Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.

Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you’d like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Write a Blog Post

Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days — whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you’re passionate about, you’re helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.

Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results here.

You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.

2. Share Stories with Friends

Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you’ve gathered a social network.

You’ll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.

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Back in May, we penned the original 10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media. Though most of those first 10 are still relevant, the pace of innovation and advancement on the social web means many more have emerged in the past five months that deserve attention. These are the tools and resources that individuals, corporations, and nonprofits alike can use to communicate, create, and connect on the social web…for social change.

1. Blog It Out: When the die is cast on social media and final judgments are made, blogging will reign supreme as the single greatest force in Web 2.0. Whereas social networking is broad and shallow, blogging is deep and focused. That’s the power behind Blog Action Day, which takes place this Wednesday, October 15th, 2008. It’s a day when bloggers the world over draw attention to a single issue and (hopefully) inspire action. This year’s topic is poverty. And given the current financial crisis, it would seem many bloggers have gotten a head start.

2. Twitter Green Events: In the first 10 Ways, we wrote about the Twitter greenstream, a tagging mechanism that organizes and aggregates Twitter messages (Tweets) about doing green things. What’s evolved since then is the widespread use of unique Twitter tags at events. Most recently, we covered West Coast Green by tagging our Tweets with #wcg08. This helps people at the event to find and meet up with fellow Twitter folk. It also enables those who aren’t attending the event to follow what’s going on and what’s being said in real time. There are a couple ways to do this. One is to follow through Twitter Search (formerly Summize), where you can track keywords and tags. Another is to send a Tweet as follows: “track word: [insert keyword]“. And then you’ll start receiving all Tweets with that tag or keyword directly into your feed.

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The Arnold Palmer is an exceptional beverage. It takes two individual beverages, iced tea and lemonade, each very good in their own right, and creates an even better one. That’s how we feel about social media and green living i.e. sustainability.

There is nothing inherently green about social media. The Web 2.0 revolution is driven by code and the Internet as a platform. According to Wikipedia, it describes this as a trend in “technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.” This is largely a virtual world.

The move toward sustainability, on the other hand, is taking place entirely offline in the actual world. It is about balancing our impact and more wisely managing our natural resources. The United Nations describes it as commitment to “the provision of a secure environmental, social, and economic future.”

As different as they are, these two trends share one key quality: they’re changing the world for the better. They are changing politics, business, culture, and society. In the following we explore 10 ways that the trends of social media and sustainability intersect as well as align.

Special Note: Sustainablog and Max Gladwell are supporting Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C). By clicking this link and signing up for SocialVibe, once featured in our Ten Ways to Change the World Through Social Media, you’ll effectively donate $1 to the cause. We also encourage you to watch the live telecast on ABC, CBS, and NBC, September 5th, at 8:00pm ET/PT.

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It’s a self-evident truth that moms know best. Until recently, though, this knowledge was largely confined to the family unit. With the spread of social media such as blogs and social networks, the walls of motherly wisdom are coming down. Concurrently, the sphere of motherly influence is expanding, most notably to board rooms and chambers of congress. This isn’t to say that moms don’t already wield influence in these areas. Speaker Pelosi is, indeed, a grandmother. But of all the demographic groups gaining power through the social web, from techies and teens to musicians and green activists, we’d argue that none is more formidable than moms. Marketers, politicians, and CEOs take note: networked moms have become a force to be reckoned with, and they continue to gain strength.

Anyone who’s ever feared or respected their mothers (that means you) knows what we’re talking about. Indeed, when you step back and consider the makings of this phenomenon, it’s nothing short of awe inspiring. The technology of social media has extended the power and reach of the individual to a point where it’s possible for anyone to spark a groundswell of action and impact, fueled by network effects and viral distribution. It is the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings and causes a hurricane on the other side of the planet. Only this butterfly is highly motivated with a tremendous vested interest in the health and wellbeing of the next generation. And they number in the tens of millions in the U.S. alone.

For the past several decades, Oprah has been the voice for so many American moms. From the serious to the mundane, she covers issues that matter to women and holds tremendous sway with her viewers. We’ve seen firsthand how companies are nearly capsized with demand when their product becomes one of Oprah’s favorite things. But this is a waning, one-way channel. It’s Media 1.0, where companies produce the infotainment and we consume it. By and large, if it wasn’t important to Oprah, it wasn’t important to her audience. Media 2.0, on the other hand, is about creation and participation. According to MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, some 40% of moms in the U.S. are already on MySpace, “using the site for the same reason everyone else is: to socialize.” Social media is about initiating and joining two-way conversations that matter to the individual and finding others for whom the same topics or issues matter. What matters most to moms? Their children, of course.

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Editor’s note: We’re pleased to welcome Max Gladwell, of MaxGladwell.com, as a regular guest writer on sustainablog. Max Gladwell covers the nexus of social media and green living. We feel that these two trends and technological developments hold tremendous promise for improving quality of life for everyone on the planet.

If you’re reading this blog, then you’re on board with social media. There’s a good chance you belong to social networks like Facebook or MySpace. It’s likely that you Digg stories and even possible that you Twitter. These technologies and services, together with a growing number of others, make up the social web. It’s much like the regular web, but more interactive. More…social. It invites and even demands active participation from everyone. It has a global reach with viral capacity, and yet it’s bringing local communities closer together. It enables people to connect, organize, and make a difference as never before. Indeed, social media is a powerful force, one that the world’s CEOs are starting to acknowledge and take seriously.

Many entrepreneurs, activists, and marketers are leveraging the social web for positive change. In the process and by its very nature, they are giving each of us the tools to change the world and make it a better place. There are thousands of examples, which is precisely why Max Gladwell exists. Here are 10 worth exploring.

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