No matter what your religious denomination, beliefs or faith may be; the latest campaign from Australia’s Bible Society is an impressive, integrated exercise in Social Marketing.

What started out in 2002, has travelled across Australia, through Adelaide, Canberra, Tasmania, and is currently underway in Western Australia and across New South Wales for a six week period from September 15, 2009.

According to the campaign website: “Jesus. All about life is about presenting the words of Jesus in a culturally appropriate way, the media is the marketplace of the 21st Century…The media is the catalyst for interest, but each local church involved is the delivery point of the program.”

It’s a different approach for ‘the Church’. Even the campaign website acknowledges that connecting with the community via mainstream media is a new direction, saying that to date “…the church has not used the media well.”

Perhaps we are the target audience, but everywhere we go, we see this campaign.

It has an impressive dissemination strategy, including mainstream TV ads, Billboards, bus shelters, and has a banner on almost every church you can see – talk about utilising prime real estate in a cost effective way… so cost effective that local churches pay to disseminate the campaign materials! According to the campaign website, “For just $100 registration fee, payable on-line at www.jesusallaboutlife.com.au your local church can be a part of this campaign.”

The television advertisement is certainly easy for anyone to engage with – there’s hardly even a mention of religion.

The microsite is clever – appealing to Gen Y, encouraging user-generated content, and looks a bit like a myspace page.

The campaign has certainly attracted all different types of attention, including editorial discussion by key outlets like the Australian and on ABC Radio, blogs, endorsements from well-known people, and even critical review and parody websites.

Who sums it up best? In an interview with the UK’s Daily Mail one of the campaign spokespeople said: ‘Christian or not, it’s a passionate topic. It’s a huge campaign in its own right and hard to ignore.”

We agree. Amen to good Social Marketing.

For those of you who haven’t checked out this year’s Rock The Vote campaign, you should click here immediately. It’s a fantastic example of a strategic focused social marketing campaign with a strong call to action.

I’ve seen a lot of ham-handed Facebook marketing of late but it looks like the folks over at Guinness have a solid idea of how Facebook works. They’ve been using it — and other social networking services — to encourage people to sign their petition asking that St. Patrick’s Day be declared a national holiday. The Facebook group they’ve started has over 15,000 members as of this posting.

This campaign is innovative because it leverages the already existent “activist” behavior on the social Web to promote a product. For example, Facebook users routinely join groups to support the causes they care about. Often at times, that’s the extent of their “activism.”

But for a social marketer with a real cause to shout about, maybe we should take another look at facebook . . ?

Social media is a key part of social marketing, why? because social marketing is essentially about talking to people, about understanding how and why they behave the way they do and about affecting behaviour or providing new perspectives.

Social media is about connecting with people in new ways. It’s about open dialogue (where we can both talk) it’s about finding new ways to reach people and it’s about looking for new ways to engage and connect with people.

While we’re on the subject of social media perhaps we should explore a little more by what we mean when we use the term ’social media’. Below is a great article from the scobleizer, if you haven’t read any of his words of wisdom before then click your little mouse here. He’s the Big Cheese over at Fast Company in the US and a very smart cookie.

So here’s the skinny on social media according to the scobleizer ::

The best way to understand a new media is to compare it to what’s come before? So, what kind of media do you have lying around your house? Probably these:

• Newspapers.
• Magazines.
• Television.
• Radio.
• Books.
• CDs.
• DVDs.
• A box of photos.
• Physical, paper mail and catalogs.
• Yellow Pages.

Now, what about the media (my blog) you’re reading right now? What are some attributes of it that are different than any of the “old media” above?

1. The media above can’t be changed. A newspaper can’t magically change its stories, even if society decides something in them is incorrect. My blog can be updated for all readers nearly instantly if someone demonstrates that I was wrong on a post.
2. You can interact with my blog. You can leave a comment. Call me an arsehole. Etc. Etc. With the above you can’t interact at all.
3. You can get some sense of the popularity of my stuff in real time. How many comments does each post get? How many links does each post get? I can see in WordPress how much traffic each item gets. You can visit Digg to see voting on my blog’s items. Or, TechMeme to see which blog items got most links in the past few hours. None of the media above do you have a clue about the granular popularity of any of the items until much later after best seller lists are published.
4. With the “new media” you can look at my archives and see all posts. Try doing that with a newspaper. Yeah, you can, if you pay the San Jose Mercury News a fee. But it’s not as easy as it is here.
5. Here on my blog I can mix media. A post could contain text, audio, video, or photos. Not so on newspaper or magazines.
6. Here on my blog I don’t need to convince a committee to publish. Not true with other media forms. Imagine you walked into CNN and said “hey, I have some cool video, can you publish it?”
7. The new media is infinite. The media above all has limitations in terms of either length (a TV station only has 24 hours in a day — over on YouTube, I guarantee they publish a lot more than 24 hours of video in a day) or in quantity (try to convince USA Today to publish a 40,000 word article, or, 500 articles on the same topic).
8. The new media is syndicatable and linkable and easily reused. I can link to your media here, for instance, a few seconds after you publish it. Try doing THAT with any of the above media. Not to mention, my words here kick into an RSS feed which you can then republish using something like Google Reader, if you’d like, or you can copy a sentence out of my post, paste it into your own blog, and say something about what I just said.
9. The new media can be mashed up with data from other services. Check out that Amazon advertisement over to the right. Did you realize that isn’t on my, or WordPress.com’s, servers? It actually gets served up from some organization I don’t control. Amazon could, if it wanted to, replace the image there with a different book. Or, something else. Many people are putting widgets on their blogs that display various things from places they don’t control. That’s impossible in the older media above.

When I say “social media” or “new media” I’m talking about Internet media that has the ability to interact with it in some way. IE, not a press release like over on PR Newswire, but something like what we did over on Channel 9 where you could say “Microsoft sucks” right underneath one of my videos.

I don’t really care what you call this “new media” but you’ve got to admit that something different is happening here than happens on other media above.

Microsoft comes to the party...

In this day & age you can’t talk about social causes without talking about social media – understanding how with connect and engage with people is half the battle.

Well Microsoft has introduced a brand new social initiative called ‘i’m’.

Every time you use Windows Messenger or Hotmail, Microsoft shares a portion of the program’s advertising revenue with an organization of your choice from a selection of some of the world’s most effective organizations dedicated to social causes. They’ve set no cap on the amount They’ll donate to each organization. The sky’s the limit. And it’s free.

i’m is about making a difference. Not in a huge expensive way, not in a time-consuming way. But in a simple, effective way. You won’t have to change your conversation to change the conversation. With every e-mail and instant message, you help address an issue you feel passionate about, including poverty, child protection, disease, environmental degradation and animal protection. Just join and start talking, and they’ll start giving.

For more information check it out here