Why Special?  Well, Inspire is special because it is nothing short of the official Al-Qaeda’s online magazine, which « surfaced with frank essays, creatively designed imagery and ominous terror tips », write CNN journalists Joe Sterling and Mohammed Jamjoon.

The first issue of the magazine, which was posted in July 2010, clearly announced the type of target the Jihadi editors were looking for: provide bomb instructions and offer English translation of Osama Bin-Laden speeches to young American and British readers.

One month Ago, in October 2010, the magazine issued its second edition in which various articles encourage terror attacks on U.S. soil, suggesting that followers open fire at a Washington, D.C. restaurant or use a pickup truck to “mow down” pedestrians.

Unaware of what that magazine was all about in the first place, my firs read was really boring: The magazine looked like one of the million tasteless humoristic magazines that blossoming websites and humor forums are offering on the net on a monthly basis.

In the same vein as the world famous video of Ahmad the Dead terrorist , reading the magazine first gave me the impression of a new humoristic attempt to make fun of terrorists –their sign language, their beards and clothes, their solemn tone when they speak, their mottos, expressions and gestures.

Am I exaggerating it using “humoristic” as an adjective to describe my first impression reading the latest October edition of the magazine? Judge by yourself:

In an article called “The Ultimate Mowing Machine”, editors explain how readers should proceed: “To achieve maximum carnage, you need to pick up as much speed as you can while still retaining good control of your vehicle in order to maximize your inertia and be able to strike as many people as possible in your first run”.

Going a bit further, there are some key lessons one should take away.

First, Social Internet has become an unavoidable marketing tool and an inevitable means of communication, whether you are an individual blogger, a profit company, a non-profit organization or a Jihadist group.

Second, the alleged depravation of the western world as always described by Al-Qaeda is not that “bad” as the terrorist organization does not hesitate to use some of its characteristic features when it can benefit from them.

Last but not least, If we take seriously the impact of such a magazine on “weak and influential” people living in English-speaking countries targeted by Al-Qaeda, it seems that the undoubtedly positive improvement represented by social networks and Web 2.0 could play as the Free West’s Achilles Heel: augmenting its general well-being and at the same time, increasing risk exposure to Enemies of Freedom.

That is the question many people seem to be asking about Procter & Gamble (P&G)’s newest Give Health Clean Water Blogivation campaign.  And the answer seems to be that it is a little bit of both.

The campaign aims to show the power of female bloggers to bring about social change.  P&G has recently invited them to apply for the code to embed the widget pictured below into their blogs.

By entering an email address and clicking, blog readers can donate 1 day of clean drinking water, defined as 2 liters, to someone in the developing world.  P&G’s goal is to click away 100,000 days of clean water.  Since the widget launched on November 1, they have already made it almost a quarter of the way there.

The widget is part of P&G’s larger Children’s Safe Drinking Water Project through which the company works with 16 partners including NGOs like CARE and World Vision.  They have already donated over 1.6 billion liters of clean water- that’s a shocking 8,000 times their donation goal for the widget campaign!

So if P&G is already giving away so much water, what’s the point of the widget?

Enter the skeptics.

Between stamping the P&G logo across a variety of blogs and presenting readers with a coupon for a P&G product after they click to donate water, the effort may appear less than genuine.  Is this simply the symbiotic relationship of doing good mixed with publicity inherent to corporate social responsibility?  Or has P&G gone a step further?

Image courtesy of Mashable.

Rob Wu, founder of the networking and fundraising platform CauseVox, emphasized, “The history of advocacy and marketing goes like this: we started with face to face approaches, then it went to snail mail, then TV and radio, then email, and now we’ve rapidly moved into a society that is growing more into the online space.” He went on to talk about the prevalence of social media marketing and the use of technological innovations in this field.

“Social media marketing is very hot right now…[but] no, it’s not a fad. It’s definitely going to stick around for a long time because it’s just another channel that reaches supporters…it’s going to stay especially because the younger people – people who are 35 years and younger – are plugged into this online space and are comfortable with finding non-profits and causes through this medium.”

The goal now is to get non-profits into the same space where their supporters are. But how is this effectively done?

Taking a look at Restore NYC, a start-up that officially became operational a year and a half ago, one can see the power of a small non-profit when it takes social media, the web, technology, and innovation by the reins. Founded by three friends sitting around a dining room table one night, Restore seeks to bring holistic care to international sex trafficking survivors in NYC. Their services range from counseling to ESL to job training to legal advocacy.

Being in the heart of NYC, one of the major epicenters of digital progression, Restore knew that they had to do more than just create postcard-like fliers to hand out. Even having a website was barely enough; after all, who didn’t have a website nowadays?

“When I first started in the summer of ‘09, we only had a website and it was really poor,” stated Lance Villio, Operations Coordinator at Restore. “It wasn’t up to date in any way and even the information on it was inaccurate. Our website is supposed to be the face of Restore to a majority of the public; I felt we really needed to change it.” He mentioned that they also had a Facebook but that it was not being maintained well.

Working alongside one of Restore’s board members, Greg Wong, a partner at the marketing and branding firm the Longitude and co-founder of the social enterprise Hello Rewind, Villio made sure that the organization not only had a functioning and informative Facebook page and website, but also an active blog and Twitter account.

“For non-profits, I think it’s vital to have a Twitter page,” Villio said. “And to be consistent with it, otherwise people lose interest. For our supporters, it just keeps people in the loop…For us, it allows for us to track what we’ve done, see other organizations and what they’ve been doing…so networking, basically.”

Restore felt strongly that having an online presence wasn’t just to stay socially or digitally savvy but also to remain transparent. “Transparency is really important in any non-profit. People want to know — and we want people to know — what they’re being a part of and what they’re giving to,” added Villio.

