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Hatef Yamini 10 min read

Sunny the Seal Melts Hearts on MySpace

Sreenshot_1.jpgCarie Lewis of the Humane Society recently shared with us some lessons learned about branding and list recruitment from their unique MySpace campaign against clubbing baby seals.  In addition to having an organizationl profile on MySpace, HSUS ventured onto the site for this specific campaign as "Sunny the Seal" and in the process discovered some great approaches for grabbing attention:

Frogloop: What promotional channel did you find to be most effective, bulletins, blogs, top friends, what's hot section or your own email list?

Carie: Bulletins, because people repost them and that results in new friend requests. Also promoting on the website seems to have picked up the number of friends requests we received, since there was so much traffic to our protectseals site and that is what you saw when you went to our homepage during the hunt.

Did you experience any increased site traffic to HSUS as a result of your MySpace presence?
We've seen a 50% increase in traffic to our site from MySpace since the campaign went live. But that doesn't count the places where we link to protectseals.org, since it's a redirect.

What specific statistics can you share with frogloop readers?
We had almost 500 new additions to our email list from MySpace-which includes both profiles-our main HSUS profile and Sunny the Seal's profile. It was important for us to carefully cross promote the advocacy campaigns between the two profiles and leverage the number of friends with our main profile.

How many photos were submitted?
We got about 50 photos, many were from one person who had compiled them from all the protests that have gone on. We used about 15 photos from different people.

How did you go about building up the friends network?
We promoted to the HSUS friends list (in a number of ways - bulletins, blog, top friends, what's hot section) and had a group of people here sending out friend requests to related profiles, celebrities, and other organizations.

We also linked to our MySpace page from our website and blog, asked people to repost our bulletins, and promoted it via our email list. The biggest thing was creating a compelling page that people would want to tell their friends about.

Its not just another MySpace page about another one of our campaigns. We used storytelling to engage people and motivate them to take action.  Although we didn't put our "brand" on it, this campaign is heavily linked and coordinated with our main MySpace page. The buzz that followed came from the story of the seal hunt being told from a different perspective.

Did the badges and portable YouTube videos help?  
YES! People love the badges because they're so easy to use and give them a sense of pride that they support something. All they have to do is grab the code off the badge page - no downloading or hosting needed.

Some people even repost them or use them as their profile image. We posted our badges on others' pages too. A smart tactic we added to the badges was in the code, we added links to the badge download page as well as a link back to the HSUS profile. That way, if you saw the badge on a friend's profile and you weren't our friend yet, you could go to our profile and download a badge for yourself.

We also offered our layout on the HSUS page for people to download. Many people had asked for it and I've seen quite a few using it.

How many people have subscribed to your list?  Have you seen any donations  
from MySpace folks?  Any other metrics that are worth noting?

We've seen a few donations, but MySpace has never been proven to be successful in that aspect for us. We do have a charity badge, which we've promoted on our blog and MySpace, but we've run into compatibility problems, so we've only raised a small amount.

Advocacy, however, has been more successful. Two ways we engaged people was to take action then post a comment on our page telling us what you did, and we also asked for people to submit photos of what they were doing and we'd post on our page. People love telling their stories about what they're doing, it gives them a sense of connection to our organization.  Storytelling has always proven to be a great engagement tool.

What other residual benefits you have noticed?
The biggest success I've seen so far is education and motivation to take action. I've had hundreds of people write sunny and say they had no idea this was going on, and they would do x y and z. Giving people banners,
videos, and ways they can spread the word where they already are (MySpace) is convenient and easy for them to do.

Also - we had a complete strategy around this project, from building the profile to building the friends list. We didn't just come up with the idea put up a page, then wait for people to come. We did a lot of outreach and built the page in steps. This kept people engaged and coming back.

One last comment- I believe this profile was successful because there was a "personality" behind it- and actual animal that people became quite fond of! People told us that they logged in every day to see if Sunny was OK and to listen to his story.  The most powerful things about this profile was that it evoked emotion and gave people a sense of connection with what was really happening out there on the ice. I think that having an emotional song playing that relates to the situation, along with reading his blog postings, really got people emotionally involved with what was going on and motivated them to take action.

Visit HSUS at:
http://www.hsus.org

Visit the MySpace page featured in this article here:
http://www.MySpace.com/sunnytheharpseal

Quick Tips:
1. Use your own email list and ask people to help you grow your presence on MySpace by either inviting friends to your profile or posting web badges or action alerts in their bulletins or by commenting on their Friends' profiles.
2.  Use an individual or a persona (like a cute baby seal).
3.  Make it easy for people to spread your branding for you with web badges, action alerts and pre-formatted messages
4.  Request to be friends of well-connected individuals that are relevant to your cause (i.e. Moby and Sarah Maclachlan are animal rights advocates, so it made sense to post on their profiles so that all of their fans would see the cute seal web badges).

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