»  bytes from the bird

What is cause marketing? It’s when brands tap into do-gooder impulses to disseminate a marketing message, and if you work at a Charlotte ad agency, please take note of this socially beneficial way to help your clients get attention.

The retailer Target is a good example of cause marketing. The retailer is unusual in that it dedicates five percent of its income to charity. It’s also no stranger to social marketing, having more than 260,000 fans on Facebook.

Last week, it brought the two together by kicking off “Bullseye Gives,” a campaign that invites users to choose from a list of 10 charities to which Target will donate $3 million. The social twist: After voting for a charity, users are invited to broadcast their selection to their Facebook friends via their news feeds, the running summary of updates that is central to the Facebook experience. In less than a week, Target tallied 40,000 votes, which translated into tens of thousands of peer-to-peer impressions.

The effort is one of several undertaken by companies recently that use charities to give people a reason to share brand messages. In the social world, the central front for brands is what’s been called “the stream,” the real-time feed of updates, links and bits of content that has become the defining characteristic of Facebook and Twitter. Entry to the stream is coveted by brands desperate for the word-of-mouth appeal that comes close to a personal recommendation to friends.

What does this mean for B2C and B2B marketing in Charlotte? When you do something good, it used to be that you had to buy a large quantity of media to tell people or do a lot of traditional PR. Now, the potential is for people to tell each other that you do good.

And for some brands, particularly those in low-consideration categories like consumer goods, charities can become a cheap way to get access to the megaphones everyone has in social media. Take Colgate. It created a Facebook application called Smiles that languished for months, with just a few hundred people sharing it. Then it hooked up with SocialVibe to recast the tool to tap into the do-good vibe. The brand offered charitable donations each time users shared Smiles. The result: The widget was shared 500,000 times in five weeks.