yinkaolaito.com – the branding gavel, brand communication expert, nigeria brand consultant, social media expert

In one of my previous articles here I did mention that most of our brands efforts on the internet here are focused on social media abuse through web advertising in social media platforms.

In recent times, we are pleased to note that changes are taking place from unexpected sources. The non-profits are taking the bull by the horns. A particular example is the social medial virtual effort to promote and create awareness for a leadership conference organized by a non denominational outfit named Daystar Christian Centre in Lagos. The first step taken in this regard is to hire a web designer who is versed in e-marketing, e-commerce tools. The outfit went ahead to create a customized website for the conference outside the official website owned by the brand.

To ensure activities of the conference become viral, the church created a Facebook and Twitter accounts to aid brand awareness and promotion. These will all spread the buzz about the programme. Knowing that distribution of content is also important to make it viral, the outfit encourages its over ten thousand members, who are mostly youth and internet savvy, to join the Facebook homepage, download the profile picture and use it as their profile pictures for the period the programme will last. More importantly, the members are also encouraged to tag their friends and contacts with the programme banner used as profile picture.

With regard to the twitter account, each member is also encourage to follow, tweet the activities of the programme, use harsh tag (#) to create a buzz around their tweets. While we are still monitoring this effort with regards to ROI, measuring the effect of this viral initiative, we for see these efforts going viral if there is a hundred percent compliance from the congregation to instruction given. 

An honest assessment of this effort though is that creating accounts on any platform whatsoever is the beginning of the deal.  There is an absolute need for commitment to continually update status. Mere creation of accounts without a corresponding effort in building emotional attachment with the advocate will not help matter. To retweet, there must be enough information that followers can act on. Also in other to slightly differentiate its social media effort campaign (which has a little disadvantage from permission), efforts must be made to buy in followers at their own term. For those who want to know more about online campaign, they can check this article. A consistent effort can be made to speak glowingly about the benefits of the programme, the quality of the speakers and what attendees stand to gain instead of limiting tweets to registration details as it is currently obtain. The customized created website can also be turned into integrated one that serves as hub for all the viral activities instead of making them a stand alone.

But come to think of it and getting out of academic, professional analysis, this organization pioneering dffort is commendable. This shows the quality of the mind of the leadership of this organization in annexing new trends to spread its message. When many religious organizations are still contemplating the use of computer- that is termed as devil box by many of its kind, Daystar has gone ahead to show the way while many for profit organizations are still spending huge amount of money on web advertising. This is not bad anyway but we are just suggesting a new, effective cost saving way.

# Caveat: I am a big fan of this outfit.