Internet marketing has proven to be very effective when it comes to promoting social, charitable, and environmental causes, and blogs have played a major role in making this possible for marketers who are on a small budget.
Blog Action Day is a great example of an initiative with next to no funding, that has gone viral by asking bloggers to do what they do best, talk passionately about a subject.
Blog Action Day was started by Collis Ta’eed, Leo Babauta, and Cyan Ta’eed based on the idea of how great it would be if bloggers all around the world were talking about the same issue on the same day. All three are passionate about the environment, and they knew it was a popular subject, so they decided to make the environment the theme for Blog Action Day 2007.
Collis Ta’eed wrote a great post on the NorthxEast blog that describes in great detail how Blog Action Day got started. He describes how they turned an idea into a global internet campaign in less than three months.
We needed a plan to make the idea into reality and after a little thinking we came up with what amounted to the biggest name-dropping initiative in blogging history… we decided that before we told the world we needed to have some big names already on board.
So we began by making a list of about 80 bloggers we knew who had at least a thousand readers. The first blog to join was SEOMoz… as soon as SEOMoz joined, their name appeared in every email to help give credibility to what we were doing.
Their plan also included: lots of emails (over 2000), a professional looking web page (”you can make yourself look more professional with good design”), reaching out to bloggers (”The best way to reach bloggers is of course through blogs about blogging”), a couple viral videos (viewed over 40,000 times on youTube), posting to social sites like Digg and Delicous (”brought in floods of traffic”), and more emails.
Here is the first video they posted to youTube on Aug 14th.
Blog Action Day 2007
Here is the second video released just six days before Blog Action Day. Notice the inclusion of the logos for several major blogs.
Blog Action Day 2007 Video 2
On the eve of Blog action day 15,568 blogs with a combined rss reach of 12,507,731 people have already signed on. The plan is for Blog Action Day to become a yearly event, with a new theme every year.
Will Mushrooms Help Save The World?
I thought I would participate in Blog Action Day by sharing a couple videos about mushrooms. Mycologist Paul Stamets has been researching the medicinal properties of mushrooms for fighting diseases like Cancer and HIV. What Paul Stamets has also also discovered, is that his mushrooms can be used for cleaning up toxic spills (bioremediation) and eliminating the need for pesticides during insect control.
