LinkedIn is sometimes thought of as the poor relation to Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps that’s because it was originally perceived as just a jobhunting site and a place to post CVs.  But to me LinkedIn is an invaluable resource for my job, both for gathering information and connecting with great people, and I often wonder why charities don’t use it more. It may not be as big as Facebook and Twitter but with more than 150 million members it’s no slouch either. There is a growing sense that it is no longer the ‘Cinderella’ of social media. I want to share some tips to help you make the most of this underrated but brilliant tool.

Don’t be put off by appearances. LinkedIn is a relatively simple site, without the bells and whistles of Facebook. Its value lies in its focused and lean approach. And once you dig a little deeper, it pays rich rewards. Shirley Ayres, digital strategy and communications consultant, says, ‘It has taken quite a long time for people outside of the recruitment industry to recognise the value of belonging to a professional network. Now I believe (LinkedIn) is a vital tool for professionals and organisations to make connections and share knowledge and resources.’

Here are some ideas to help charities leverage what LinkedIn offers:

• Get into the habit of using it. I know a lot of people who sign up to LinkedIn and then don’t take it further.  If you want to make the most of it, then you’ll have to devote a bit of time to it. As with any social media platform, the best way is to get involved. This doesn’t have to take long. I check it a few times during the day for no more than five minutes each time, and I always learn something useful from it.
• Use it for targeting decision makers. Want to reach that elusive pro bono partner at a City firm, a high net worth individual or a senior grant officer at one of your funders? Chances are that she or he will be on LinkedIn. From their profile you should be able to see what their interests are, what their professional background is and who you may know in common. It’s the kind of information that money can’t buy.
• Use it for connecting. I normally connect to people after meetings, if I’ve worked with them, or talked to them a lot on social media. It’s a great way to stay in touch and can help strengthen relationships when used well.
• Set up a charity group. Establishing a group can be a quick and easy way to engage with your stakeholders. It is a good forum to start debates about issues that are important to your charity, or to take soundings. I particularly like the way Knowhow Nonprofit use their group in this way. Admittedly it takes a little time and effort to manage a group, but if your target audience used LinkedIn it could be worth it.
• Use it for market research. I’ve blogged before about how you can deploy LinkedIn (and other social media platforms) for market research. I also love LinkedIn’s daily news story updates, which pull together the most shared stories on the site. Like you I’m short of time, so I rely heavily on this and my Twitter feed to keep me up to speed with key developments.

I’d love to hear what you think of LinkedIn. Is your charity using it yet and how have you found it?

This is a guest post written by Zoe Amar, Head of Marketing and Business Development at Lasa, a charity which provides services to Shelter, Age UK and thousands of other charities across the UK. She is also on the Bright One board and she is a regular personal commentator and speaker on charity marketing, contributing to The Guardian and Charity Comms. Zoe is also a Chartered Marketer and tweets from @zoeamar

How we receive news is ever-changing, and these days it’s faster than ever and we’ve got access to more outlets than we’ve ever had. The reason for this is of course new technology and the fact that news can be posted in an instant, by anyone, on social media. The latest example is the news of Whitney Houston’s death which was reported on Twitter only minutes after she was declared dead with 2½ million tweets being tweeted within the first two hours.

New technology is changing the way we can record what’s happening around us and many spoke of 2011 as being the year of the camera phone with the Arab Spring being broadcasted to the world straight from the streets, and fashion designer John Galliano having his career ending because of a racist rant caught on a dinner guest’s phone.

As it’s Social Media Week at the moment there are events taking place all over London (check #smw12 and #smwldn for latest updates and events). I attended one organised by The Good Agency and MyNewsdesk where participants discussed journalism, social media, eyewitness news and professionalism. The panel was chaired by The Good Agency’s Head of Digital Charlotte Beckett.

Speakers:

• Jason Mills  –  Web and Techology Editor, ITN/ITV
• Lauren Wyper  –  Communications Strategist, The Good Agency
• Fergus Bell  –  Digital Newsgatherer and Senior Producer, Associated Press
• Adam Baker  –  Founder, Blottr
• Stephen Sidlo  –  Head Publisher, Demotix

All panellists agreed that social media has created change for news reporting, but Fergus argued that media always changes so this isn’t anything new. Jason agreed and stated that a good journalist is still doing the same thing. However, Adam argued that social media has transformed news more than perhaps TV did as it is now different for the public – people can contribute rather than just consume. The challenge for journalists as well as the public is to cut through the information overload, irrelevant reporting and actual lies. Blottr’s Adam suggested that if something is trending on Twitter it is probably true but others on the panel and most people in the audience seemed to disagree.

We live in a fast-paced society and we have learned to expect to know about events as they happen. Journalists have to, with reduced resources, keep producing news, fast. Nick Davies uses the term ‘churnalism’ to describe the result of journalists having to churn out news but whatever you may call it there is this constant worry that something has got to give in this quest for quick news. Can we still trust that thoroughly checks are being made? The recent phone-hacking scandal has done a lot of damage to journalists’ credibility and many more of us have probably started question what the consequences of ‘a good story’ are. We might sometimes doubt the accuracy of citizen journalism but it is traditional (professional?) journalists that are going through this media ethics inquiry.

