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Don't sabotage your chances of sales success by trying to move too quickly. Slow down. Way down. Ensure your prospect has made key decisions before you jump into the next step- or suffer the consequences. You can't rush a relationship!

SXSW was a total whirlwind filled with some of the biggest thought leaders discussing social media (of course) but also about the power of online fundraising and crowdsourcing. While many nonprofit campaigners didn't make SXSW this year, we at Care2's Frogloop and some of our guest writers attended several sessions. What were the key take-aways at this years conference?

When building a fundraising campaign via crowsourcing:

• Build personal relationships with people first.
• Don't treat potential donors like an ATM machine.
• Keep expections simple. (Editors Note: This was part of a live discussion between Beth Kanter and Mark Horvath of the Invisible People project).

Check out more nonprofit campaigner take-aways below.

Michael Cervino, Beaconfire: For online campaigning, a whole new world of tools and tactics is opening up for nonprofits as the commercial sector invests in social media, social networking and more sophisticated UI experiences. I saw dozens of new services and tools at SXSWi of which nonprofits could take advantage. But at the core of whether any of them will make a difference was a pervasive question by many in the sessions: What is your nonprofit’s story and why should constituents care? If we can’t answer this question in spades, no new tool in the world is going to help you build your base, improve your advocacy and raise money for your cause. Be authentic, be transparent, and be relevant before you start worrying about being “cool” or “edgy.”

Michaela Hackner, Forum One: Community is king - both online and offline. It's the way we not only identify ourselves, but most importantly a true vehicle for change. Our communities vet good ideas, apply the "trust" layer, and motivate us to take action. It is the groundswell of communities that provides the momentum and sustainability for social change. This week has reminded me that the power and benefits of getting communities together in person shouldn't be overlooked. Human contact leverages passion that sometimes gets lost online. It re-energizes and inspires. It reminds us why we do what we do.  For me, I'm excited to get more involved with my local community when I get home, and apply those local lessons on a global scale.

Clint O'Brien, Care2: It was a scary revelation that both AOL and Demand Media are using the same mechanized approach to creating content. As I understand it, first they use an algorithm to detect what people are already talking about a lot on the Interwebs, then they assign writers to blog about those matters. Talk about an echo chamber!

Mashable and George Weiner have some excellent new data to share about social media usage and mobile giving.  These three articles are MUST READS:

1. Mashable: Our Social Media Obsession by the Numbers (based on a Retrevo study)

2. Mashable: The Current State of Twitter by Muhammad Saleem

3. George Weiner in the Huffington Post: Mobile Giving and Why People Are Bad at Poker

Here are the highlights, in case you don’t have time to read all of these articles.

Article 1: People who are into social media are REALLY into it - especially iPhone people.

Article 2: Twitter just hit 10 billion Tweets, which is amazing, but there are still a lot of dabblers on Twitter who give up after a month.  And a lot of useless Tweets. 

Article 3: Nonprofits are whipped into a frenzy about the state of mobile, thanks to the millions raised by the Red Cross for Haiti.  As George Weiner puts it: “Everyone thinks getting a mobile text-2-donate short code will win them a huge pot of money (or medium pot). There are currently a little more than 400 approved charities through the Mobile Giving Foundation and—in the three weeks following Haiti—there were more than 800 requests from non-profits about mobile giving.”

George offers a reality check from the Mobile Giving Foundation:

20% of our not-for-profits earn 80% of the revenue generated from text-2-give programs.  This data follows a standard power law distribution; it is clear simply having a mobile-giving program will not ensure success.

So what to do?  Get his tips here.

You may also want to look at a Convio/Edge/SeaChange study on Haiti-related mobile giving that found the following.  The friends to friends angle is especially interesting. 

The study, Early Signals on Mobile Philanthropy found among respondents:

•77% knew that they could donate via texting to support Haiti relief work
•17% of Gen Y & 14% of Gen X donated to Haiti via texting
•3% of both Boomer and Mature donated via texting
•36% of all respondents would consider texting a donation after a crisis
•31% would text a donation if a friend was raising money for a charity

I want to tell you about an incredible resource that I discovered a few months ago--The Progressive Exchange. And, as soon as you read this post, I urge you to join me there. It's free and will help you the first time you use it. I guarantee it.

