Charles Festa, Community Manager at Threadless, speaks to the importance of branding and community engagement during his keynote speech at Making Media Connections 2011
Thursday afternoon’s keynote speech at Making Media Connections 2011 introduced nonprofit communicators to the crazy online world of t-shirts. In typical lively fashion, Threadless Community Manager Charles Festa shared his online video and community engagement tips that helped pave the way to online success.
An early Threadless video screened by Festa proved that videos with low-quality production values can still be successful tools of engagement. In fact, Threadless’s grainy and sometimes pointless videos created quite an online following, appealing to designers and young, hip customers.
Eventually, Festa and his colleagues realized that proper branding and promotion could help grow their community even more. They incorporated simple touches like the company’s name and URL into the beginning frames of each video and even asked its own community to complete scripts for videos to be featured on the Threadless website. While Festa wouldn’t describe Threadless videos as “viral,” he acknowledged that these activities along with cross promotion across marketing channels like Twitter and its newsletters helped spread the Threadless brand and grow its devoted community.
Since its early days of posting silly and random videos online, Threadless has developed a successful online video and engagement strategy that can be applied to nonprofit goals. Festa encouraged the audience to begin with simple online videos and involve their entire organizations in production process.
For more notes from this summer’s Making Media Connections conference and the latest insights on communications strategies for nonprofits, visit the Nonprofit Communicator blog.
Many thanks to all the participants and attendees who made the Making Media Connections conference a success! Recaps of the panels and workshops will be available shortly on the resources and tips section of our site. Check back regularly or sign up for e-notes for updates on their availability. Until then, enjoy some photos from the event!
We’re looking forward to sharing with you our knowledge of groundbreaking new digital communications methods, how to get your story into the media, and how to be the most effective nonprofit communicator you can be! We can’t wait to see you next week!
We asked previous attendees of the Making Media Connections Conference what their favorite part of the conference was, and got some interesting answers!
In the video below, watch Workshop Vice President Nora Ferrell speak about her first time attending MMC at the start of her career as a public relations professional, and how she learned to pitch journalists.
We asked previous attendees of the Making Media Connections Conference what their favorite part of the conference was, and got some interesting answers! In the video below, watch Ernest Sanders, New Communities Program Manager and Director of Communications for The Greater Auburn-Gresham Development Corporation (GADC), had to say about his experience networking with other nonprofit communicators at the conference.
We asked previous attendees of the Making Media Connections Conference what their favorite part of the conference was, and got some interesting answers! See what Yesenia Sotelo, Director of New Media at Jasculca Terman & Associates, had to say about her experience connecting with other nonprofit communicators at last year’s conference in the video below!
Join Yesenia at this year’s Making Media Connections conference to connect with nonprofit communicators, Chicago-area media makers, journalists, bloggers and more!
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Programming at Chicago Public Media’s Chicago Amplified
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