The buzzword is digital and the result can be dynamite; the question is how do you use the former to generate the latter? The answer is: using traditional customer-oriented marketing in a new-fashioned way!

In line with various white papers on the subject, the key to driving engagement with your supporters and service users is to create a more personalised experience on and offline. In this digital age where the internet is the first port of call for information, Bright One is looking at the internet’s role in building charities’ brand experiences.

The ‘Social Graph’ uses personal information that people put online and looks at how they relate to their social connections. This commonly uses the social networks that you are probably on: Facebook; Twitter; perhaps LinkedIn – as well as scoping the rest of the internet. It gives you the ability to target markets via both their own online social activity (such as Likes) and that of their social connections. Take Facebook for instance: there are fans or ‘Likers’ of a brand, and their friends. The latter is a whole new target group for your brand – ready set with accessible contact details.

The ‘Social Graph’ potentially allows you to reach a larger number of people. It also allows you to use your markets’ online information to target them with personalised messages, which are statistically far more effective than generic messages. The British Heart Foundation is just one charity including this approach in their strategy; is it time for you to take notice of the tangible results that social media can generate too…?

Following last month’s inaugral Bright One training session on ‘Talkability’, a group of Bright One volunteers and clients were given an exclusive training session by Melanie Seasons, Social Media Strategist at Onlinefire, all about ‘Social Media and Online PR’.

During the session, Melanie described why Audience Mapping is important (Understanding who your target audiences are and what they ‘do’ online, as you need to know what platforms are best to engage on and if you already have advocates) and some of the tools you can use to find them. These tools included paid-for services such as Radian6, right down to free tools such as Google Blog Search, Addict-o-matic, IceRocket, and BlogPulse.

She also took the attendees through the basics of Social Media Relations, where organisation engagee with their audiences through Social Networking (Twitter, Facebook), Pro-active outreach (e-mail, newsletter, events) or Online press offices (blogging, video).

The attendees were also left with a few final thoughts to take away with them:

• Starting from scratch can be tough – establishing a social media profile does not happen overnight
• Expect growing pains – you’ll figure out as you monitor where your audiences are online
• Sign up to it all, but don’t expect to be able to do everything – concentrate on what works for you, and build a strategy from there

All in all, it was a fantastic session, so many thanks to Melanie for giving us a superb insight into Social Media!

We thought that it’d be good to let you all know how we here at Bright One use the internet to reach out to people, so we’ve made the below Bright One Online guide(using the excellent online tool Prezi). It shows you where you can find and connect with all of Bright One on the internet, and keep up-to-date with what we are up to. To watch the guide you can either navigate through it manually (by clicking on the arrow which takes you through each point) or hover over it until you see “autoplay” and it will take you through it..

You can find the links to all our online presence below…don’t be shy, come and find us!

]]> http://brightone.org.uk/bright-one-online/feed/ 2 http://brightone.org.uk/bright-one-third-sector-pr-joint-xmas-drinks/ http://brightone.org.uk/bright-one-third-sector-pr-joint-xmas-drinks/#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:49:17 +0000 benmatthews http://brightone.org.uk/?p=1532 This is a guest post from Rob Dyson, PR Manager at UK charity Whizz-Kidz and founder of the Facebook Third Sector PR and Communications network. You can follow Rob on Twitter at @robmdyson or read his blog at www.robdyson.posterous.com.

Last night my Facebook Third Sector PR and Comms network hosted a joint Christmas knees-up with Bright One – the award winning volunteer-run communications agency – at the Roxy Bar and Screen in London Bridge.

And jolly good it was too. For all the tweeting and virtual networking we get up to, it’s really nice to find an excuse to have a good old fashioned party every now and again. It was great to meet people in reality to build on friendships formed online, flesh out ideas and opportunities for working together, and just sink a few for Christmas ;)

Seasons greetings from the Third Sector PR group and Bright One. And if you want to meet us for a drink sometime… tweet us at @thirdsectorPR or @brightonecomms!

This is a guest post by Ken Punter, Digital Media and Publications Manager, World Vision UK.

