Joe Marchese
Co-Founder and President
SocialVibe
3-17-10
How does SocialVibe think about cause marketing?
Good marketing is about attention transfer. For a good cause, or the right experience, I will transfer my attention.
The SocialVibe.com charitable network is our cause platform. Marketers want people’ s time and attention and will pay for it but the amount [they’re willing to pay] is too small to matter [to those individuals the marketers are targeting].
Donating to a cause of the user’s choice is more valuable. This benefit is higher than the money [the advertiser is] willing to pay because there’s a halo effect. [In other words,] by aggregating social benefits you can do more than just raise $1 here and $1 there. Together we can say we raised $100 or $1000 or $1 million.
[Another key is] translating micro-dollars raised to the impact it has. [For example,] $0.25 can feed a starving child for a day.
[Ultimately, I like to think of it as] cause motivation, not cause marketing.
[To date,] SocialVibe has raised millions for causes and driven tens of millions of engagements [for marketers]. We have over 1 million people registered for SocialVibe.com and can reach another 200mm-plus through Zynga’s social games.
The value exchange on the web is different than traditional media. Contests are an attempt to value people’s attention transfer but very few people actually engage. There’s an economics principle called “expected benefit.” If I have a 1 in 1 million chance of winning $1 milliion, the expected benefit of entering that contest is $1.
With a cause marketing platforms, we let people choose the cause that’s important to them, rather than pick one cause that a marketer decides to support and hope that people rally around it. We need to give people an expected benefit that’s meaningful.
