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First of all, we’d like to congratulate our partner Live Free Or Die Alliance, a non-partisan political alliance out of New Hampshire whose goal it is to bring both citizenship and courtesy back to the political process. This morning, they hit 5,000 fans on Facebook. So clearly their positive message is getting through in the Granite State.

Speaking of politics, here’s an interesting post about using the data collected through Google Paid Search and seeing how is garnering the most interest in the 2012 GOP Presidential Race. Hint: it’s a former Governor from Alaska.

Here in our office we listen to Pandora on our iPad. We have watched their stock IPO with interest. While we disagree with some of the commentary, we do think that this time around there is a far smarter balance of optimism and cynicism as regards the pricing of the stock.

New Hampshire is once again taking its place as one of the two bell weathers of politics as the 2012 Presidential Race starts to heat up; especially on the GOP side. Like Iowa, the residents of the Granite State take their role as vanguards of the process quite seriously and in turn, the Republican Candidates are heading north, and lining up to shake hands across the state.

One of our clients here at Common Sense NMS is the Live Free Or Die Alliance, a non-partisan group dedicated to improving the civility of the political discourse in New Hampshire and also bringing the concept of active citizen participation back into politics. LFDA launched three years ago and is starting to gain considerable traction on issues important to local residents but now, of course, as the country’s attention turns to their state, they are increasingly become a solid resource for on the ground New Hampshire political news.

In working on their efforts in the Granite State as the process has picked up, it’s been fascinating to see the relative strength of the GOP candidates as reflected in the Google search trends of the core candidates. From this unique perspective, we can gain some insight into who has appeal at this early stage, or at the very least, who people are finding interesting enough to go onto Google and type in their name. This is important to LFDA as we helped LFDA receive a Google Grant a year or so ago, and the ability to capture and translate the political trends in search helps them grow their group. Contact us to learn how a $120,000 a year Google Grant can help your C3. For example, if more people are searching for Mitt Romney and what he is doing in New Hampshire, we can then focus the Grant efforts on words relating to Romney and introduce people to LFDA via the Grant and their interest in Romney’s Campaign.

As you can see, over the past 30 days, no candidate comes remotely close to having the interest that Sarah Palin does, in terms of search globally. She clearly is far and above the other candidates, in fact, she is more interesting to those online on Google than all the other candidates combined. Of course, this doesn’t mean true political support, but it does mean interest, and interest seems to be a precursor to support.

Thanks to the power of Google, we don’t have to look just globally. We can look at Search Traffic in the United States and you can even dial down and look at just New Hampshire which we decided to do. Before we pulled this chart, we thought that perhaps within the Granite State, the serious but relatively unknown candidates like Jon Huntsman might pull a little better but just the opposite is true. Within the borders of NH, Palin is even more dominant than she is globally.

But before any Palin fans start planning their trip to Washington for the Inauguration, let’s look at what people are searching for in terms of their favorite candidate, and the answer is our post title. So the interest in Sarah Palin is being driven most recently by her gaffe in Boston, not by pure interest in her campaign. We’ll keep tracking the trends in New Hampshire but remember, Google Insights is free and available to all. When you are looking at your organization or your company and want to learn more about what people want, what they are looking for or even where they are searching from, Google can give you a lot of valuable information instantly.

Last week we talked about the foundation of a successful Google Grant – scalable architecture. Now that you have a firm foundation you can start building out your Grant to get the most traffic possible to your site to convert into supporters and donors. Adding keywords is the way you begin to get more and more relevant traffic to your site.

As we learned last week, you want to build your grant out around themes that already exist on your website. Therefore, you should have campaigns that reflect the layout of your site.

Example

Our national environmental non-profit is back as an example. Say we have a campaign for Animal Protection. On our site we have a page devoted to the polar bear with a strong call to action to Save The Polar Bears. Within our grant, in the campaign for Animal Protection, we can build out a Adgroup for keywords relating to polar bears. I like to use the naming convention (kw: polar bears) to make sure I remember which keyword clusters are in each adgroup.

There are two really easy ways to find good keywords: (1) Check the Google Analyics report for that page on your site. Which organic searches are driving people to that page already, (2) Use Google Instant search. Google Instant was rolled out last fall and essentially changed the amount of words available to marketers using Google Adwords. To get a keyword list on Google Instant type out “polar bear”. You will automatically get the top 5 or so results on what users are looking for in real-time. The trick, and this is time consuming, but is to type “polar bear a”, “polar bear b”. “polar bear c”, etc., until you have a robust list of keywords related to users searching polar bears. Not all of these words will be relevant so make sure to screen them before you add them into your Adgroup.

Once you have a good list, you will want to add all three variations of the keyword: broad matches [exact matches] and “phrase matches”. There is a great tool by Matchpeg that will churn out all three variation for you to add into your Grant

Big Takeaway

(1) Build robust keyword lists for each adgroup.

(2) Keep Adgroups segregated by keyword clusters (themes)

(3) Use the free tools available (Google Analytics, Google Instant Search, Matchpeg) to your advantage.

