There is this great campaign being launched as I’m writing, and I thought you’d want to know about it.
But knowing is not enough. They need your support to be able to get governments involved. Read, sign the petition, share (on Facebook, Twitter), and ask your friends to share too. Please.
Born HIV Free
We need millions of people to make their voices heard. To reach them we will ask you to spread the message. How many online friends, fans and followers do you have? 100? 500? 10,000? Use ’suggest to friends’ on the left of this page and invite your friends to join. Let them all know about the campaign. Who wouldn’t want to do their part to ensure a AIDS-free generation?
And now, the official press release for those who want more. (Contact details at the end)
What is it?
The BORN HIV FREE campaign has been created to mobilize public support for the work of The Global Fund and for a world where no child is born with HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) by 2015. Originated and supported by Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, Global Fund Ambassador, this is the largest ever digital media campaign of its kind. At the core of the campaign is a series of entertaining films and events intended to inspire people to sign up online in support of The Global Fund’s mission.
Transmission of HIV from mothers to their children has nearly been eliminated in Europe, North America and other industrialized parts of the world. In contrast, in developing countries, 430,000 children are born with HIV every year - that is well over 1,000 every day. The campaign’s main message is that “We can put a stop to this in the next five years. A world where all children are BORN HIV FREE is now possible”.
Launched on 19 May 2010, in five languages: English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. the campaign uses a set of innovative and imaginative animated films across digital and traditional media platforms to spread awareness about the opportunity the world has to ensure a virtually HIV-free generation by 2015 and to generate support for this goal – and the Global Fund’s wider mission of fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The campaign appeals to all viewers to show their support by signing their name on the campaign’s “virtual wall of support”.
The campaign will run until October 2010.
Why is The Global Fund promoting this?
This year the Global Fund is requesting its donors to pledge contributions for the next three years. It has estimated a financial demand for up to US$20 billion for these three years. The Global Fund currently channels nearly a quarter of all international resources to fight AIDS, but more than half of the resources to prevent transmission of HIV from mothers to children, as well as more than half of the people receiving AIDS treatment around the world. In addition, the institution channels around two thirds of the resources invested against tuberculosis and malaria.
By focusing on a world where virtually all children can be BORN HIV FREE, the campaign is drawing attention to one of the many ambitious goals the world can achieve if it continues to increase investments in global health. By signing up on the “virtual wall of support”, people can signal to their country’s government that they approve of the use of public resources to fight these global pandemics and to achieve ambitious global goals, such as a virtually HIV-free generation.
Given that The Global Fund relies predominantly on public funding for its resource needs, the campaign is not a direct fund-raising campaign and does not ask individuals to contribute money. It simply asks people - by the simple act of clicking a button - to register their support for BORN HIV FREE and for the work of The Global Fund.
The Global Fund will publicize the levels of interest, awareness and support as the campaign progresses.
How has the campaign come about?
The campaign was conceived by Julien Civange at the request of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and co-produced with The Global Fund. The campaign films were produced by Oscar-winning production company H5, as well as by Passion Paris, TWA/MAP and NEXUS Productions, focusing on the promise of life fulfilled for children who are protected from HIV. The animations will be distributed through various social and mass media platforms and be supplemented with a film by the award-winning Swedish animator Jonas Odell showcasing the tremendous advances made in the fight against the three diseases since the inception of The Global Fund in 2002. The campaign web site was designed and developed by red design, and the YouTube channel was developed by type3.
A number of official partners have joined together to support this cause: Google, YouTube, MSN, Orange and JC Decaux.
Why launch the campaign now?
On 5 October 2010, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will chair a meeting of donor countries in New York where they will pledge financial support to The Global Fund for the next three years (2011-2013) to fight the three diseases. Given the Global Fund’s large share of global financing for the fight against the three pandemics, the level of financing secured will largely determine whether the battle to virtually eliminate mother to child transmission of the virus by 2015 – as well as other targets, such as a end to deaths from malaria and dramatic reductions in the burden of tuberculosis – will be won or lost.
A majority of The Global Fund’s financial resources come from public sources. The United States is the single largest donor and of the top 16 government donors, twelve are from Europe. Japan, Canada and Australia are the other major donors.
Strong support from the public is needed to enable donor countries’ leaders to continue increased investments in The Global Fund so that a HIV-free generation can become a reality.
The Global Fund is a unique global public/private partnership dedicated to attracting and disbursing resources to prevent and treat HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. Since its creation in 2002, The Global Fund has become the main source of finance for programs to fight AIDS, TB and malaria, with approved funding of US$ 19.3 billion for more than 572 programs in 144 countries. It provides a quarter of all international financing for AIDS globally, two-thirds for tuberculosis and three quarters for malaria. For more on the Global Fund see www.theglobalfund.org
What is the link between Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and the Global Fund?
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy became a Global Ambassador for the Global Fund for the Protection of Women and Children Against AIDS in December 2008. At the announcement of her ambassadorship, she declared that one of the ways she wanted to act as an ambassador was to engage the world of art, culture, fashion and entertainment for the cause of ensuring that virtually all children are BORN HIV FREE. The campaign grew out of this commitment.
For more information contact:
Andrew Hurst – Media Relations Manager
Office: +41 58 791 16 72
Mobile: +41 79 561 68 07
Email: andrew.hurst@theglobalfund.org
I think this article is a must read - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8590306.stm
At the F8 conference in San Francisco, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a number of products he says are aimed at putting users and their friends at the “centre of the web”. It will surely work on the further unseating of Google being the site or service synonymous with internet usage and the webs most used or visited service.