Today’s diversity of media can create a challenge when charities are trying to reach out to their publics as it’s easy to get lost in the maze of different types of sources. But it can obviously also be seen as an opportunity – as long as you take the time to find the most suitable outlet for your cause/campaign. Tips from the panel on how charities can make it into the news included the importance of making sure you’ve actually got a story and understanding how readers/viewers might relate to it. There was emphasis on exclusivity with Jason arguing that today when everyone’s got a voice, exclusivity offers something different. The panel also suggested that communications professionals shouldn’t be relying too much on social media as 140 characters isn’t always enough – make sure you pick up the phone and talk to someone in person about your story. But in some cases using social media may be enough and it might be worth asking whether your story actually needs to be on the news or whether it might do as well going viral across social networking platforms.

What is social media’s role within professional journalism? Where do you normally pick up news stories – TV or your Twitterfeed? Are we more interested in eyewitness news and citizen journalism rather than traditional media these days? How do you get heard above the noise? 

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…?

Last week, Weber Shandwick London hosted a great breakfast seminar to talk through the findings of their Socialising Your Brand study and to share their approach to building a social brand.

Speakers:

• James Warren - Chief Creative Officer, Digital
• Chris Perry - President, Digital Communications
• Leslie Gaines-Ross - Chief Reputation Officer

The excellent speakers were able to share some of the best examples from their clients and the findings from their study can give us all food for thought. The study examines closely what ‘world class’ social brands do differently from the rest and identifies nine drivers of sociability which we should all look at.

The infographic and executive summary are definitely worth a read for the details but some of the key points that stood out during the event are:

1. Weight given to social

One of the big things that stuck out from the study was that this year the EMEA brand managers surveyed attributed 52% of their brands overall reputation to how social it is. That’s up from 44% last year and for anyone having to make a case internally that digital needs more resource, it’s definitely a good stat to use.

On top of this, charities need to keep in mind the proportion social plays in our brands. A corporate brand manager may attribute 52% of their brand to social but they are also probably weighing up extensive paid advertising and other contributing factors that charities can only dream of! It’ll vary from charity to charity but it seems likely to me that digital might play a bigger part than 52% in our brands.

2. Listening more than you talk

The speakers really tried to drive home that you almost can’t listen too much and what you hear, has to be dealt with. For non-profits this is important because we can, and therefore should, do it. It’s not too expensive or technical, if anything it’s something we’re already good at doing.

The ‘world class’ social brands are twice as likely to change a product or service based on social interactions than the others. Chris Perry used a great example from Weber’s US office to demonstrate this at its best. American Airlines began rolling out free Wi-Fi on their domestic flights but while the roll-out wasn’t quite complete they began getting some criticism from people who got a flight to find it didn’t have Wi-Fi. In response they built a very simple widget, aawifiwidget.com, which let people check before flying which over 3 million people used.

3. Break your own news

We’re all now accustomed to using social to publish our own stories but Chris Perry encouraged us to break our own news. I can completely see the benefit of this for digital teams but as a member of a press office this made me a little worried because there are some important traditional media who don’t want to touch stories once they’ve broken elsewhere.

In fairness, the speakers did encourage us to think in terms of the Weber Shandwick’s Content Fusion model which would give you more content and allow you to save the big ticket items for your key tradition media contacts.

Finally, I’ll end the same way the event ended. Social media is like teen sex: every one’s talking about it; few people understand it; and even less people are doing it well.

A selection of tweets can be seen here: storify.com/socialising-your-brand-weber-shandwick

Along with quite a few other charity PRs (well, it was a free event after all!) the Bright One blog enjoyed an afternoon of tea, political campaigning and social media at Building an Effective Social Media Campaign, courtesy of the Hansard Society and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

The awful 3G reception on the Parliamentary estate made for an interesting background to an event on social media campaigning, but while the audience’s check-in’s failed and tweets stalled the great speakers had some interesting things to say.

The panel

This post was written by one of our new Bright One bloggers – Nick Stanton. Nick is experienced working in press and public affairs at regional, national, and international charities. Nick will be blogging regularly on the Bright One blog so make sure you keep an eye out for his next post!

What makes a good PR professional? What skills do you need? How do you go about getting that all important first job? These were some of the questions discussed in yesterday’s live Q&A arranged by Guardian Careers. The panel included Bright One’s Ben Matthews together with: Emma Radcliffe (Beattie Communications), Hew Leith (M&C Saatchi PR), Dillon Mann (Spada), Maggie Taylor (Prima PR & Marketing), Jon Cope (University for the Creative Arts), Agatha Chapman-Poole (Chapman-Poole Communications), Ellie Hernaman (Truffle PR), Vic Miller (Man Bites Dog), and Jackie Bates (Richmond Towers Communications).