(4) It takes time, but building robust and relevant keyword lists is vital to maximizing the potential of your Google Grant.

If you are a non-profit ready to make the jump into the digital marketing world with a Google Grant, then we are here to help. Contact us to get started immediately.

Every Friday, we like to highlight and share some of the top things we see online, big stories, little insights that might add up to some big progress and often just some fun online things we want to share. So on this sunny summer Friday (in Boston at least) take a moment and let’s look at what the week has had to offer.

First, it’s easy to always include Google in our round-ups because to be honest, they always deserve it. So to start the round-up, hats off to Google who yesterday had one of the great Doodles of all time honoring Les Paul on what what would have been his 96th birthday. Not only was the Doodle a Les Paul Guitar design but you could actually play it AND save the song you created. Some Fridays, we just have to tip our hat. Here’s an article with more on that.

And yes there is a place where all the old Google Doodles go when their time is up. Check them all out here.

GroupOn has been accused of essentially being a ponzi scheme, and this article makes a pretty good case for that line of thinking.

It does feel a little like people are starting to act like it’s 1999 all over again. The valuations for online properties seem to be distinctly out of line with what they are actually worth. And that’s our bottom line on GroupOn (and Pandora too).

Our very own Cody Damon made Tuesday the day to learn more about Google Grants. He launched a series of posts this past week a note about Grant Architecture. If you’re one of the thousands of non-profits who have a Google Grant, you’ll want to follow what Cody shares on Tuesdays.

What did you see this week that’s the top online story? Email us at inquiry@commonsenseboston.com and tell us what you think. Have a good weekend.

We have been working with Bobby Shriver on Product (RED) since it launched and today, Bobby took another one of the causes near and dear to him, the issue of homeless veterans, to the next level, suing the Veterans Administration to force them to use VA land and resources in Los Angeles to provide shelter to homeless veterans.

Here’s a post I put up on Daily Kos about this.

And here is the coverage from today’s New York Times.

Congratulations Bobby. Keep fighting.

Grant architecture? You won’t a need a fancy compass or any measuring tape. What you will need is your site map and some time.

Your site should be laid out in a manner that makes content easily distinguishable. Building out your Google Grant will follow this same premise. Remember you can have 25 active Campaigns in your Google Grant account. Each campaign can have an unlimited amount of Adgroups.

Your campaigns should be topics that are logical for your website and easy for you to be able to find. Remember the Grant is an ongoing and constantly evolving project and you want to think about scale at the beginning.

Example

Let’s say you are an national environmental group. Your website is broken into four sections: (1) Animal Protection, (2) Clean Air Program, (3) Kids Education, (4) Citizen Advocacy. You can create four campaigns that target a national audience. For your animal protection campaign, perhaps you have 10 Adgroups representing each of the animals that you have webpages. Always remember to group your Adgroups by keyword. For example, if the African Elephant is a species that you create an Adgroup for, then make sure you only have keywords and ads that contain “African Elephant”.

Big Takeaway

Keep it simple and keep it logical. Use your own site map as the guide and remember you can always go back and make edits. Your grant should evolve with the content on your site.

Subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure you don’t miss any of our Google Grant Tuesday write-ups. If you need more help right away be sure to reach out to us and we can get you started down the right path of utilizing your $10,000 a month Google Grant in the most effective way possible.

Once upon a time, branding a product or a non-profit was wonderfully easy. You created a brochure, or a direct mail piece, complete with pictures and an interesting chart or two, and sent it out. Or you made a PSA with the help of a willing commercial producer and ran it on television and played it for perspective donors.

As they say, those were the days.

Today, non-profits and causes who attempt to brand from above and follow the mantra of ‘we know what we are doing give us money’ collide full force with the modern world of technology, access to information and, in fact, the whole world of new media.

It started and is most clearly associated with, movements like Charity Navigator. Instantly a potential donor could see behind the curtain of a non-profit and see details on spending and work. It might not seem like much but just like potential voters used to have to go to the library to see how their elected official voted, the instant access to information means instant decision making.

It goes much further than that of course. So much further that this weekend I was introduced to “Carlson’s Law” which has applications to the non-profit world.

“…a manifestation of “Carlson’s Law,” posited by Curtis Carlson, the C.E.O. of SRI International, in Silicon Valley, which states that: “In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.” As a result, says Carlson, the sweet spot for innovation today is “moving down,” closer to the people, not up, because all the people together are smarter than anyone alone and all the people now have the tools to invent and collaborate. “

From a non-profit branding point of view, here’s how I see the application of this law.

It’s no longer enough to say you are going to do something, you have to show what you are doing. You have to engage with your constituency in a real collaborative manner, not the usual ‘will you sign my petition online” mode. You have become engaged in a way that is uncomfortable for a traditional group and you have to understand that the knowledge and power you once held tightly onto is now available to a lot of people outside your four walls.

If you do this, you will succeed. But if you don’t, Carlson’s Law has another important warning for you. Take the millions of Americans who are interested in the environment and climate change. If they don’t see that the legacy groups are effectively fighting the battle, they now have the tools and technologies they need to organize themselves and push change themselves.