“One of the points Mr Zuckerberg was making was that the web has become a lot less anonymous and Facebook is definitely positioning itself as wanting to be the owner of that information,” said Maya Baratz of the Huffington Post. (Given Facebook’s growing and highly influential size the Huffington Post online publication has dedicated a whole section of its site to news surrounding Facebook which you can read by clicking here.)
Zuckerberg told developers at the f8 conference that the experience will mean a more personalized, social, smarter Web. As quoted from an another article on Huffington Post “Facebook is spreading its wings to the broader Web with new tools that will allow users to see personalized versions of websites they visit elsewhere.
The move could change the way people experience the online world, though it could come with deeper privacy implications. By accessing Facebook’s tools, websites will be able to customize the experience based on the list of friends, favorite bands and other things users have shared on their Facebook profiles.
“The Web is at a really important turning point now,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the F8 conference for Web and software developers in San Francisco. “Most things aren’t social and they don’t use your real identity. This is really starting to change.”
In its first steps Facebook has changed the semantics surrounding fans “people who like this” – has replaced the former term of “fans.” Facebook has added these new features to its site,
If you haven’t noticed these changes in the past few days take look.
In conjunction with this step it also launched the concept of what it calls Community pages. The concept of Community pages is to revamp users’ profiles to emphasize the pages for bands, books and businesses that users have become fans of. Facebook has started prompting users to essentially combine the two ( a users “Faned” page , and their profile page ) So if you listed The Clash in the “favorite music” section of your profile, Facebook will now ask you to join his page, if you haven’t become a fan of it already.
Facebook has also announced its working to eliminate the FB Connect ‘brand and replacing it with OAUTH - OAuth (Open Authorization) is an open standard that allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their username and password.
Its also working on projects such as social plugins whch they call GDP (granular data permissions) and continuing to work on user privacy settings. Zuckerberg said Facebook made sure that its new tools don’t intrude on their privacy. Users’ preferences won’t be logged unless they choose to press the “like” button on websites. If anything, Zuckerberg expects the “like” tools to give people more control over what they want to share with their online entourages.
If users embrace it, Facebook could gain valuable insights that could help it sell more advertising, potentially rivaling online ad leader Google Inc., which typically tailors ads based on keywords in search terms and Web content.
“If I were Google I would be really scared because Facebook might end up with a lot more intelligence than them,” said Alain Chuard, Founder of social marketing firm Wildfire. “Google is just an algorithm, but Facebook could rule the Web.”
So there’s obviously and lot more planned for the near future as the battle for social dominance increases. I wonder what Google will do now since its Buzz launch looks like a knee jerk re action to Facebook’s growing importance and it incremental loses in market share of audience time and visitation online?
Reposted from http://blog.label.ch LABEL Communications
In terms of SEO Facebook has become one of, if not, the largest influencer in organic search today. This is something not to ignore for any SEO oriented marketer or communicator. Its very easy to work out what is driving this .. the sheer size of its user numbers pages and content links have driven it to prominence.
400 M registered users with 200 M logging in each day
More than 3 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
Here is a simple list of tactical steps on how to benefit from using Facebook’s SEO advantage (adapted from All About Facebook)
1. Start with a good URL
URLs are critical in search engine optimization. Google (and other search engines) use as much information as possible to determine the relevance of a particular page for a given search. Currently Facebook enables those pages with over 100 fans to get a vanity URL. A vanity URL is the short Facebook URL that helps people easily access your page.
Monkeys with Typewriters - Myths and realities of social media at work.
There seems to be a lot of books that are be published about social media, the new digital marketing paradigm, and they are propagating as fast that the exponential growth of social media and networking. Most are, unfortunately, the non-descript how to do, or dummies guide to social media or how to use particular tool or a book rushed to print on hype. For the most part these serve their purpose but will be outdated by the time they publish or contain nothing more that are dry set of repetitive studies presented as a mind numbing, blunt string of wide eyed testimonies that say the “times are a changing”. I must say, save the print and spare me the drudgery please. Then I also must concede, I am not the target audience or buyer of such books.
Jemima Gibbons recently published book, Monkeys with Typewriters is quite different to those aforementioned book types. Its a new and refreshing read, a sparkling gem in a field of proliferating drudgery of “read this now and it will change your life” books. It also poignantly marks the period we are experiencing. Read more…
As the digital shift continues to move marketing communications to more direct and dialogue driven channels companies should adopt a simple methodology in identifying what will work for them and their consumers. The dialogue idea is as unifying concept that aligns relationship or socially driven programs with other communications as a part of an integrated marketing approach. As more participatory channels for consumers are developed the need to establish consistent, non-campaign driven dialogue points becomes critical in the marketing mix. These are not just limited to the direct channels, as we know them; (CRM, DM, email, websites), but really extend across any personal contact that can be associated to the “ brand experience”; customer and consumer services, in store demonstrations, events etc.
A real world experience with a brand is only mirrored in the participatory platforms online and this mirroring reflects the sentiments it arouses in real world conversations. Read more…
A very interesting view from Pete Blackshaw, The Nielsen Company, on what to do and how to prepare for the future of online marketing. Responsiveness is key to success, but also being aware of what you need to respond to and planning for what the consumer might do next. Pete suggests “that there is a new accountability standard that has been put on the table by consumers and that may lead to better advertising” . He also cites the Nielsen research that suggests that “consumers trust each other more than they trust advertisers” , ” if advertisers can figure out a way of co creating with consumers, everybody might win”. Brands should be both reactive and proactive in planning for what consumers might do through better websites and better feedback loops.
