March 13th, 2009

How Social Media will Enhance Sustainability Strategy

I just answered a great question on LinkedIn: Can social media drive corporate sustainability strategy?

The inquirer, Katie Fry Hester, clarified that she’s “been testing the idea that companies can derive real business AND sustainability value through online communication and collaboration. For example, testing new eco-products in Second Life, launching a sustainability report on JustMeans, crowd sourcing customers for product improvements, monitoring blogs for stakeholder feedback, using twitter for a more direct line to journalists…”

She added: “How is your company deriving business/sustainability value from these new technologies? If you have any examples and/or evidence, I’d love to hear them…” [so would I!]

So, my enthusiastic answer:

“Yes” is the short answer. I also believe it’s potentially “game changing”, as one commenter put it recently. Social media is perhaps the biggest cause for the increasing transparency in the corporate world. It will continue to play an important role in corporate social responsibility’s (CSR) evolution.

Major themes of the way social media will benefit companies involved in CSR include: (1) greatly facilitating meaningful dialogue and collaboration with various stakeholders; (2) tracking and “officially” reporting their CSR efforts; and (3) using the information gleaned from the reporting process to communicate CSR efforts in an more accessible way to a broader audience than CSR report readers and watchdogs.

Some examples of organizations benefiting can be found in a report we did last year and a more recent article I wrote for the LOHAS journal (pdf format).

Social media is still in its infancy and the sustainable business crowd, like most others, has just begun to touch the surface. Your examples are good, and we’re in the process of looking more closely at SM’s use specifically in the development of CSR communications, with a new paper due out soon. Please do ping me if you’d like me to let you know when that’s available.