Too good not to share

FOX News Strategy Room Lineup Yesterday

• Me
• A HUGE marine in dress uniform who was a former child soldier in Congo
• Miss Universe
• Gene Simmons

Unfortunately I didn’t get to hang in the green room with the last two!

Check it out here

And no, I don’t know where ‘hunky-dory’ came from.

I’m extremely proud of my team at charity: water today as we launch our annual September campaign – an online movement to raise $1.7 million for Central African Republic in order to provide access to clean and safe drinking water to the Bayaka people.

Since 2007 charity: water has asked people to give up their birthday and ask for donations instead of gifts, with 100% of money raised directed to water projects. This was how I first met the charity, donating my September birthday back in 2008.

This year is our biggest campaign yet. My coworkers at charity: water have been doing work that is nothing short of amazing. In addition, Razorfish and Golin Harris have donated time, energy and brain power pro bono to help our campaign along – I’ve been incredibly impressed by the smarts of our agency team.

We need your help to spread the word. Please spend a few minutes to watch our campaign video, and then I have 3 asks for you.

Give Up Your September Birthday

Are you born in September? Then please give up your birthday and fundraise with us. 100% of donations will fund clean and safe drinking water projects in C.A.R. (we even pay back the credit card fees).

Not born in September? You can still fundraise!

Donate

$20 gives one person clean water in C.A.R., donate at charitywater.org/september.

Donate Your Facebook Status

The good folk at Buddy Media have donated us their platform, so on the charity: water Facebook page you can send virtual jerry cans, do a quiz on C.A.R. and see more videos and photos. Every day we’ll be posting a behind-the-scenes video from the field that only fans will be able to see.

Help us spread the word of September, the Bayaka and charity: water on Facebook by posting this video to your Facebook status:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=749305803385

We’ve been stepping up our email marketing efforts at charity: water thanks to the generous pro bono support from our partners at Silverpop.

As we move onto best-in-class technology (the Silverpop tech and services really do rock – I can’t endorse them highly enough) we also want to clean up our list and make sure all our subscribers are completely happy. So in a recent mailing we placed a prominent ‘unsubscribe’ link at top and bottom of our mailing, and pointed them to this page:

The users choice – unsubscribe, OR watch this video featuring our fearless leader Scott Harrison getting the clean water treatment:

The results so far:

• over 70,000 emails sent
• around 100 unsubscribes
• 740 views of the video

We’re pretty happy with an unsubscribe rate at close to a thousandth of a per cent, and that over 7 times that many watched the video and stayed with us. Plus, we love another chance to have a personal touch with our network of supporters.

If you would like to opt-in to our occasional emails and help us provide clean and safe drinking water to the 1 billion people living without it, just click here to sign up.

Many thanks to the folk at Groupon for sparking this idea!

charity: water was born in September – and every year in September we ask our community to fundraise together with us to make a huge impact.

This year, we will be raising $1.7 million for Central African Republic to provide clean and safe drinking water to 85,000 people – including ALL of the Bayaka people.

The campaign launches August 16. If you’re birthday is between August 16 and September 30 please get in touch! I’d love you to donate your birthday alongside us. If you’re not in that window you can still spread the word. For starters, like us on Facebook for exclusive access to info and content, and right now check out a sneak peak of this year’s September story:

september campaign teaser from charity: water on Vimeo.

Why Central African Republic? Check this snippet from a recent Foreign Policy report:

Over the last year, we led a research team that conducted perhaps the most extensive survey on the impact of violence on the Central African Republic’s population. The results, which will be published in the Aug. 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, reveal a country besieged by violence and extreme poverty. We asked 1,879 adults in five administrative areas of the country about their lives, their security, and their experience with conflict. More than three-quarters said they had either witnessed or personally experienced traumatic events during the wave of violence that began in 2001, and more than half met criteria for depression or anxiety. The monthly death rate was five per 1,000 individuals (in the United States it is 0.7; the average for sub-Saharan Africa is 1.3). Put another way, 6 percent of the country’s population is dying every year.

More to come next week.

You can help. The people of Central African Republic need you. If your birthday falls between August 16 and September 30 then I want you!

For more background on September, check out last year’s trailer:

The story of charity: water – The 2009 September Campaign Trailer from charity: water on Vimeo.