The Progressive Exchange (PX) is an online community (a.k.a. easy-to-use email list serv or web-based community) for folks doing online organizing, advocacy, marketing and fundraising "on behalf of the public interest."  I had heard about PX for years, but never really knew what it was, and don't want you to wait as long as I did.

First of all, there's a diverse and helpful community of participants with lots of nonprofit marketing expertise. Secondly, there are folks in related functions who can shed some great perspective on marketing issues. Best of all, PX is incredibly easy to use--I've set it up to email me daily summaries of questions and replies being asked by other PXers, and replies. I also email my questions out the the list but, if you choose, you can also do it all on the web.

I've learned so much in these few months, and gotten great guidance in seeking a proofreader, getting direction on a specific SEO issue and more. Today I want to review discussion on  e-news open and unsubscribe rates.

PX is an incredible community, and the more of us there are, the more valuable it is. Please join me!

P. S. Get more in-depth articles, case studies and guides to nonprofit marketing success -- all featured in the twice-monthly Getting Attention e-update.  Subscribe today. 

REWORK Podcast with Jason Fried

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Jason Fried (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes

37 Signals is a company that most online service providers would love to be like. From day one the creators of Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise and Campfire, made money, built a rabid word of mouth fan base, and perhaps more importantly, built the business they wanted to work in without taking outside funding. Along the way they became media darlings and a frequently cited use case for how to do it right.

But just how did Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson do it? The often unconventional approach taken by 37Signals is on display in the Fried and Hannson’s book REWORK. REWORK is a collection of essays that I think could best be described as a combination of business, self-help and wellness, and technical mentoring advice, but the collective impact is very powerful.

This is one of those books that you can pick up and read from any point and find yourself immediately engrossed . The tone of the book is such that you feel as though you are having a conversation with the authors in a style that matches the laid back, this is how we do it here, vibe that is 37Signals.

I spent a few minutes discussing REWORK with Jason Fried for this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and I can tell you that this book is going to show up on a lot of “best books of 2010″ lists.

A few nuggets from REWORK

• Ignore the Real World – The real world is telling too many small businesses that their idea won’t work.
• Why Grow? - Everyone seems enamored with the idea of rapid growth. Maybe that’s not the right approach for you.
• Outside Money Is Plan Z – Hang on and build it organically or it won’t be your company.

Image credit: Randy Stewart

• Previewing Highrise from 37Signals
• Kentucky "This is fattening food" Fried Marketing
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Has your nonprofit been frustrated with the lack of comprehensive analytic tools for Twitter? How can organizations on a budget be expected to truly measure their impact and engagement using social media, if they don’t have the tools to properly analyze it? Thanks to Shana Glickfield of the BeeKeeper Group, I discovered a great new tool called tweetlytics that provides detailed analytics and slick graphical renderings of data then many of the other budget oriented Twitter analytic tools don’t have. Here’s how it works.

Organizations can sign-up to monitor between five and fifteen campaigns at a time that they are promoting on Twitter. Campaign Managers tag multiple keywords for each of the campaigns that they want to analyze. For example, if I were setting Tweetlytics up for a group like Planned Parenthood, a campaign would be Save Roe. Some keywords I would tag and track for the Save Roe campaign within Tweetlytics would be prochoice, Roe Vs Wade, Planned Parenthood, as well as opposition keywords like anti-choice, prolife, etc.

Once the campaign is up and running, Campaign Managers login and generate reports. Reports can also be delivered to your inbox daily and include:

• Total tweets and links about campaigns.
• Top Twitter users who mention your campaigns. Campaign Managers can also click on the link and see the actual tweets.
• Top hashtags

I just realized I hadn’t shared our webinar line-up with you recently, so here’s what’s coming up in the next few weeks:

March 18: On-the-Spot E-Newsletter Makeovers: Get Your E-Newsletter into Better Shape

March 23: Getting Your Nonprofit Started with Social Media

March 30: Q &A Conference Call: Personality and Positioning with “Brandraising” Author Sarah Durham. This is for our Pass *Plus* Members Only.

April 14: Forget the General Public! How to Define, Research and Reach Your Target Audience

April 20: Switching from a Print Newsletter to an Email Newsletter

I will also be doing a free webinar (charitable donation requested, but not demanded) in early April on beating nonprofit writer’s block. More on that in the next few days.

Will You Be Attending NTC?

