By Hartley Mikus, Account Executive

Welcome to Cause Marketing 2.0.

It has been awhile since I’ve been contacted via phone to donate to a cause. I also receive far fewer direct mail pieces asking me to be a local volunteer and help champion a cause than I remember my parents receiving.

Perhaps it’s because I haven’t lived in the same apartment for more than a year at a time or had an actual land line since before I started college. Or perhaps it’s because what we once knew as cause marketing has morphed into cause marketing 2.0.

Social media has grown as a powerful public relations and marketing tool, especially with respect to non-profits and other causes. Original attraction to the emerging medium may have had something to do with the fact that implementation was, and still is, relatively inexpensive, especially when compared to creating a direct mail piece and sending it via snail mail to 10,000 homes. And now, as various social media platforms have evolved and users have become more knowledgeable, it now seems to be the vehicle transmitting several cause marketing and public relations campaigns/initiatives.

On Twitter, you can now tweet to empower women to travel the world, tweet to save the environment and tweet to make sure a young child with terminal cancer has a good Christmas. You can also fundraise through YouTube, friend charities and join non-profit groups to unite a population and pass legislation on Facebook.

At first it doesn’t seem fathomable, but since the popularity and effectiveness of leveraging social media as a cause marketing tool is continuing to grow, one might ask how these social media cause campaigns are gathering so much steam? How are they raising so many dollars? How are they garnering so much support from complete strangers? I think the answer points to three key attributes of cause marketing 2.0.

Personal: Social media is personal, two-way communication. As PR people, we constantly strive for opportunities for one-on-one communication with key audiences, and social media provides this perfect opportunity. And people like to donate to causes with which they identify, and they enjoy being a part of things with friends, or other similar individuals.

Instant: Social media is fast, nearly immediate. Once something catches on, it ripples through target audiences quickly. Using these tools as a way to generate support and get people excited is far easier than through a direct mail piece. It also allows people to see their contributions or advocacy support methods immediately, and in a society where the need for instant gratification and impatience are prominent, it fits well culturally.

Easy: Retweeting a message with a specific hashtag takes far less effort than breaking out the checkbook, scrawling out a donation and then locating a stamp and mailing it to an organization.

Since cause marketing 2.0 allows us to personally feel like we are immediately effecting social change without draining our budgets or our schedules, it seems as though this method of marketing is more than a phase, but instead, just the beginning of a completely different and emerging cause marketing world, still in its infancy stage.

Do you agree? What do you like most about your favorite cause marketing 2.0 campaign?

photo credit: live-showtime