Caveat non-profits. Work with your supporters and brand yourself with them for success. Ignore your supporters and brand top down at your peril.

And don’t forget, a $120,000 Grant from Google is something you should never ignore.

When you’re doing a Social and New Media Round Up, you could literally write about Google every week and we often do include Google in our Round Ups. But this week, we’re going all Google, because well, we can.

First, Google rolled out their +1 Feature for websites, it’s a great tool for sites. Here’s a quote from the good folks at HubSpot.

Think of it as a Facebook “Like” button for the web. With the Facebook Like button, when a user Likes something via the button on a website, it shows up in their Facebook friends’ news feeds. Similarly, when a Google user clicks the +1 button on a web page or article, their connections will see their +1’s within their search results. This enables users to easily view recommendations from their connections where they’re most useful — in search results.

While we agree that +1 is a great tool but every time you see something great from Google, there is someone on the other side of the equation, out of England, we see someone who says ‘let’s not feed the Google beast.”

Last but not least, we recently learned that Google has not distributed over $600,000,000 through the Google Grant program for non-profits which we find to be a remarkable and encouraging number; hats off to them for helping literally tens of thousands of non-profits around the world raise money and further their cause. If you work at a non-profit or know someone who does who could use a $10,000 a month advertising grant, ping us here and we’ll tell you more about how it works.

I was sitting down with a perspective employee the other day and in the course of the interview, the phrase “Digital Darwinism” came to mind and it occurs to me, that the revolution we have seen in the non-profit and cause world over the past five years is finally proving that to survive you have to evolve how you think about your business.

Business in the sense that for the past thirty or so years, non-profits were sheltered from business realities, they were, of course, not for profit groups intent on creating positive change in the world; saving the rainforests, promoting unique community projects around the world or even just trying to build constructive and non-partisan means of communication among citizens.

Non-profits existed in their own ivory towers and were self-dependent. They never have competed with, or even made an attempt to be as up-to-date with technology as a business where the decision is driven by the bottom line. In non-profit culture, there is not the need or desire to budget and adapt quarterly or monthly. Annual budgets are drawn up, if not in stone, at least in very strong concrete, and that’s that.

However, one of the many results of tools and technological advancement is that non-profits can no longer ignore the world outside their doors, nor can they realistically expect to survive if they are unwilling or unable to embrace the developments around them. It’s as if they believe, on some level, that they can stick their heads in the sand and survive. But they can not.

I speak from experience. In 2006, when we set up Common Sense NMS and began to advise non-profit clients on the new and emerging world of social and new media, Veterans For America was one of our largest and most important clients. Under the tutelage of Bobby Muller, VFA had won a Nobel Peace Prize and was a leading voice in the veterans movement. The world changed around them, younger groups like IAVA and VoteVets were created in the digital age, and soon, with other factors involved of course, soon VFA folded its doors.

I went to check on another former client, The Justice Project, it was a strong organization that featured the work of Kirk Bloodsworth, the first man freed from Death Row by DNA. The website is down, the account suspended and the organization is again, apparently no longer in existence. The Innocence Project, however, continues to grow and develop strongly in its place.

Both of these organizations were smart groups, founded by dedicated people, who wanted to do more in the world. But both were also groups of the legacy world, focused on traditional models with traditional strategies and tactics. Both of their missions have been usurped by younger groups whose sole focus is digital.

So, is there hope for legacy organizations in the new world? Of course. But I see two things that are critical to making sure the evolution follows the revolution. First, the change has to be driven from top down and it’s going to ruffle some feathers. It’s critical that leadership within the groups understand the world has fundamentally changed and it’s not going to change back. Direct mail is a declining tool (though a still valuable one.) Newspaper and traditional PR doesnt’ cut it any more. From Facebook to Twitter to Google, the tools are not new anymore, their use and capacity to change how we live and communicate is not open for debate.

You can either engage and evolve and survive, or sadly, like VFA and The Justice Project, you can close your doors and move on.

Google has had its fair share of misses, remember Google Buzz? Well at least someone does. But we are pretty enthusiastic in the loft about the potential of Google Wallet; we think it’s going to work because Google is making it open source and they want it to work. We are aggressively looking at how it operates and the details but stay tuned, whether you are a huge retailer or a small non-profit or someone with a farm stand, we’re betting that Google Wallet will be part of your future. Here’s what Google has to say.

Amazon partied like it was 1999 today. Remember when servers used to go down all the time? We do and a few folks at Amazon have a more recent memory of the good old days online. When they offered Lady Gaga’s new album for just 99 cents to show how they are going to compete with iTunes, it crashed their servers. So they offered it again with a no-crash promise and so far so good we hear.

Remember newspapers? CS NMS Founder James Cannon Boyce was asked by The Boston Herald about what he thinks about the perennial sale of The Boston Globe. Doesn’t appear like there is a price the owners will accept that the buyers will pay, but time till tell. (NY Times Company paid $1,100,000,000 for the Globe way back when and in the latest round offers were around $35,000,000 – that’s a 97% loss.)

Have a great Memorial Day Weekend everyone.