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.

Bright One client The DoNation is looking for a motivated and driven marketing intern with an interest in sustainability, behaviour change and communications. The DoNation is on the look-out for someone who can support the team in increasing The DoNation’s presence among key sporting organisations and environmental networks and support the development and implementation of The DoNation’s broader marketing strategy.

The DoNation is a dynamic start-up with a small team and the intern will therefore be able to experience all aspects hands-on, developing The DoNation’s various communications offline as well as online.

Details:

Location: London

Hours: 3-4 days a week

Duration: 3 months

Salary: Voluntary with expenses

Website: www.thedonation.org.uk 

Application deadline: Monday 15^th August

There’s much more info to find here and if you’ve got further questions, email Hermione at Hermione@thedonation.org.uk

This is a guest post 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 board at Bright One and is a Chartered Marketer. Zoe tweets from @zoeamar

Social media gurus keep telling us to ‘listen’ as well as ‘engage.’ Now that Twitter, Facebook et al are well established charity communications and fundraising tools, and we’re all tracking our social media mentions, I think we need to maximise their potential for market research.

Social media offers valuable leads about what your audience is thinking- right now. These channels are ‘free,’ but they are not substitutes for bigger market research projects such as focus group exercises, interviews or omnibus studies. What they provide are raw, immediate and unvarnished insights into your stakeholder’s most pressing needs. And many of us are using all of these tools already. So we are ‘listening’- we just need to know how to do it systematically so that we make the most of the huge amount of powerful data available through social media.

At Lasa we have a tight budget for market research, so I’ve learned some quick and cost effective ways to gather useful data through social media. Here are my top tips:

• Twitter is brilliant for pushing out surveys. Last year we ran an online survey to find out what the charity sector thought about ‘Big Society.’ (As a charity which supports thousands of charities across the UK each year, we wanted to know their views). We sent it out through our @Lasavoice  and @LasaICT Twitter accounts, and we also asked a different charity sector opinion leader (with at least 1000 followers) each day to retweet it. Interest in the survey snowballed and more people began to tweet about it. Over 400 charity sector professionals responded and the results were covered by the BBC Politics Show, Metro, The Guardian and Third Sector, amongst others. We did all the work in-house so the only cost was £150 for the Amazon vouchers which we gave away in a prize draw for respondents. If your survey covers a hot topic, offers good incentives and is quick to complete, then Twitter is a great way to get it out there.

• LinkedIn groups offer useful data. Often the dark horse of social media, LinkedIn can be a great way to source market research. At Lasa we seeded our Big Society survey amongst charity sector discussion groups, which created a lot of word of mouth interest and boosted responses. The charity sector groups are also very active and are good places to pick up nuggets of valuable information.

• Who you follow on Twitter determines the quality of your insights. Make sure that you’re following journalists, competitors, trade associations, trade press, government departments, MPs and any other key stakeholders. Since Twitter is often the first place that news breaks, this means that leads sometimes need to be verified, so take care that they come from a reliable source and doublecheck them if necessary. It’s easy to just dip in and out of Twitter reactively, but if you can get into the habit of checking the timelines of your most important stakeholders regularly and following up useful tweets then nothing will slip through the net.

In today’s rapidly changing climate, your market research needs to be ongoing 24/7. There is no better tool for that than social media.