How Do We Kill Birds

Conferences who want to hear you speak can purchase a certain amount of books, and give it to their attendees :)

Hi Chris, Is that picture of your Son? What a great picture! Kids know how to do facial expression far better than us older folks.

To the point, I have always struggled with questions like yours, we have so much here in North America and yet so many struggle. I don't mean Charitable Organizations, I mean people that these organizations don't help. I would rather see you try to help families that can't make ends meet, or find work in your own back yard.

I have always tried to live by this motto: How Many People Are Better Off Because You Lived?

Anyway, food for thought. Thank you for being who you are and for giving some of us hope.

Many Blessings, Owen

Chris, the best option in my opinion is giving your time pro-bono in exchange for a large purchase. Or maybe with the sale of every 1,000 books (from now on) you give an hour of your time to a cause chosen by your followers and readers?
Cool idea!

Instead of a Borders or B&N or BAM, have your next book signing at a soup kitchen or at the open house of a charity you endorse. On top of that, give a discount on the book to people who show up to pitch in/donate/get on a mailing list/etc. Heck, start doing this all over the place and give them a catchy name like 'TrustUps.'

You could give one copy to a non profit for every 10 sold… the non profits could apply by commenting with a link and what they do. The world would see how many great causes there are to support and some lucky applicants would get a copy.

Hey Chris, being an entrepreneur, I know how valuable time with you would be. There are a lot of questions I have about how to best position my startup in terms of branding and in social media.

You mentioned giving 5 hours of your time to a non-profit of a company's choice. I'm sure they would pick a large, established organization. But how about non-profits that are in the startup phase? I know that they could use your help and that a few hours with you would mean a lot to their marketing efforts.

I propose that a startup non-profit sell a certain number of your books (through word of mouth, a blog post, or whatever their methods may be) for 2-4 hours of your time.

I know a few startup non-profits that would definitely be interested in this idea if it interests you. Let me know!

- Jun Loayza

How about using your professional skills to help a nonprofit organization?

If a corporate sponsor or a neighborhood association bought 1,000 copies of Trust Agents you would help a nonprofit of their choice to improve their online communications. Instead of giving them a fish, you teach them how to catch some.

Excellent marketing article Chris! Awesome strategies to deliver value to all! More folks focused on delivering value and content like you do the world would be a better place! Thanks again for sharing!

My answer is obvious: build a well!

Building a water well to provide clean drinking water to an entire village of people can cost as little as $4000. This prevents war and completely preventable diseases. One in six people on the planet doesn't have clean drinking water. That's just crazy talk.

P.S. If you are down for this, I can help you raise money for charity and promote your book with an idea that I've had for a WordPress plugin. Your star is so bright, I should have no problem getting it built 100% free by one of the many bright coders here in Austin in exchange for you just mentioning it. Just give me a call at 512.294.3909. I'll explain it and if you like it, I'll make it happen.

Keep it up, Chris. You aren't just typing. These are hard times for people and your guidance is helping people through a really difficult time. The book is good too. It's my “chilling out at Barton Springs” reading.

It's hard to beat hitting NY Times best-seller list in 2 days. Congratulations!

You might take a look at what Rohit Bhargava did to promote Personality Not Included. I participated in his blogger interview contest and his breakfast brain storming meeting at Blogger Social NYC April 2008. You can follow the saga of his book promotion on his Influential Marketing blog and on the official personalitynotincluded website. I would also talk to him to find out what worked and what didn't.

I wrote about the contest here:
http://itsdifferent4girls.com/blog/2008/04/08/t…

The brainstorming breakfast was a great investment for him. Of course your ability to crowd source ideas from the mere power of your following is tremendous. Rohit's breakfast added to idea collection, discussion and refinement of each idea and then voting. You could do that right here as well.

Because of my background in Japan, the first volume related idea that comes to me is to make sure that you get a good Japanese translation out there quickly. The Japanese are voracious readers and Trust Agents should be of interest there. Your publisher should have the connections to make international distribution happen fast and happen right.

I think it's also important to get people will read it to buy it. Having someone buy 100 books then donating it to whoever will generate short time $$ but no referring sales.

You don't want people to put the book on a shelf and not reading it.

Speaking about your book at a local or national conference may be a good way to get people to actually read the book.

I would also consider selling a PDF format as today's generation probably wont read something if it's not presented on a computer screen.

As an entrepreneur I tend to think in the early-stage business sense, and think the small guys should be empowered by thought leaders whenever they can afford to do so.

I'd focus on lowering the bar in terms of access to your services. The obvious hurdles any low-budget non-profit faces are simple; resources versus need for a wider audience. Many are turning to social media as a lower cost way to jump those hurdles. I work with many in Chicago, and the learning curve, especially towards making the right moves in community building, is somewhat steep.

Many won't even know who you are. However, many will have people in their audience who do, and who might bring this to their attention and tell them to take a shot at earning some insight from you. Maybe their audience will make it happen FOR them.

