Policy area: Social Media

North East’s most influential Twitter users

19 January 2012 – 12:23 pm

Twitter, the social media tool, is becoming an increasingly useful way to reach people of influence.  One retweet from an influential Twitter user can send your message through to thousands of followers, even go global.  With this in mind I have gathered a list here of who I believe to be the North East’s most [...]

By Carrie Brookes | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Stop this unfair news tax on charities

18 January 2012 – 10:42 am

CharityComms has launched a campaign this week to exempt charities from paying a fee for sharing online news articles. I am wholeheartedly behind this campaign which seems grossly unfair and an unnecessary burden on charities at a time when many are closing down due to funding cuts. Im also very disappointed to see The Guardian [...]

By Carrie Brookes | Also posted in Campaigning, Communications, In the news, Support for sector | Tagged , | Comments (4)

Charities and business coming together on Twitter

11 November 2011 – 4:01 pm

I followed throughout October a great example of using social media by a local business that wanted to form links with local charities. Benfield Motor Group ran an online campaign called Charity Drive for its customers (or ‘friends’ as they like to call them) to nominate a charity from the North East, Cumbria and Yorkshireto [...]

By Carrie Brookes | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Is it time to ditch the ‘traditional’ website?

21 October 2011 – 2:45 pm

I spotted an interesting article about Bar chain Varsity dropping its website.  It hasn’t given up on the internet of course, it’s just moved all of its digital content onto Facebook, reasoning that 96% of students (its target audience) uses Facebook daily, so lets go where our audience ‘lives’. It got me thinking about charities [...]

By Carrie Brookes | Also posted in Communications | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

Facebook changes we should know about

28 September 2011 – 1:44 pm

Facebook has made a flurry of changes recently to the way it operates, with its largest change to date happening tomorrow. This will change people’s profile pages into a timeline of interactions with Twitter that can be scrolled up and down over the years. Basically it turns all your old posts, photos, likes etc into [...]

By Carrie Brookes | Also posted in Communications | Tagged | Comments (0)

Bish, Bash, Bosh.

21 March 2011 – 2:51 pm

I’m increasingly drawn these days to the various debates emanating from the Our Society network. There’s some really good stuff going on there so check it out if you get the chance. It was whilst on the site the other day that I was spring-boarded to observations made by Kevin Harris after a Julian Dobson [...]

By Andrew Samuel | Also posted in Big Society, ICT | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Taking the stigma out of mental health one tweet at at time

10 February 2011 – 2:36 pm

Last wednesday saw the start of a flurry of tweets on Twitter all with the hashtag of #whatstigma describing the Tweeter’s mental health issue. It co-incided with the launch of No health without mental health, the cross-governmental outcomes strategy for mental health in England. It all started with a tweet from actor Rebecca Front (@rebeccafront), [...]

By Carrie Brookes | Also posted in Health and wellbeing | Comments (0)

Did you change your Facebook profile to a cartoon character?

8 December 2010 – 1:25 pm

Users of Facebook this week will have noticed that a lot of their friends have turned into cartoon characters this week. A campaign has snowballed across the social networking site spread through people changing their profile picture to their favourite childhood cartoon character and posting a comment to ask others to do the same ‘to [...]

By Carrie Brookes | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Social Media, worth the extra workload?

10 November 2010 – 2:48 pm

Ive just come back from a training course on using Social Media for charities. It provoked some interesting conversations amongst the attendees, mainly all from small organisations around the region. One of the biggest gripes we all had was that social media has been bolted on to the typical communications worker role, without necessarily removing [...]

By Carrie Brookes | Also posted in Communications | Tagged | Comments (0)

Social Media and civil society

4 August 2010 – 1:06 pm

2009 was considered ‘the year of Twitter’ by the media and Facebook claims to have 20 million users in the UK. It’s getting hard for even die-hard technophobes to argue that social media is a flash in the pan that won’t impact on the way that we work. Capacitybuilders funds two organisations working at a [...]

By Andrew Samuel | Also posted in ICT | Comments (0)