OPEN

I had the great pleasure of working with an global charity this week that is thinking about how it can work with social media.

Non-profits are very interesting to me from a social spaces point of view as they are often very effective at working with, galvanising and even beginning movements. Movements are essentially collaborative, networked, complex affairs that are outside of the control of any one individual or organisation.

Brands, so focused on command and control models can learn a lot from activism and movements when it comes to changing the way they communicate.

If something is being controlled by an organisation or a cabal of individuals, it isn’t really a movement.

Anyway, one thing me and all the charity people got very excited about was Amnesty UK‘s social media campaign case study which that it released this week with its agency partner Made By Many (surely the nicest named and branded agency in the social/design space).

Actually, everybody I talked to about the case study got a bit excited. It’s very close to the Understand Your Networks / Be Useful to Your Networks / Be Live in Your Networks mantra which underpins our social approach at iCrossing in terms of its approach / structure but it also includes some genius twists and turns.

I particularly loved:

• Starting up the Twitter conversation before a strategy had even been formed.
• Drawing in the digital / social / marketing experts with sympathy for the cause to help brainstorm the campaign.
• The excellent use of third party tools like Pledge Bank and Map the Gaps.
• The coordinated actions by their supporters.

Amnesty’s brilliant. So is Made By Many, if this is anything to go by. I’m grateful – as are a few others I’ve spoken to this week – to both parties for sharing their experience so openly…

Technorati Tags: Amnesty, brands, charity, innovation, Made by ?Many, marketing, PR, case study, social media, Twitter