This post is a collaboration between Mashable’s Summer of Social Good charitable fundraiser and Max Gladwell’s “10 Ways” series. The post is being simultaneously published across more than 100 blogs.

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.

3. Follow Charities on Social Networks

In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you’re increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it.

Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it’s a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers.

You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:

Oxfam America (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube)

The Humane Society (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr)

LIVESTRONG (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr)

WWF (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr)

4. Support Causes on Awareness Hubs

Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money.

It’s important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they’re another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you’ll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.

5. Find Volunteer Opportunities

Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers.

For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.

6. Embed a Widget on Your Site

Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money.

Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.

7. Organize a Tweetup

You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that’s important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.

Be sure to check out Mashable’s guide to organizing a tweetup to make sure yours goes off without a hitch, or check to see if there are any tweetups in your area to attend that are already organized.

8. Express Yourself Using Video

As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message.

Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac — the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports.

If you’re more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.

9. Sign or Start a Petition

There aren’t many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years.

Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.

10. Organize an Online Event

Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized “tweet-a-thon” like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity.

In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.

Bonus: Think Outside the Box

Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew’s Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew’s cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease.

Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy.

The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.

Special thanks to VPS.net

A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week.

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About the “10 Ways” Series

The “10 Ways” Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter.

This content was originally written by Mashable’s Josh Catone.

Many of us who are students of this space continue their learning throughout the year and not just at Affiliate Summit.  So it’s important for people like me to remember that just because I didn’t really learn anything new from this panel doesn’t mean there weren’t some newbies that learned volumes.  I can’t speak for them, of course. The panel consisted of:

• Ted Murphy, Founder/CEO, IZEA (Moderator)
• Rob Key, CEO, Converseon
• Stephanie Agresta, InternetGeekGirl.com
• Chris Brogan, VP Strategy & Technology, CrossTech Media

Hopefully you’ll learn some more things than I did.

Bullet Point Review!

• 70% of people online last month watched a video.
• The top rated websites are the social media networks.
• There really are strategies to using social media.
• Seeing how the flow of conversation is going is hard to track, but when cross conversational tracking becomes available it will be exciting.
• This is a marketing channel just like any other; it can work well with other channels to a brand or company’s advantage.
• Tracking is coming soon… and will be immensely valuable.
• A comment on a blog or a good blog post as social value.
• Brands are starting to bring enthusiasts in to help market.
• FriendFeed could be taken more advantage of by affiliates.
  • It allows for more nuanced opportunities.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Personally I asked if there were any tools to help manage a social media strategy (knowing slightly that there weren’t any I knew of) and the answer was “don’t get caught up in tools”.  Fail.
• Social media may bring rise to a different kind of content.
• There are listening tools like Radian6, BuzzLogic, lots of deep dive listening tools for brands to hear what the conversation is.
• Twitter isn’t a good place to recruit affiliates but it’s good for conversions (no real expansion on that was given).
• Will we see a change in the code of ethics regarding transparency & disclosure?  Not sure but disclosure breeds trust.
• Interesting argument – more and more people are giving kudos to those that disclose affiliate links however no one in television bothers to disclose even blatant product placements so it’s a fine line & unresolved argument.
• Recognize the conversation AS a conversation – treating it like a traditional marketing venue doesn’t work.
• Look at social media like a picnic, says Chris Brogan.  Don’t just run up & start selling your product to people hanging around having a good time.
  • “Turn your stupid bullhorn into a party hat”.
• Give something to the social media community before you take – content + trust (+ conversions).
• Try to think just a hair outside your brand.
• Conversion rates coming through social media sites are 4 times higher than traditional channels.
  • Note: Since there’s no standard of tracking it’s very difficult to isolate this.
  • The social media forerunners are working on an open wiki to open up discussion on how to isolate.
• Many brands are worried about the affiliate channel cannibalizing other in-house channels like search.
• It takes a high level of comfort to let go of the brand & get into social media.
• There’s a big education process for merchants before jumping into the pool.
  • “We’re really afraid of this because we don’t want people pooing on the brand”.
• Listening to the conversations that are out there is the easiest “gateway drug” to get companies hooked on wanting to participate.
• If you’re going to disclose your affiliate links, at least do so on your about page and possibly at the end of every post.
  • At IZEA when they decided to make the disclosure banner mandatory, conversions surprisingly went up 20% – 15% of the clicks were on the “Sponsored by” button itself.

Overall it seemed like a lot of the conversation was “when we get tracking… ooh boy watch out!” and tried to steer away from the fact that there is NO real solid way to track any social media “strategy”.  I had an interesting conversation with Wil Reynolds, another speaker at Affiliate Summit who is an “SEO guy” later in the day about the pannel – tracking really is the KEY to having companies on larger scales start to really dig into social media.  Without it, they’re going to go spend their budget on an SEO firm instead of someone who’s talking to them about Twitter & Facebook.

As I mentioned… this may not have been the best session for me.  They didn’t talk much about just HOW social media is changing affiliate marketing, so name fail.  I’m pretty versed in social media at this point, so a lot of this was the same song & dance – but I really do hope that somewhere in the room there was a newbie who learned a lot.

So, like I said… overall, I only learned of a couple of new tools for “listening to the conversation” from this and I was actually pretty surprised that they didn’t mention Trackur.com, a really great tool touted as an “online reputation management” tool – really other than the name I can’t see how it couldn’t be beneficial for listening in on the online conversation about your brand.  But I hope you learned something from the recap!

The first week of June is over and done with and summer officially starts in 15 days!

• Lisa Picarille reported back on the Affiliate Thing podcast from a dinner last week about a potential industry regulatory body, tentatively called Performance Marketing Alliance. They’ll be starting small, hoping to have a blog, board elections, and sponsorships over the next six months, and hope to launch early next year. They hope to be able to be ready with some kind of announcement by August’s Affiliate Summit East in Boston.
• In my all consuming quest to increase the page rank of this blog, I read a really good article over at Marketing Pilgrim on sculpting page rank.
• Search widget Lijit has teamed up with b5media to improve their service. Longtime readers will note that I had this widget up for awhile and when I redesigned it disappeared. I’ve put it back up for awhile – we’ll see if it does any good.
• Sam Harrelson started an Affiliate Marketing room on FriendFeed. I joined – should be a good place to share some ideas and links. Hopefully I get some good stuff to share with you next week!
• Are you a green affiliate? By virtue of the work-from-home industry, most affiliates are more eco-conscious in using less paper, not burning fossil fuels by commuting, etc. So now boast that fact proudly with a free Green Affiliate laptop sticker from Affiliate Summit. Just fill out your address and Shawn Collins will lovingly pack up one and send it your way!
• UnsubCentral and the Email Sender &Provider Coalition (ESPC) are teaming up for a free webinar/conference call on June 10th about abiding by the changes in the CAN-SPAM laws that are coming up. I signed up make sure PsPrint will be compliant – if you do any email marketing you should too!

That’s all folks! Have a great weekend – I’ll be enjoying fireworks tomorrow night at McAfee Coliseum in Oakland – hopefully also enjoying the A’s kicking the Angel’s butts!