Social Giving

As this is the season of giving I have been thinking of ways to get us the social media/ citizen journalism/ bloggers more involved in giving back to the world. I realize this sounds bombastic but I do strongly believe there has to be a way to harness the power of the millions of people who blog to support noble causes. Many bloggers have Adsense or similar type of advertising on their pages. My guess is that 90% of the people that have advertising on their pages are making less then $3 a month (if anyone has that stat please forward it to me) and are participating in social media because they want to, and not in hope of making money from their writing. I am sure that some people don’t ever collect the royalty checks from commission junction, Amazon or Google as the amounts are to small. But what if all of this money could be easily donated to support UNICEF or a similar type of an organization. These small amounts could end up making a big difference. For only a few dollars UNICEF in South Africa get children to play with a real football instead of paper tied up in string. In my recent visit to South Africa I met some of the people from UNICEF and am sure that even small amounts of money could make a big difference for their programs.

I believe that best way to make this work is with the commerce platforms. Google Adsense, Commission Junction and the other technology platforms should add an option in the sign up that will allow us to contribute. As a blogger you could set a limit on how much you are willing to give and then have the technology platform collect all of the money on behalf of millions of people and transfer it directly to the charitable cause.

Anyone participating in this program would get a button that would display as part of their Adsense stating that revenue from this advertising will be contributed.

The technology is fairly simple to implement and the benefits to the community are clear.

If anyone of you knows the right person at Google/ Amazon/ Commission Junction or any of the other major blogging platforms please forward them my post and I promise to keep you updated on the progress of my idea.

Socerex

This is a post I wrote several weeks about after Soccerex and by mistake was not published. It is a bit out of date but still relevant in many ways.

Soccerex is the largest football related conference in the world and brings together football clubs, associations, and all types of business that surround the beautiful game.

The conference was hosted at a suburb of Johannesburg and hospitality was superb. It seems very important for the South African to show what a great host country they will be for the upcoming World Cup and the amount of security around the event was almost ridicules. I doubt they will be able to have this much security with hundreds of thousands of fans visiting from all over the world in two years. My view is that the World Cup in 2010 will be a success. Visitors will enjoy the fascinating and friendly land of South Africa and unfortunately crime will also be part of the games with a fair share of muggings robbery etc. Hopefully no tourist will loose their life. I am looking forward to the World Cup and to many more visits to South Africa.

For Sportingo the show was another opportunity to advance the cause of social media and sport and expand our partnership base for the fast growing guide What’s Online. We have several new partners (more in a separate entry) and the amount of coverage of the media guide is growing each week. We are considering renaming the service, if you have any ideas please leave a comment on email me.