He pushed their online presence further by encouraging video logs (or vlogs) on the website as well, allowing followers to “get real faces, and get to know what’s going on first hand.” Despite the limited resources available to the agency, Restore honed in on what it did have and what it could do.

Through these mediums, they were able to connect with people and groups they would not have likely encountered in “real life,” including videographers, photographers, magazines such as Red Rover Style and Her Journey Magazine, people in various industries such as fashion and retail, and social media gurus like Desiree Frieson, who happens to have a passion for advocating against sex trafficking.

Restore felt that it was doing well reaching its current supporters and being discovered by new fans. Their online presence was active through Twitter and Facebook and their events and projects were successful. Then the young agency decided that they needed to hold a large campaign with the goal of raising at least $50,000 to maintain the first ever safehouse for internationally trafficked women in NYC. Faced with this goal, Restore knew that Tweeting for donations was not going to cut it this time around. Fortunately, through yet another connection, they discovered CauseVox.

According to its website, CauseVox is a “brandable platform that engages…advocates, reaches more supporters, and effectively tells [the non-profit’s] story, all in a fresh, easy to use, and affordable service.” Founder Rob Wu felt strongly that small- and medium-sized organizations were “struggling with technology and how to utilize it” as well as encountering difficulties in fundraising. CauseVox tackles both issues with one platform. Because technology isn’t easy to use – “especially for smaller organizations,” said Wu – he and his friend Jeff Chang developed a supporter-based, or peer-to-peer, fundraising platform. Wu also calls it network fundraising.

Remarking about non-profits in general, Wu agrees that they are seeing the need to “latch on to the social media movement” but that this needs to go beyond just having a Twitter account under the agency’s name. While the methods Restore and other media-savvier non-profits are utilizing are “good for raising awareness, building and getting your message out there, it’s not so much a platform for fundraising.” Regardless of whether an organization is not-for-profit or for-profit, all need a flow of funding. Unfortunately, awareness-building doesn’t necessarily bring in those needed dollars.

“Yes, there is Twitter and Facebook fundraising methods,” Wu said after giving some specific examples, “but the reality is that the returns are not that high and the higher returns are seen when non-profits utilize more than that.”

CauseVox was created exactly for this purpose. It caters towards non-profits in an easy-to-use way to create support. It is completely customizable, “like having a blog,” with modules that the organization can play around with.

Non-profits often have a passionate group of supporters, and CauseVox allows for them to tap into these supporters’ networks. Restore’s campaign, titled Brick by Brick, was the perfect pilot project to demonstrate this. It ran from August 22nd to September 30th and was entirely an Internet-based campaign. A supporter could create his or her own fundraising page and blast that out to friends, families, coworkers, neighbors, etc. via mediums like Twitter, Facebook, email, text, and blogs. Those friends, families, coworkers, and neighbors then donated to that supporter’s page. So now Restore, rather than just getting the support of one person, now gets the support of that one person and his or her network.

“Brick by Brock was really effective because it gave people a voice on their own pages as well as a way to help,” Villio stated. He acknowledged the ease of use with CauseVox, criticizing only one detail. “It would have been better if there was a way to link emaill addresses in supporters’ contacts or address books rather than manually sending out the page to each person. Obviously, anything to take time off of what our supporters need to do is best.”

Wu also acknowledged that there were minor tweaks that needed to be done with CauseVox but mainly they were moving forward to building up and adding to the platform.

“The cool thing,” Wu added, “is seeing how social media is incorporated. Our next step actually is to integrate something similar to Facebook posts or blog comments. We’ll plug in the ability to leave comments on one another’s fundraising page. This allows for non-profits to extract data; see who is supporting who, what conversations are emerging, and what their constituents care about.”

On both Restore and CauseVox’s ends, they reported that there were nearly no problems throughout the process of the campaign. Wu mentioned that a “hiccup” involved may have been exporting data in terms of the platform – gleaning out email lists, for example. But other than that, both parties acknowledge that there were no hurdles and the campaign went smoothly.
In fact, Restore NYC raised nearly $130,000 from the Brick by Brick campaign, including a gift from an anonymous donor that matched dollar for dollar every new donation made during the campaign. With this money, the agency can provide two years of safe housing for sexually exploited women in NYC.

Villio expressed Restore’s gratitude for collaborating with CauseVox, saying, “[CauseVox] is going to be a very successful program. It’s genius because it allows people in their own words to describe what they are doing — people want to personally send out a message for a greater good in their own way.”

Restore is one of the many smaller non-profits that realize that handing out informational packets is not enough; even “doing” social media is not enough, but that social media and advocacy is an entire package. Through their utilization of innovative technologies such as CauseVox, coupled with the power of mass social media through networks like Twitter, blogs, and Facebook, they showed that even a young and small non-profit can be digitally relevant and change lives.

“The key to all of this is learning how to use each tool specifically,” Villio commented in regards to mediums like Twitter, Facebook, blogging, and other platforms. “They can perform so many different functions, you just have to be creative and purposeful with them.”

Mark Earls writes in Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature that traditional marketers completely misunderstood the mechanics of mass behavior. Instead of a direct relationship between brand and individual, our instinct is to look at what others around us are doing, using and possessing, and emulating that behavior.

Think the ubiquity of text messaging, the explosion of the Internet itself and the crowding of social networking sites: all examples of activities that entered daily activity not so much because of top down marketing, but because each lubricated the social interaction of those among us.

While the talk in the video above is about and for commercial brand managers and marketers, there are considerable lessons to be learned by the NGO, non-profit and governmental agency communities. This primarily includes how to inject ideas into the public sphere, have them take hold in the collective imagination and develop a life of their own.