I’ll be attending the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Atlanta, April 8-10. Along with Nancy Schwartz and Big Ducks Sarah Durham and Farra Trompeter, I’ll be hosting a meet-and-greet there for nonprofit marketing and fundraising people on Thursday, April 8 at 1:30 p.m. If you read this blog and will be there, please introduce yourself!

Want some one-on-one coaching with Kivi Leroux Miller? That’s included in our Pass *Plus*, along with our weekly webinar series, for $220 for 3 months. Get the Details and Order Here.

I’m speaking this afternoon to a group of executive transition leadership folks who wanted help thinking about how to market their services.

I was asked to share some general thoughts on marketing. I’m going to share here what I’ll say, because like these folks, you probably struggle from time to time on how to take a complex idea and make it instantly compelling to your audience.  These classics are probably useful to you as a nonprofit marketer.

Here’s what I’m going to say:

1. First, tackle positioning - ie the marketing sweet spot.

That’s the intersection between:

-What your organization focuses upon (which is hopefully what you’re good at)
-What you do better than anyone else (what is completely unique about you)
-What your audience cares about

If you know me, you know this Venn diagram, which has appeared here before.  It is SO IMPORTANT, because we tend to spend too much time ensconced in the righthand circle.  We trumpet our merits and call it marketing. It’s not.  Our audience members may not care about those merits, or they may feel they are getting what they want from their status quo approaches (or inaction).

Marketing takes into account competition (the lower circle) and the audience’s interests (the lefthand circle).  It defines a good position in the marketplace as the INTERSECTION of all three areas.

This diagram is based on the work of some branding folks and Jim Collins’ hedgehog concept.

2. Second, turn that positioning into messages.

The best messages directly address the following:

Why people should care
What specific action you’re asking people to take
What personally relevant reward they’ll get in exchange for taking that action
Why taking that action is better than what they are doing now (the competition)
Why they should take action now (as opposed to later or never - there needs to be a sense of urgency)
Who claims all this is true (you need a trusted messenger)

You want your audience to engage with you and think:

I want to do this right now!  If I (take the action you’re asking), I will get (this great benefit you’re offering) which will be far preferable to (whatever I’m doing now) because (a trusted person told me so).

If you’re not getting that outcome, you’ve got a positioning problem and a messaging problem.

What would selling be like without a daily dose of “Let me think about it?” Probably a whole lot easier and a whole lot less frustrating. But since the objection isn’t going to go away any time soon perhaps now is a good time to look at some ways to tackle it. Is it Real?

5 Ways to Use Social Media for Things You Are Already Doing

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

One of the biggest road blocks facing small businesses when addressing social media is the question of return on investment. With so little time devote to what’s crying out to be done, adding something else or something new like social media can feel like a real burden. Sometimes the only way to rationalize and prioritize something new is to understand the benefits in relation to everything else your doing and take a new view based on that understanding.

So much of what’s written on social media amounts to lists of things you should do, get on twitter, blog, create a Facebook fan page, and not enough on why you might consider doing it. While all those tactics may indeed be wise, I would like suggest a number of ways to use those actions to do a better or more efficient job doing things you’re already (or should be) doing.

Start to think in terms of doing more with less effort, not simply doing more. If I can let small business owners get a glimpse of social media through this lens, they might just decide to go a little deeper. Here are five ways to look at it.

1) Follow up with prospects

I love using social media tools as a way to follow-up with prospects you might meet out there in the real world. So you go to a Chamber event and meet someone that has asked you to follow-up. Traditionally, you might send an email a week later or call them up and leave a voice mail. What if instead you found them on LinkedIn, asked to be connected and then shared an information rich article that contained tips about the very thing you chatted about at the Chamber mixer. Then you offered to show them how to create a custom RSS feed to get tons of information about their industry and their competitors. Do you think that next meeting might get started a little quicker towards your objectives? I sure do.

2) Stay top of mind with customers

Once someone becomes a customer it’s easy to ignore them, assuming they will call next time they need something or, worse yet, assuming they understand the full depth and breadth of your offerings and will chime in when they have other needs. Staying in front of your customers and continuing to educate and upsell them is a key ingredient to building marketing momentum and few businesses do it well.

This is an area where a host of social media tools can excel. A blog is a great place to put out a steady stream of useful information and success stories. Encouraging your customers to subscribe and comment can lead to further engagement. Recording video stories from customers and uploading them to YouTube to embed on your site can create great marketing content and remind your customer why they do business with you. Facebook Fan pages can be used as a way to implement a client community and offer education and networking opportunities online.

