The Flickr Hold A Sign Meme: Protesting Wendy's Frosty Attitude Towards Animals

I'm a sucker for black dogs that look like my old dog Sadie.  This photo is from the Humane Society's recent "Wendy That's Not Right" campaign.  This technique is the "hold a sign meme" where you ask your community to send photos to flickr of you (or your animal) holding a protest sign.  The flickr pool of photos is here.

I saw a campaign email (I'm on their list so I saw the email a fews ago, but I was too overwhelmed with email to do anything).  Today, I happened to see HSUS that staffer Carrie Lewis posted a note on her profile and it showed up on my friends feed on Facebook.  Hence repetition through different channels is probably a necessary as is tracking the results of different channels and interpretation.  (The text of the Facebook note is below in case you want to take action.)   Here's some points:

• This is a great example of multi-channel marketing with integrating social media along with other more "traditional" internet tools like email.   I'm assuming the messaging on Facebook is slightly different from that on other networks or via email.   The messaging on MySpace is a very different style.   How else is the message being distributed and how it is being tweaked for style and language for different channels?
• I love the Flickr Hold A Sign Meme - but so far haven't found a great application in Facebook that allows for easy cross posting.  Has anyone?  I wonder if the photos would also get spread on Facebook?
• Some of the photos are licensed with "all rights reserved" and it would make sense to promote the cc licensing so the photos could easily spread.
• I wonder how HSUS is cross-promoting or engaging with the dozen or so brand groups like the Wendy's Frosty Group on Facebook.
• I wonder what the ROI is of incorporating the social media strategies and how they are tracking this campaign.  I would love to see campaign map.

The Facebook Note

Tell Wendy's to have some compassion for animals! Let them know that we want them to stop using eggs (yes, they use them in their new breakfast menu) from caged hens which are crammed into spaces so small they can't even turn around.

It's so easy... use your digital camera or even your cell phone. You can create your photo message by doing one of the following:

1- taking a photo of yourself and adding text to it containing your message
2- having a friend take a photo of you holding up a sign with your message on it

It's been done both ways. To see the photos we've already received, check out our Flickr group:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/wendysvswendys

Once you've got your picture, you can either upload it directly to the Flickr group above or send it to us at [email protected].

Please make sure to include your name and where your from on your message. And please only send photos... if you'd like to just send Wendy's a message, you can write to them.

Thank you for caring about ALL animals!
-Carie Lewis
The Humane Society of the United States

 

Comments

[Jess]

Great post, Beth! Got me thinking about Flickr pools and best practices for nonprofits. Check it out: http://escapetochengdu.wordpress.com/

[Carie Lewis]

Hi Beth,
Thanks so much for blogging about this campaign.

The most important thing for us is that we're starting to take an integrated approach with our campaigns. We're coordinating with video, print advertising, email, and social networks to reach the largest amount of people possible. And it's working!!

This is our first photo petition campaign. With a little help from my friend Tim Fullerton, who recently did a similar campaign for Oxfam, we pulled this together. I've learned a lot about messaging; particularly on each channel.

Email - we needed to be very specific. People on our email list are generally not as familiar with social networks, so we needed to give specific instructions on how to do what we wanted them to. Many people just sent us a photo of themselves with their message in an email. But we wanted people to send us their message in the actual photo.

MySpace - they get it, but we have to talk to them in a more casual tone. We've been on MySpace for awhile, so people are comfortable with us and seem to love to hear our stories. We can be creative. So, I took a different approach.. I dressed my cat up, put a message on his photo and told the story from his point of view. And they loved it.

Facebook - they totally get it, and they just want to know what they can to do help. Cut right to the chase. So, I put it step by step what we wanted them to do and that was it. I crossposted on our Group, Page, my personal profile, and our CEO's personal profile. Yes, our CEO is on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=566578253

Since this was our first run at a photo petition, it was difficult to get across exactly what we wanted people to do without writing a book. So every person that wrote in and needed help was answered personally. This gave us a good idea of how to more clearly explain ourselves next time.

Also, we understand that, as we integrate our campaigns more and more, there's probably an overlap of people that are on our MySpace and Facebook networks, and may even be on our email list too... so we don't want to just copy and paste the same message on each channel. Plus, all these channels are unique in their own ways.

Haven't found an application on Facebook that allows sharing of petition photos. I've just been re-posting my note every so often so that people who have passed by it previously will hopefully come across it. I love how you can share a note or post it on someone's wall and the associated photo will automatically appear with it.

We're cross posting the note with animal-related groups as well. But I didn't know about the Wendy's Group on Facebook; I'm checking it out RIGHT NOW. :)

In terms of ROI, we track everything using Convio source codes that ties to the advocacy part of this campaign. But the real "social" part of this campaign is obviously the photo petition. We're looking at how many photo submissions we actually get, how much feedback we're receiving, and how many comments we receive from our posts.

Hope this helps! Keep the questions coming!
-Carie