Beakinoftruth: Making Money With Youtube

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Non-profit organizations and passionate individuals have found a slew of creative ways to leverage social media and the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet to make the world a better place. Online campaigns help provide clean drinking water, food and malaria-preventing bed nets to people who need them.

Creative uses of the web are helping to provide and enhance education. These four projects, for instance, found innovative ways to help build schools through digital campaigns.

1. Epic Change

Epic Change has become a model for raising money using social media. Since 2008, its annual TweetsGiving has asked people to tweet about what they’re thankful for while making a donation. The strategy was so successful that #tweetsgiving became a trending topic on Twitter during the first year’s campaign.

Starting out, the benefactor of TweetsGiving was a school in Tanzania that was founded by Mama Lucky Kamptoni, a passionate local woman who started the school using money she earned from her poultry business (now there are two more benefactors). Epic Change wanted to help her rebuild and expand the school.

The organization also launched To Mama With Love, a website where users can make a donation by creating a “heart space” for a mother they care about. The “heart space” is a collection of photos, videos and words dedicated to that mother. Other people who care about that mother are invited to donate in her honor.

From one of the classrooms that was built using donations from these campaigns, the students now tweet and connect with the rest of the world.

“So often, we hear the stories of children in the so-called ‘developing’ world from the perspective of the media, non-profits or friends who have traveled or volunteered,” explains the Epic Change Blog. “What happens now – when these students can share their own stories, and build relationships with the rest of the world, for themselves? How will the world be different when these children, who live so geographically far away, move into our virtual backyard? What difference will it make in their lives to know that their voices will be heard?”

2. Stillerstrong

When Ben Sitller launched the Stillerstrong campaign on YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube, Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter and a branded website, he did it with a video that poked fun at Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong campaign. It was hard to tell if he was kidding.

But the campaign, which sells Stillerstrong headbands and accepts donations by text message and credit card, has raised about $300,000 to help provide temporary schools for Haitians displaced by January’s earthquake. At the time the campaign was announced, the organization and its partners Causecast and the Global Philanthropy Group were expecting each school to cost between $45,000 and $55,000.

3. TwitChange

Instead of auctioning off celebrity memorabilia to support a charity, TwitChange hosts eBay auctions for celebrity Twitter interaction. The donation’s bidders put down to have a celebrity follow them, retweet their tweet, or mention them in an update. The proceeds go to aHomeInHaiti.org, which will use them to build a home and school for children with disabilities in Haiti.

The first auction in September raised $531,640.25. The website instructs us to “stay tuned for the celebrity tweet auction coming this holiday season.”

4. University of the People

Less of a “campaign” than a full-blown effort to democratize education, University of the People provides tuition-free higher education through an online campus.

Since launching last year, the university has accepted about 700 students from 100 different countries to its three- to four-year programs for business and computer science. Recently the university opened computer centers in Haiti so that students with limited Internet access could enroll in its courses.

“I do believe that if we take the millions of people around the world who could not afford going to university and teach them tuition free, we’re not only changing their lives, and their family’s lives, we also change their communities, their countries,” founder Shai Shai Reshef says. “And if we have a lot of them, we will change the world for a better world.”

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More Social Good Resources from Mashable:

- How Online Classrooms Are Helping Haiti Rebuild Its Education System/> - Why Social Media Is Reinventing Activism/> - 5 Creative Social Good Campaigns for the Holiday Season/> - 4 Real Challenges to Crowdsourcing for Social Good/> - 9 Creative Social Good Campaigns Worth Recognizing

Image courtesy of iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, urbancow

For more Social Good coverage:

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Show me a modern political candidate who doesn’t understand television, and I’ll show you a loser.

When TV became the dominant medium for Americans to consume news and entertainment, political candidates could no longer be successful without looking polished in televised debates, appearing on talk shows and spending big on commercials.

Like the television boom of the 1960s, we are standing on the precipice of a big shift in how public figures are perceived and how campaigns are conducted. Our frontier is social media, and its impact on mainstream political culture is coming on fast.

While my colleagues have been making their predictions about what’s on the tech and social media horizon in 2011, there will be no major U.S. elections next year. Here, we’ll be postulating about social media’s impact on the more long-term future of American civics.

1. There Will Be a Tipping Point

While campaigning and marketing share many similarities, the differences mean everything when you’re talking about democracy’s big picture. Brands can sell by hitting a tech savvy demographic of influencers. Elections involve everyone, whether they’re online or not.

If a large bloc of your constituency is made up of 65+ year-old retirees, chances are a Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook strategy won’t be time well spent. Despite the enthusiasm of the tech crowd and blogosphere, Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter is exceedingly far from the mainstream, with only 6% of Americans using the service. And while the world consumes YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube videos at a mind-bending rate, viral success is still transient and elusive.

While these tools have certainly proven to be effective in rallying support and contributions, we don’t yet live in a world where social media can make or break a political candidate by itself.

That will change, perhaps even by the next major election cycle.

The future of the social media politician is not about wild speculation and technological uncertainties. It has everything to do with when and how deeply social media can be absorbed into mainstream culture. We are on track for a tipping point — a JFK/Nixon TV debate moment — when everyone on the political scene will acknowledge that we can never go back to campaigns without social.

2. New Media Strategists Will Just Be Strategists

I’ve had the opportunity to talk with the new media strategists for a number of senators, congresspeople and political causes. Despite their differences, they all agree that their own jobs will soon be folded into the larger campaign strategy. As many have already foreseen, social media will not require experts for much longer. As we head toward true mainstream adoption, social will be a default and well-understood tool in the belt of any public-facing professional.

We’ve already seen this happening in the private sector with marketing and PR professionals. As many corporate entities lumber to catch up with those on the cutting edge, so too will government officials and the campaigners who seek their offices.

3. We’ll See the Devaluation of Old Media in Politics/>

Print and radio ads are not as valuable as TV. TV will no longer be as valuable as interactive media. For politics, this is especially so, as the arena (at its best, anyway) warrants engagement and discussion.

As media appetites shift, this is an inevitability. In the U.S., we’re already seeing web use catch up with television in terms of weekly hours spent. Political money will simply go where the eyeballs are, and we’re likely to see a big payoff on social creativity when it comes to future campaigns.

4. Whistle Blowing Gets More Efficient, But That’s It

The WikiLeaksclass="blippr-nobr">Wikileaks saga has ignited plenty of discussion about journalism and whistle blowing in the Internet age. But at the end of the day, the mechanics of an information leak are about the same as they’ve always been: Someone from within an organization leaks damaging information, and the media (in whatever form) disseminates it to the public. Generally speaking, WikiLeaks has only acted as a “middle man” for raw information. It’s journalists who are making sense of it and transmitting it to the public with context.

The web only speeds up this process through digitization and universal access. Governments and politicians will feel the impact of leaks sooner, but it’s unlikely the methods of protecting sensitive information will be much changed.

Your Thoughts?

What do you think will be social media’s biggest impact on the political process? How long until we see a winning campaign strategy that is purely social? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

More Political Resources from Mashable

- How WikiLeaks Became the Story of the Year in 2010 [VIDEO]/> - The Future of Social Media and Politics/> - How Political Campaigns Are Using Social Media for Real Results/> - How the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” Nailed Social Media/> - 17 Web Resources to Help You Decide on Election Day

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Beakinoftruth

Friday, January 7, 2011

Making Money With Youtube