3) Keep up on your industry

Keeping up with what’s happening in any industry is a task that is essential these days. With unparalleled access to information many clients can learn as much or more about the products and solutions offered by a company as those charged with suggesting those products and solutions. You better keep up or you risk becoming irrelevant. Of course I could extend this to keeping up with what your customers, competitors, and key industry journalists are doing as well.

Here again, new monitoring services and tools steeped in social media and real time reporting make this an easier task. Subscribing to blogs written by industry leaders, competitors and journalists and viewing new content by way of a tool such as Google Reader allows you to scan the day’s content in one place. Setting up Google Alerts and custom Twitter Searches (see more about how to do this) or checking out paid monitoring services such as Radian6 or Trackur allows you to receive daily email reports on the important mentions of industry terms and people so you are up to the minute in the know. (Of course, once you do this you can teach your customers how to do it and make yourself even more valuable to them – no matter what you sell.)

4) Provide a better customer experience

It’s probably impossible to provide too much customer service, too much of a great experience, but you can go nuts trying.

Using the new breed of online tools you can plug some of the gaps you might have in providing customer service and, combined with your offline touches, create an experience that no competitor can match.

While some might not lump this tool into social media, I certainly think any tool that allows you to collaborate with and serve your customers qualifies. Using an online project management tool such as Central Desktop allows you to create an entire customer education, orientation, and handbook kind of training experience one time and then roll it out to each new customer in a high tech client portal kind of way. This approach can easily set you apart from anyone else in your industry and provide the kind of experience that gets customers talking.

5) Network with potential partners

Building a strong network of strategic marketing partners is probably the best defense against any kind of economic downturn. One of the surest ways to attract potential partners is to build relationships through networking. Of course you know that, but you might not be viewing this kind of networking as a social media function.

If you identify a potential strategic partner, find out if they have a blog and start reading and commenting. Few things will get you noticed faster than smart, genuine blog comments. Once you establish this relationship it might make sense to offer a guest blog post. If your use a CRM tool (and you should) you’ve probably noticed that most are moving to add social media information to contact records, add your potential partners social media information and you will learn what’s important to them pretty quickly.

If you know how to set up a blog already, offer to create a blog of network partners so each of you can write about your area of expertise and create some great local SEO for the group.

So, you see, you don’t have to bite into the entire social media pie all at once. Find a tool, a technique, a tactic that makes your life easier today and provides more value for partners, prospects and customers and you’ll be on the path to getting some real ROI on your social media investment.

What social media tactics have you discovered that allow you to do more of something you’re already doing?

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In a time when we rely more and more on virtual interaction, face-to-face gatherings are more important than ever.

Don't get me wrong--I'm a big believer in building relationships, and community online. But face-to-face can't be replaced. So often, face-to-face gatherings can bring a movement or a campaign to the next level, further engaging your base.

Here are two tools I've discovered that will help you take your organization's events to the next level.

1. Event-management service Eventbrite has just introduced Eventbrite for Causes, a discounted program (no fee for free events) are  designed for nonprofit needs. This new program that makes it easier for orgs to leverage tech tools and best practices to manage, promote and raise money through successful events. In talking to colleagues about Eventbrite, I've found several fans of its capabilities such as the once-click opportunity for attendees to share event info with their Twitter and Facebook networks.

Current org users include The Craigslist Foundation, Full Circle Fund, Citizen Effect and NTEN. You can see how it works with this dinner invite for 2010 NTC (NTEN's annual conference) attendees.

2. Analyze This, just released by Event 360 is 18 pages packed with practical guide on event analytics. You'll learn how to pinpoint what's working best so you can do more of it in the future, and what's not working well, so they can avoid it down the line. Traditionally, event managers have used this data to review events once they're over; it's even more valuable to shape those coming up.

The featured case study on the Komen Global Race for the Cure is particularly useful, as it highlights how analytics showed the way to transform a popular event into a fundraising phenomenon.

P.S. More effective messaging is a priority for all organizations, campaigns and events. Learn how to craft the most essential message -- your tagline. Download the free 2009 Nonprofit Tagline Report, filled with must-dos, don't dos, case studies and 2,500+ nonprofit tagline examples!

