On Monday I had the chance to speak at the IAB’s annual social-media event in New York City. I led a panel that included Adam Fell, VP of Quincy Jones Productions, and Jory Des Jardins, Co-founder and President of BlogHer. The topic of the session was “Social Media, World Events and the New Face of Cause Marketing.” It was a chance to explore some new territory in cause marketing and Marketing with Meaning, and I hope to continue the conversation with you in the weeks and months to come.

Our session came from a discussion I had a few months ago with Lisa Milgram, who runs programming for the IAB. She had taken notice of the number of brands that had jumped in with investments of money, time, and supplies after the earthquake in Haiti, and called me to talk about whether this was a topic we could explore further at the IAB social-media event. After some thinking and discussion, we fleshed out what I think is a fairly new concept in cause marketing, itself a concept that only really began in the 1970s and 1980s. We realized that while most cause-marketing efforts are begun with careful consideration and long-term planning by brands, events such as Haiti were compelling brands to move internal mountains and respond at the “speed of need.” Thus a conference panel topic was born.

My role in the session was to introduce the concept of cause-related marketing, show how it is an example of Marketing with Meaning, and then explore the growing number of brands that are evolving their approach to become much more instinctual and speedy in their cause responses. I spoke about two examples over the past few years: (1) the Tide brand’s response to Hurricane Katrina; and (2) the Haagen-Dazs response to honeybee disease. Both efforts brought meaningful attention and dollars to worthy causes in quick time. And both efforts built the business: Tide achieved its highest copy scores in history for its promotion of Tide Loads of Hope, and Haagen-Dazs saw sales grow 16% through its honeybee campaign and promotional flavor. The slides above show what I covered, and this article in Tuesday’s SmartBrief on Social Media captures the session nicely.

I was happy to turn things over to my fellow panelists after this short thought-starter. Adam Fell came first to tell the story of how he helped pull together many musicians in rapid time for the “We Are the World 25 for Haiti” song. He started by showing the audience camera footage from his trip to the battered country—proving that when marketers actually directly experience the cause they are involved in, much better work results. Adam spoke about how social media amplified the need—and even helped spread the word back to Haiti that millions of people around the world were praying for and contributing to their recovery.

Adam also shared an interesting story about the Visa brand’s participation in the event. Visa had planned for some time to be a sponsor of the 25th anniversary of “We Are the World” when it was planned to be in support of Africa. But when Haiti hit and Quincy Jones and others chose to throw their support behind aid for this country, the Visa brand team was thrown a bit off. But the brand team eventually agreed that the need here was great, and adjusted to stay onboard this effort.

After hearing from Adam I turned things over to Jory Des Jardins to give us some perspective of bloggers—who are marketing savvy, yet anchored in the real consumer world. She talked about how bloggers also reacted quickly to Haiti and gave both money and attention to the issue. But she had a few warnings for the audience as well: First, she reported that bloggers—who I believe are the vanguard of changing consumer opinion—are growing wary of cause-marketing efforts that seem too small or self-serving. Second, she suggested that cause-marketing efforts often need some influencers (such as bloggers) to start the word of mouth behind a new initiative. In other words, just putting up a Facebook page and waiting for traffic won’t cut it.

My only regret about the session was that we didn’t have much time for questions and discussion about this rising trend of “speed of need” cause marketing. I am personally unsure about whether most brands have the core purpose and speedy systems to allow them to give when the gut-level need arises. I would also like to explore more about our consumers’ perspective, and whether “promoting” that your brand has given can actually backfire—after all, who among us tells all of our friends how much we gave to causes in our lives…

What do you think?