Quick update from an Amtrak train en route to Baltimore – I’m speaking at two awesome conferences this week: DMEF I-Mix and BlogHer Business.

I’ve been helping the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation out with some social media advice for the last year or so. It’s a pleasure to help their mission to unite college students, professors and employers in the marketing realm. Check out their great new blog authored by my good mate (and one of the smarter young marketers I know) Andrea Derricks.

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at their Interactive Marketing Immersion Xperience to a room of marketing students undertaking a week long crash course on all things digital marketing. I’ll be taking a lead on the social media element, making bad jokes and generally being misunderstood due to accent issues.

Thursday I’m back up to NYC and I’m really excited to be speaking at BlogHer Business as a Converseon fellow alongside my former client Ilana Rabinowitz of Lion Brand Yarn.

I attended the first BlogHer Business in 2008 and it’s still a stand out conference for me due to the great vibe and heavy case study focus. I’m expecting more of it this week and I’m excited to catch up with some old friends and the many inspiring women who make up the BlogHer community.

Finally, and on a completely tangental note, since I’m riding Amtrak & enjoying their free wifi – I feel I’ve gotta point out how smart I think their cheeky advertising in airport security line bins is:

I’ve been on a bit of a Clay Shirky Binge lately, but the stuff he covers is so clever I’ve gotta share it.

The latest piece of Cognitive Surplus I’ve bookmarked during my Subway reading, this section on why we’re continually surprised by the spread of online communication – even amongst seniors:

No one wants email for itself, any more than anyone wants electricity for itself; rather, we want the things electricity enables. Similarly, we want the things email enables – news from home, pictures of the kids, discussion, argument, flirtation, gossip, and all the mess of the human condition. The surprise behind those “Old people communicating with each other online!” articles came from a focus on the technical means rather than on the social opportunities of that communication.

He goes on:

Many of the stories we tell ourselves about the tools we use are really stories about human motivation. We grossly overestimated the degree to which email would always seem futuristic and hard to use, we grossly underestimated the technical talents of older people, and we simply ignored the basic truth of technology: if a tool is useful, people will use it. (Surprise.) They will use it even if the tool is different from what existed before, provided it lets them do things they want to do. The mystery isn’t why older people started emailing each other; the mystery is how we could have convinced ourselves that email use was mainly about technological novelty rather than social continuity.

• FLAKE, cow, loser, slut, idiot, airhead, trash, penguin, creep, moron, midget, freak, Oompa-Loompa, nobody.

From today’s NY Times Sunday Styles feature on Nicole ‘Snooki’ Polizi.

Nearly 5 million people have watched this guy REALLY enjoy a double rainbow.

And old mate’s comments at the 2 minute mark of this interview really highlight how the media landscape is changing:

• “The whole thing is just a trip. It’s this cheap camera I bought on Ebay 6 years ago for $250. It’s easy to upload on YouTube so that’s what I use”

If this bloke can entertain 5 million people… what hope does big media have?

I’ve been an iPhone user for three years, and like many iPhone owners I’ve cracked my screen (twice). And also like many iPhone owners I’ve had many a horrible experience with Apple and ATT’s arrogant approach to customers.

I knew that the Apple store would charge me an arm and a leg, despite the fancy decor and Genius Bars. So I typed ‘fix iPhone’ into Yelp and found Dr Brendan near me in the East Village who would fix it for $60.

I entered his small East Village apartment to find a bunch of people lining up, two friendly blokes fixing phones and a phone ringing off the hook. To my surprise they’d been featured on CNN today and a legion of similarly disaffected Apple customers had found salvation.

The bigger story here: can a brand like Apple really get away with treating its customers so badly they’ve created a black market in customer service? Dr Brendan’s service was great, but I must admit climbing four flights of steps to a small East Village apartment had me feeling like I was doing a drug deal.

The quote to sum it all up comes from one of Dr Brendan’s other customers today, a hospital employee with a cracked screen:

“Apple’s a total asshole to me. The one time I went in there I scheduled an appointment, you have to wait, they tell you they can’t fix it…”

My advice – if you’re in NYC with a cracked screen or other issue see Dr Brendan. If you’re in the market for an iPhone: buy something else.