A great reminder of how to inspire your staff was highlighted in the recent Influence Report (a highly recommended read).  An organizational behavior researcher decided to test his theory that workers often fail to live up to their potential because they’ve lost track of the significance and meaningfulness of their own jobs.

As the report describes:

He figured that if he could remind employees of why their jobs are important, they might become more highly motivated, and therefore, more productive individuals.  To test this idea, he worked with a fundraising organization that allowed him to go to its call center and randomly assign employees into certain groups. Some of these employees read stories from other employees describing what they perceived were the personal benefits of the job, including financial benefits and the development of skills and knowledge (Personal Benefit condition). However, another set of employees read stories from the beneficiaries of the fundraising organization, who described how the scholarships they obtained from the organization had a positive impact on their lives (Task Significance condition). Finally, there was third group of employees that did not read any stories (Control condition). In addition, the employees were told not to talk about or share what they had read with any other callers. The researcher was able to obtain the number of pledges earned as well as the amount of donation money obtained by the callers both one week prior to the study and one month afterward.

The findings are an important reminder to us all:

Employees in the Personal Benefit and Control conditions looked almost exactly the same after the intervention as before it in terms of amount of donation money raised and the number of pledges earned. Yet, those in the Task Significance condition earned more than twice the number of weekly pledges (from an average of 9 to an average of 23) and more than twice the amount of weekly donation money (from an average of $1,288 to an average of $3,130). Additional analyses suggest that the huge increase was driven by previously unmotivated employees increasing the number of calls they made per hour.

If you want your staff passionate about your work, show them the good they do in the world.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy pointed me to this terrific video to inspire text giving for the homeless.

1. High-res Photo Note Taking - One of the tough things about a big event (aside from choosing which sessions to attend) is how to best take notes to bring information back to your internal colleagues who didn't attend the event, or publish your own take on the sessions. A technique I have started using is taking high-res photos of key slides from presenters. It takes just a second, and it's the easiest form of note taking as the slide becomes a reminder of a key point to write about later. To augment, sometimes I will also think of taking notes in terms of Twitter posts (140 character max). That format forces you to just focus on the key points of a session instead of just trying to capture everything a speaker says.
2. Brochure Collecting - At an event like SXSW, there are lots of sites and new innovations that are interesting and worth looking at ... but time is limited at the event. Instead of trying to write down every URL, I collect their brochures or postcards and save them. That way I have a visual reminder to check out a particular site later when I am back in the office and have a free moment. Last year after SXSW, it took me a few months to get through looking at all the sites I found interesting - but I had a constant reminder of those sites through the stack of postcards and brochures and it helped me to stay organized.
3. Plan B Sessions - Your time is valuable and at a large conference usually you will be drawn in multiple directions. At SXSW a common complaint is that for every timeslot there are several sessions that you might be interested in seeing. Ultimately, you need to pick one, but my long time advice for attendees of a conference like this has been that if you find a session is not useful after the first 10 or 15 minutes, you should feel empowered to leave and go to your "plan B session." For every time you go to a session, you should always have a second option - just in case. That way you can maximize your time and what you learn from the event, and be flexible enough to correct a mistake without wasting an entire hour (or more).
4. Influencer Tracking - When you are not necessarily connected to every event or happening at an event, it can be tough to know what you might be missing. One useful way to track the events that you may want to be part of is by creating your own short list of people who you know will be attending all the best events. If they are active social media users (as they tend to be at an event like SXSW), you can see where they are headed and mirror some of your own choices of where to go based on this information. Even if they are not active with social media, this technique can work by talking to them or others to see where they will going.
5. Eating Left Handed - As promised in the title of this post, the last tip is about eating left handed. Chances are, you just spent a good part of the day shaking people's hands and accumulating some kind of unwanted germs (no offense to the people you met, but facts are facts). We should all get more diligent about using that hand sanitizing stuff - but if you are like me and usually forget to do it, a good technique to teach yourself is to always eat left handed (ie - with your "non-shaking hand").

Rapid growth organizations call for a unique combination of leadership skills that few single individuals possess.  Consequently, the sign of the true visionary leader is their ability to envision a full leadership team within their organization and then finding a way to turn that vision into reality.

Use Your Neighbors and Partners to Build Your List

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

From the WikiPedia: Referral marketing is a structured and systematic process that maximizes word of mouth potential. Referral marketing does this by encouraging, informing, promoting and rewarding customers and contacts to think and talk as much as possible about their supplier, their company, product and service and the value and benefit the supplier brings to them and people they know.