Those insights would be invaluable, but so would the interface with their audience that this kind of an opportunity presents. It highlights not only raving fans for these non-profits, but it gives them resources when they need further insights into their social web and marketing initiatives.

Donate time and insight to non-profits who can't afford it. Let their audience…their community…rally around them to boost their strategies and understanding of what I think is their most compelling area of potential growth and sustainability.

This is a cool idea. Charities are often left out of the discussion because they typically cannot afford to pay as much as for profit companies. I think the consulting idea is great!

How about if a charity could get their supporters to buy X amount of books then you would donate X amount of hours for consulting. The charities could ask their supporters and fan base to purchase books on their behalf. It would take a little logistical planning, but could be very helpful to charities.

Some great suggestions here that could be rolled into one strategy. I agree that you need an objective before you decide the tactics. As far as donating your time to a charity, I think to be compelling, you need a larger objective around this.

Two things stand out: (1) Helping “social entrepreneurs” (as suggested by Jun) and (2) Getting into the hands of higher education, and even secondary education, institutions. As Anna pointed out, universities are frequently behind the times, using outdated materials.

You could:
- Establish “Trust Agent Social Good Circle” and identify social entrepreneurs/start-ups, and educational institutions that would receive X amount books for every book bought by a company. The company would purchase the books (perhaps at a lower cost), and they would be donated to one of the organizations as an “in-kind” donation (non-profit speak). If the company wanted to do this with someone not on the list, that org could become a member of the circle.

- Along with book, you could choose one of the organizations on a quarterly basis to receive mentoring personally from you. X number of hours. Or a company could chose to pay for your time with a chosen organization.

- The Circle would be set up on social media sites and info, insights, and successes shared.

- You could have your corporate customers pair with someone in the Circle on a project.

- Best project of the year receives an award donated through corporate sponsorship.

Lots of other things you could do, and this could also boost your exposure and biz in the corporate world if that's an objective. But instead of doing several, perhaps disjointed things, you could extend your book, brand, and social good much better through one, bigger, concerted effort.

(BTW- Looking forward to your talk in Austin at AMA next week).

Leslie

Chris- Inspiring what you are doing, you are a true example. I like what nigellegg suggests. How can you argue with philanthropy?

Another option might be to encourage your subscribers to purchase 10 copies for co-workers, clients, and friends (after reading it themselves), as your thank you, offer them access to a special webinar that builds on the themes found in the book. As an added bonus you might consider putting attendees in a raffle to be personally coached either on the webinar (so all might benefit), or outside of the webinar (1 ticket for every 10 books purchased?). Ok, I'll stop there. :-)
-Travis

The second one's pretty darned clever. I have a variation of an idea based on this and think I can riff with it. Thanks for your participation. : )

I donate time to charities. I'm not seeing the cross-marketing perspective here. Are you going with the, “be nice and helpful in front of them and they may check out your book” perspective?

If so, it's a nice thing to do, but doesn't move the needle. I will be definitely donating lots of time to charities over the next year, as I have this year. : )

The PDF version usually comes out 4 months after the book, so that'll happen.

As for speaking, I can't possibly do more events than I'm doing now. : )

Thanks for your ideas, Linda.

Rohit's a great guy. I followed a lot of his ideas when he put out his book.

As for translations, that's in the hands of the publishers, and of Japanese companies. Rights for translations are purchased via Wiley, not commissioned by the authors. : )

Build a well. Isn't taht what the Twestival folks all do?

I knew I should've just asked you. : )

Great idea, Bruno. It's what I wrote about as one of my first recommendations above. I'm glad we think alike. : )

Whoever can move 200-300 books is fine by me. I'm not singling out the big guys. :) If it's a smaller volume, I'd have to find a way that it's not my time personally, as I only have so many hours, and can't spread any thinner than I am.

Make sense?

And I'm glad you chimed in. I like you.

I really really like this idea, Jeff. VERY clever! I'm going to start requesting this for my upcoming appearances.

Now that's interesting. You'd have to buy airplane tickets most days, so that'd get costly quick. : )

I'm approaching this from the perspective of someone who's donating time to
non-profits to help them take smart steps towards engaging the socially
active crowd online. They need you and can't afford you. I have no doubt
you're already using your time to help charities, and definitely didn't want
to suggest you aren't.

My thought was to engage their audience and let those purchases act as
donations to a charity. Either create a lower, individual threshold (10
books = X hours for named charity) or track individual purchases and their
relation to a charity (I buy a book, and tag it to Chicago Dramatists, my
non-profit – if I can rally 10 or 20 or 30 other people to do the same = X
hours). The second option seems as though it'd require a bit of a tweak to
the current purchasing methods, but certainly isn't impossible.

It also might inspire the notion of competition, if you found a way to
engage the “teams” surrounding charities with one another. Competition is
viral and would probably result in more needle-pushing, per se.

Does this move the needle? I'm not sure it significantly does, and I
certainly don't think it's an awe-inspiring original idea. That doesn't
mean I don't like it:)