Yahoo! for Good & Yahoo! Green
Meg Garlinghouse, the Senior Director of Yahoo! for Good; Erin Carlson, Director of Yahoo! for Good, Yahoo! Green and Connie Chan, Manager of Yahoo! for Good all spoke on this panel.
Yahoo! makes a difference. Yahoo! for Good was created to empower people to make a difference. 
Lessons:
-Charitable efforts should align with your business
-Focus if you can
-Leverage what you do best
-Be authentic and transparent
-Be relevant to your audience (timely and personally)
-Give them a way to get engaged (take action or share!)
Social Media can be used for social good. They shared an example from their company (Random Acts of Kindess: "You In?") and a couple other social media bests: Facebook Causes' Birthday Wish and Nelson Mandela's Birthday Card on ONE. (Bloganthropy was also cited by one of the bloggers in the audience as a great example of using social media for social good.)
Next, Erin from Yahoo! Green shared some practical tips:-Solely "green" messaging doesn't usually work (very few people care that much)
-Rather, present green topics as practical, timely information (i.e. cities with best and worst tap water ; use can opener to open hard plastic packaging)
When writing about green topics... -Serve the dessert first (make it a great article that catches the readers' attention)-Certain topics are tricky to write about like saving money - readers want easy, immediate, deliverable (exact numbers/percentages) tips. Health can also be a tricky topic because people have become desensitized to warnings that practically everything is going to hurt them. Social media lessons from Yahoo! Green:-Facebook: 70% women; conversational; ask questions; most active fans don't overlap with twitter
-Twitter: more deeply green; focused on sharing information; is less about asking questions.Lastly, one of the speakers asked the question: "What annoyed you last week?" (I think the point was that if you can address those things, then it makes for a good post. I'm not sure though, because this was the point when I locked myself out of my computer/needed to resort to good old-fashioned pen and paper for a while...)
