This comes with the following thoughts from Hugh at Gaping Void:

This is really about leadership. Leaders understand, often innately, what it takes to inspire action.

Inspired action is a much different animal than top down directed action.

Inspired people will walk through fire to achieve their goal. Directed people are in it for the paycheck.

It was the difference between the Roman legions and mercenary adversaries.

It is why so many businesses these days are focussed on finding their true purpose, and why we spend a lot of our time helping companies communicate that purpose.

Purpose allows for inspired action with amazing results.

I also think it's a great reminder for fundraisers - and others whose role it is to reach out and encourage people to support charities in a variety of ways - not to lose sight of the things the motivate people to support. I see a lot of online fundraising campaigns and initiatives around that seem to be very focused on the mechanics, and inventors are regularly quoted as having said such things as, 'By making it so easy to donate, we will generate millions of pounds of additional income for charities'. But people don't support charities just because it's easy or because they can, they do it because they are inspired by the thought that they can change things for the better.

More words of wisdom from Hugh that resonate with my take on this stuff:

'About two years ago I invented this little happy-go-lucky, kinda vapid character that had no name, except "Social Media Specialist!" (with an intentional exclamation mark). Just this little social media guy who was REALLY optimistic, come what may. I poke fun to make an important point.

Even though I was an early adopter of social media and blogging, and even if I still believe that Social is more powerful than ever, I get a little cranky if there's too much happy social media Kool-Aid swishing around. Social is big, and metrics, focus and ability to deliver counts. That's why we think of ourselves as a little Social Object Factory. Objects that spread.'

Social media won't change the world on its own. We need people for that and - from the point of view of organisations driving positive change - people need to be inspired, motivated and given stuff they'll want to spread.

Jay Yarow and Jon Terbush Nov. 23, 2011, 3:54 PM

For years, there's been a theory that every person is only separated by six degrees, or relationships.

Facebook, with its data on 700+ million people and their relationships with friends says that's not true. We're all just four degrees of separation apart. Below you can see how many degrees, or "hops" apart people are around the world.

With this cartoon came this lovely missive from Hugh at gapingvoid.com that should light a fire under any of our metaphorical backsides if we're feeling like we're needing it. I know I post these a lot, but that's because so many of them inspire me and so many of them feel relevant to what I do. Thanks Hugh :)

This cartoon represents the "Hell Yeah!" moment for ourselves and those we share it with. It's a reminder of our achievements and how we all care enough to make a difference.

We spend a lot of time in our office working with people in companies that make a difference. They do this by asking us to create amazing decks for critical presentations, sticky Social Objects as content for social media campaigns, theming for conferences, internal cultural change messages, etc.

What's interesting is that no matter what the assignment, it always comes down to the same thing: Helping people kick butt - creating little cartoons that seem innocuous at first, but communicate in one colorful glance better than any piece of corporate comms. It's what we all live for and how we make a difference.

This made me chuckle

50% of people remembered a brand they saw in TV ads. That's nice, but 74% of people remembered the same brand after they saw in TV and online ads, reports Nielsen.

That's quite an uplift and adds some additional fuel for the argument for integrated, multichannel campaigns, if you need to make the case for this in your organisation.

Results we see from charity campaigns we run prove, time and time again, that you will achieve a better ROI by running your campaign across multiple channels, and part of the reason for this is the impact on recall this graph is showing.

Put simply, if someone sees your message more times, in more different places, they are more likely to remember it. And this recall effect also uplifts the number of people that respond.

I mean 'people that respond' in the widest possible sense here because, now the web is social, you should be angling for some kind of response - even if your campaign is purely awareness raising or not traditionally direct response (like fundraising, for example).

Why? Because people talking about your campaign (blogging about it, commenting on it, sharing it, liking it, retweeting it) will help to spread it further and make it feel more relevant. And because to raise awareness of an issue you need to generate genuine engagement, rather than just serve a certain number of impressions or gain a certain amount of column inches.

Looking at the figures in this graph, I find it even more upsetting than I did previously that charities still run DRTV campaigns as standalone activities. There's a clear case here to re-evaluate that.