Research company ComScore recently launched an initiative to encourage panelists to join and stay active in its research that caught my attention. It partnered with Trees for the Future and donated enough money to plant 1 million trees in developing communities worldwide. ComScore has also pledged to continue to make donations when new panel members join and remain active in the panel.

DMNews recently looked at the difficulty in providing incentives to participate in market and demographic research. It will be interesting to see how the market researcher’s green efforts work toward this goal. Is your company considering an environmentally friendly way to get attention or response? Tell us about it!

The developers of the popular online game Scrabulous have pulled the game from Facebook, after receiving legal threats from Hasbro. The game, which Hasbro claims is too closely related to its trademarked game Scrabble, will no longer be available to Facebook users in North America.

I wonder what this will do to the amount of time that users are spending on Facebook and how advertisers will respond. I know that I have personally spent many hours playing the game, while various ads sat in prime view on my dashboard.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/technology/30scrabble.html

Customer Futures is an international members-only network of learning groups consisting of executives from non-competing businesses that meet quarterly to share knowledge in the areas of customer management and customer experience management. There are currently forums based in the UK, Ireland, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, South Africa and the Netherlands. The company is owned by OgilvyOne.

Naras Eechambadi, Ph.D and CEO of multichannel marketing solutions provider Quaero will be the facilitator of the first US forum, scheduled for September 9. Charter memberships are currently available.

There’s been a lot of talk that non-profit organizations are facing a double whammy in 2008 of poor economic conditions coupled with the fact that this is a presidential election year. What these factors are supposed to add up to is less giving by donors, but according to new research from Merkle Inc., the election may not be a factor after all.

Merkle examined the similarities and differences between donors who give to presidential campaigns and non-profit organizations and found that political campaign donors are typically younger, more likely to be male and have higher incomes. Nonprofit donors, on the other hand, are typically older, are more likely to be female, and are located throughout the country. Political donors tend to be located in the Northeast.

Merkle also found that political elections have no noticeable impact on charitable contributions and that both political fundraising levels and charitable giving continue to grow.

Merkle reviewed historical direct mail performance data from large national nonprofits from various sectors and compared it with political contribution data obtained from the Federal Election Commission for the report, Measuring the Impact of Political Fundraising on Nonprofit Direct Mail Performance.

As I plan the DMNews features for the rest of 2008, I’m starting to turn my mind to a couple of stories we’ll be doing on global marketing this fall. So I turn to you, faithful DMNews readers — what are some of the biggest challenges for U.S. marketers looking to implement global campaigns? What are some recent global campaigns that you think have really worked well? As a U.S. marketer, what do you want to know about going global? I’m on the hunt for ideas…I hope you’ll share yours!

As a big fan of the British humorist Stephen Fry, I’d be remiss to point out an interesting Sound Off that CNN has posted borrowing his witticism: “The e-mail of the species is deadlier than the mail.”

It notes that e-mail and other electronic communication has taken a bite out of the postcard mail stream and asks readers to share their own postcard experiences. Personally, I still enjoy getting the printed piece to hang up and envy from my peripatetic friends - however I get an equal number of blog updates or mass e-mails.

For marketers travel correspondence via the Web has made these consumers more accessible. In fact, Dianna Dilworth recently looked into trends around social networking and travel for a DMNews article, noting that before a trip marketers can use the travel plan chatter to target would-be vacationers.

We’ve yet to report on examples of the marketing that takes place while consumers are on a trip, but it’s not difficult to image receiving a targeted Gmail ad next to a friend’s trip update from Austria with a “Cheap flights to Vienna” link. How are you reaching buyers with wanderlust?

We got a rather long, anonymous reply to a recent Gloves Off debate, “Does accountable pricing help SMBs?” with the main contention that it is not pricing model (CPA vs. CPC vs. CPL), but product quality and effective targeting that determine campaign success today.

However, in disputing the need to contrast pricing models, our anonymous poster raises another interesting point: the role of laziness in online marketing. He or she asked the rhetorical question: “Which model allows a marketer to be more lazy and still make money?”

My question for our readership is, is there a role for laziness in online marketing? The obvious, gut answer is “no.” Online marketers have to be vigilant, constantly watching their ROI, their CPA and, thanks to the latest technology, the chatter around their brands and products taking place on blogs and social networks.

But every day releases cross my desk that boast automated platforms for keyword monitoring and bidding or online ad networks that manage media buys based on a preset maximum bid.

As the amount of data available increases and the level of technical expertise for understanding search algorithms grows greater, how can marketers navigate information and price optimization without involving such tools? Is it lazy for them to do this without understanding the back end technology to all of this data processing and at times blindly automate campaigns based on predetermined equations and cost-benefit analysis? This issue becomes crucial when you consider the size of marketing departments for SMBs.

In fact, I think there is a lazy factor in evaluating what model is going to work for your marketing department. By choosing something that is automatic, that you can trust, more focus can go into planning the next push, evaluating the creative, the product, your audience penetration and all of the other valuable metrics that come out of a running campaign.

Join the conversation! Does your department rely on any “lazy” tools, or strategies to handle its day to day campaign maintenance?

The Netroots Nation 2008 convention is being held July 17 to 20 in Austin, TX.

Netroots Nation is a three-year old progressive political organization that uses blogs and other digital media to encourage public debate and political activism.

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Vermont ex-governor Howard Dean and congresswoman Donna Edwards (D-MD) are just a few of the national and international experts that will be speaking at the event.

The convention will be using LocaModa’s Wiffiti application to enable simultaneous Web, mobile and in-location conversation at the event. Wiffiti will be running on large projection screens in the convention center and all messages sent by attendees will be posted in real-time on the Netroots Nation Web site and any linked blogs.

-Chantal Todé

As an early adopter of the iPhone (my lovely wife gave me one for Christmas last year) I am slightly jealous of all the folks zipping around on their new, faster 3G models. However, my jealousy is tempered by the new iPhone apps, which work even on my now outdated model.

I wrote about widgets a few weeks back, and most of the apps are not too dissimilar from widgets — both are small applications with streamlined function.

I’m very interested in seeing how marketers leverage this new development. The free app Twitterrific integrates advertisements into the Twitter stream using the Deck Network. Will Facebook or the New York Times integrate ads into their free applications? Or, will third parties release portals that trade increased functionality for ad placement? There’s also the chance for brands to create promotional applications that can be dynamically updated with new deals, as with widgets.

Another interesting development is the series of e-books available for download. These are mostly older books in the public domain. Though it is unlikely that this will compete too readily with the Amazon Kindle, which has many more (and recent) books available to read, it does convert the iPhone into another portal for the e-book channel — and one wonders if the Kindle itself may add communication capability in the future.

Haagen-Dazs has launched a viral video on YouTube designed to bring awareness to the honey bee cause and to give viewers a look at the “unique hive dance” of the honey bee. After launching on July 15, the video–aptly named “Bee-Boy dance crew drops dead”–already has more than 50,000 views on the video sharing site.

“Bee pollination is essential for ingredients in nearly 40 percent of our super-premium flavors,” says the company on its Help the Honeybees Web site. Visitors to the site can purchase merchandise to help fund honey bee research. You can also design your own animated honey bee and e-mail it to your friends.