World Vision launched its first national Week for Children on 8th June with an urgent appeal for 5,000 new child sponsors. Five is very much the theme of our campaign, with over 5,000 children in need of sponsorship in five sub-Sahara African countries that have amongst the highest child mortality rates in the world. This is largely due to the five main killers of under-fives: malaria, HIV and AIDS, pneumonia, measles and diarrhoea.

We are aiming to raise awareness of the nine million children who will die from preventable illnesses this year. 99% of these avoidable deaths will occur in the developing world, so we are urging members of the public to give just a little to make a huge difference to the lives of children and their communities.

A large part of the initiative was to increase awareness of the campaign. In additional to our outreach to national and regional print and broadcast media, we used a number of digital channels to communicate our message.

People would be communicating to their friends and peers as potential sponsors, whether through word of mouth, blogs or Facebook, who may then pass on the information to other potential sponsors. In addition to the Facebook fan page that has videos and images, we also created a YouTube and Flickr channel to increase visibility on arguably two of the most popular sites in the world. These sites also make it easier for readers to share the information and provide an interface many are perhaps more familiar with.

Twitter and Facebook allowed us to increase our interaction with supporters. Most importantly, it allowed our messages to be spread more effectively. Through these channels, we are also able to acknowledge and thank those who helped spread the message.

Blogger outreach is seen by many to be a fundamental tactic when creating any digital campaign and we took a relatively conservative approach even though we felt that our information could be relevant to many blogs. Initially we identified several blogs who we felt were a good balance between influence and relevance to our campaign.

Throughout we asked the questions: have they written about World Vision in the past? How likely were they to write about this campaign? This allowed us to concentrate and build relationships with a small number of bloggers. We continued with this organic approach to blog relations through the Week for Children, only approaching those bloggers who reached out to us via Twitter or Facebook.

When looking at any type of communications campaign, we always look at how digital tactics fit in with offline tactics and “real world” activities – we believe that they should always work together and not in silo. To this end, every piece of content created is related or repurposed for use online, via the offline media or in the “real world” with each tactic driving traffic or interest to the other.

For instance, we partnered with Channel 5 for a series of reports on the five killers of children under five in Zambia and Mozambique, to be broadcast during the 5 o’clock news slot throughout the Week for Children. Channel 5’s news correspondent, Jonathan Samuels, met with mothers who have lost children and looked at how simple interventions are saving lives and transforming communities. This was communicated to both our Facebook Fans and Twitter followers, who then spread the message to their friends.

Social media tactics can go some way to helping improve the reach of a campaign. Facebook Fan Pages, blogger relations and Twitter can help you build a relationship directly with supporters and key opinion leaders. However, only by combining the digital tactics with traditional communications tactics could we optimise our campaign.

To participate in World Vision’s Week for Children and become one of the 5,000 Britons to sponsor a child please visit www.worldvision.org.uk or call 0800 501010.

The Bright One Facebook fan page now has 50 fans!

It might not seem much, but it’s a milestone to us (and we’re all about celebrating small victories!)

From the beginning, we’ve made sure that Bright One has been a positive experience for all of those volunteering for us. We’d much rather only have 5 volunteers who have all had a great time with Bright One, rather than have 100 volunteers with only 5 having a great experience.

We’ve made sure Bright One can provide a positive volunteering experience by listening to what our volunteers want. The latest way we’ve done this was by holding a focus group with 12 PR professionals, all giving us fantastic feedback, ideas and suggestions for other things that Bright One could be doing.

If you didn’t make the focus group, you can still offer your feedback on Bright One and help us to keep it a valuable volunteering experience. You can do this in several ways, but perhaps the best ways are by leaving a message on the Facebook fan page or on our Uservoice forum:

http://brightone.uservoice.com/

You can also help us get to spread the word by getting your friends to become fans of us on Facebook. The simplest way to do this is to click on the ‘Share’ button on the bottom left of the fan page. It will only take a moment to do but will really help us out.

Thanks in advance for your help and looking forward to hearing from you soon!