So referral marketing is really all about relationships you foster with people, and how those people remember you when they talk to anyone that might need your products or services. If you’ve got a storefront or business that serves a certain location (even if you don’t, read on this applies to you as well), your number one goal is to get traffic to that location, right? And hopefully you’ve built good relationships with the business owners around you, or are willing to. So today, I’m going to talk about how your neighboring businesses can use their email list to refer business to you, and how you can do the same for them.

Here is a great example of how 4 local businesses can collectively refer customers to each other:

You have a retail business in a neighborhood where there are other retailers, service businesses or restaurants where people visit. In this case a restaurant called Nova Bar.

The product or service that you sell has complementary (maybe even competitive) products offered by other businesses in the area. In this example this particular restaurant also included another restaurant in their email campaign. You can’t eat at the same restaurant every day, right?

You’ve been collecting email addresses and communicating to your recipients on a regular basis.

Here’s one way to make it happen:

Step 1. Approach your neighboring businesses and tell them that you’ve got an idea that will collectively help all of you get more business.

Step 2. Find out how many email addresses each business has. You’ll want them to be close to the same because if one is 10x bigger than the others everyone else will benefit from the big guy but they might not benefit in the same way. That said, if this does happen, maybe the businesses with smaller lists can make up for it by mailing a few more times.

Step 3. Create separate email campaigns where the FROM LABEL is from each list owner. If you are doing the mailing to your list it should come FROM your business, if your neighbor is doing the mailing to her list it should come FROM her business.

Step 4. Your message should include a paragraph explaining why you’re sending this email. For example:

“The merchants of South Beach all got together and decided that you need to know about everything that’s going on. So opt-in to all of these lists and be the first to know.

Try giving an incentive or coupon to any new people who signed up to each list to motivate them even more to join!

Step 5. In this example you can see that there are links to each of the business’s opt-in forms. Avoid sending them directly to a home page unless the opt-in form is easy to spot. Make sure you also tell your recipients what new registrants can expect, like weekly specials or “email only” discounts. Also include an image or logo for each business.

Other ideas for using email marketing as a referral tool:

• If you don’t want to use this as a “list building” tool and each local business just wants to give a great offer, go for it! Make sure you send them directly to a page where the offer is displayed prominently.

• If you’re business isn’t “locally oriented” but you have complementary business partners, you can still follow the same general steps. Partner up with them and send emails to your respective email lists about your partners, ask them to do the same.

• You can also use the page that you send people after they opt-in to your list, and include your partners/neighbors offers or links, and they can do the same for you.

Bottom line: keep each other honest. Join each other’s lists and make sure all of you are participating. Agreeing to help businesses build their lists is going to help traffic to everyone’s business. And that’s what referral marketing is all about in the long run.

Janine Popick is the CEO and co-founder of VerticalResponse (Inc. 5000 2006-2009). She also is VerticalResponse’s CEB (Chief Executive Blogger) and won the 2006 ClickZ Best Marketing Blog Award, the 2007 Stevie Award for Best Blog, a 2008 SIIA Codie Finalist for best blog and 2009 Stevie Finalist for Best Blog.

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What is Make A Referral Monday?

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Last week’s Make a Referral Week, an event designed to generate over 1000 referrals for 1000 small businesses, was a big success in terms of bringing a focus on the act of making referrals, but why stop at a week. Making referrals is a great practice all year long.

Please join me in kicking off something I call Make a Referral Monday. The idea is to bring the practice of making referrals into focus every week, all year long.

One of the ways to keep this idea alive and top of mind is to use the awesome reach of Twitter as a weekly reminder and accountability tool. If you participate on Twitter you are probably aware of something called Follow Friday. Follow Friday asks folks to share the names of people on Twitter that they like to follow, with the idea that other might as well. Follow Friday participants use what’s called a hashtag to designate their Follow Friday listing – #FF (More on Twitter hashtag use here)

To participate in Make a Referral Monday (#marm) I would like ask you to a) make a referral and b) tell the Twitter world about it using #marm as a hashtag each and every Monday. Something like: I just referred @AcmePrinting to my BFFs at @ZetaGraphics both do awesome work #marm

I think we have the ability to create a bit of a movement out of the act of making referrals. Spread the word, retweet this post and make those referrals!

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