Work experience and social media were popular topics, as well as the discussion regarding suitable degrees. Everyone on the panel agreed that hands-on experience gained through work placements, internships or volunteering is key. You need to be able to show that you’ve got suitable experience for the job you’re applying for and Ben mentioned that a well-presented portfolio could do the trick. And with the increasing use of social media Vic Miller argued for the importance of being able to demonstrate a sound knowledge and to take an active interest in keeping up to date with opportunities it presents for PR. However, Dillon Mann stressed that people shouldn’t get too hung up on social media since it is only one channel amongst many – it is important to know when to use it, but also when not to.

The comments were mixed in regards to University degrees but the overall opinion was that the subject doesn’t really matter. The theoretical communication knowledge you can get with a PR degree together with contacts in the industry is great but academic disciplines could give you useful specialist knowledge. Maggie Taylor gave the example of how a science degree could benefit someone wanting to go into healthcare PR. Hew Leith added to the degree discussion by saying that even if you don’t have any degree, this shouldn’t stop you – the passion for PR is what matters!

There were many more useful comments and if you’d like to read all questions and answers, you can find them here and if you’ve got any further tips or suggestions on how to make it in PR, feel free to comment below.

With cuts being made to local news, and new media providing people with tools to tell stories from their area, citizen journalism is on the rise. Anyone with a smart phone and/or internet access can easily report on breaking news happening where they are and sites like Blottr and Citizens’ Eye are helping them spread their stories.

Bright One founder Ben Matthews was on the panel at a debate organised by Blottr last week. The debate took place at London College of Communication (LCC) and the speakers discussed the role of citizen journalism and its use of new media.

On the panel, together with Ben, were: Adam Baker, Blottr’s founder, Ramaa Sharma, senior lecturer at the BBC College of Journalism, Russell Merryman, lecturer at LCC who helped launch Al Jazeera English, and Mark Stone, Sky News reporter who used his iPhone to report from the London riots earlier this year. The debate was chaired by Milo Yiannopoulos, Blottr columnist and writer for The Times.

The speakers all had interesting points to make in regards to the level of truth and the speed of news and if you’re interested in reading more about what was said in the debate, this post on the Blottr site will give you a good overview.

We are looking for Bright Ones interested in writing for our popular blog. We use the Bright One blog to communicate with our internal and external community about our latest announcements, exciting campaigns and news regarding our charities, and to discuss the latest developments in the world of communications and charities.

We want to make sure the blog is updated regularly with interesting comments and the latest trends to ensure our readers feel they can trust the Bright One blog to be a useful source of information and discussions. We would therefore like to have a blogging volunteer onboard to help us make the blog bigger and better!

People applying for this role should have a keen interest in charities and communications in general and blogging and social media in particular.

The blog editor will:

• Provide strategic guidance in regards to the blog and its content
• Create content to the blog on a regular basis
• Help to grow blog traffic
• Seek out opportunities for blog content and guest bloggers

Key requirements for this role:

• Good writing skills
• Attention to detail
• A self-starter who can use their initiative to proactively seek out opportunities
• Able to work independently
• Basic SEO skills
• Highly organised and professional

This is a voluntary position.

Interested applicants should send CV and covering letter to Tove Nordstrom at tove.nordstrom@brightone.org.uk

LinkedIn has just released a new Volunteer Experience & Causes section, giving the ability for individuals to highlight relevant volunteer experience at charities and non-profits, including the skills and functional areas in which they worked.

And there’s more: If an organisation has a Company Page on LinkedIn, the volunteer will also be linked to that Company Page, firmly establishing that volunteer time with that organisation.

Over 120 million professionals and some two million companies and organizations currently use LinkedIn, making it the largest social network for professionals. As one LinkedIn team member put it, “LinkedIn is putting a stake in the ground that volunteerism can and should be a part of everyone’s professional brand.”

This is great news for our volunteers at Bright One and for those who volunteer elsewhere, as they can now count their time spent volunteering on the world’s biggest social network for professionals.

We’ll be encouraging our volunteers to add their time spent volunteering with Bright One to their LinkedIn profiles, as we already know that volunteers who add us to their CV get lots of interest from prospective employers.

You can also follow @LinkedIn4Good on Twitter for updates on how LinkedIn is “connecting talent to opportunity to change the world.”

Ben Matthews, founder of Bright One, spoke at a CIPR Fifth Estate group event called ‘Trends in Charities’ Use of Social Media’, held at Grayling PR’s office.

Charities have grasped the opportunities that social media gives to communicate with their supporters, often being nimbler and more innovative than their private sector counterparts. Facebook and Twitter have become the dominant platforms, allowing charities to communicate directly with their supporters using rich and engaging content. But with new platforms on the rise – including social networks like Google+, mobile apps like Instagram, and devices liked the iPad – new and ever more divergent opportunities for stakeholder engagement are becoming apparent.

Whether communicating with donors, funders, government, internally or with ‘free agents’, charities face bigger challenges – and threats – more than ever. How can charities keep up with new technologies and platforms? What should their strategic approach be to ensure they are making the most of these opportunities? What are the risks and how can these be overcome?

Ben was joined by Tova Turkel of the British Lung Foundation, who presented a case study detailing how the charity built support and made an impact with their most recent Children’s Charter campaign.

Below are the slides from the presentation and you can find out more about the Fifth Estate group on the CIPR website.