November 23rd, 2009

Sustainability Requires Continuing Dialogue

As posted this morning on Max Gladwell

It is our first guest post here at Max Gladwell and we are excited to be contributing to the thought leadership here.

So why we chose this topic is that a surprisingly small percentage of the general public knows that a corporate conversation around sustainability even exists, let alone that they can participate in it.  This is despite the fact that many of the largest companies are spending considerable resources to become socially responsible and publicize those efforts.  We discussed some aspects of this in our recent special report Social Media is Advancing the Sustainability Dialogue .

Grail Research recently released a study highlighting the fact that most consumers have no idea that companies like HP, Cisco, The Gap, Microsoft, Nike and General Mills are socially and environmentally responsible companies.  Which was exactly the point of our paper as well – companies need to be doing a better job of communicating the good works that they are doing, and getting ongoing stakeholder input, for a variety of reasons.   Silvia Springolo of Grail Research says it very simply “The low awareness of these initiatives raises huge questions because companies are spending so much money on them. And while green qualities are very important to consumers, they are not being communicated effectively.”

Recently, Deron Triff, CEO of Changents.com has been working to bring awareness of this gap by challenging people to match Fortune 100 companies with their CSR achievements via a 5-question CSR quiz.  The winner receives 100,000 consumer impressions of their Ad (benefiting a company or a favorite non-profit) on the homepage of Changents.com.  Take the CSR quiz now and see what you know – I know it was illuminating for me.

And if companies are spending so much time and money on these initiatives, it begs the question – why do we know so little about them?  If we are serious about wanting to change the world, then these stories need to be a part of the dialogue.  Companies are putting tremendous effort into compiling CSR reports, but at the end of the day who really reads those reports?  More recently, separate CSR websites are starting to emerge – who visits them?

Sustainability is such an important topic that the stories about corporate efforts need to be part of the companies’ overall communications, and companies need to start enabling dialogue with all of their stakeholders.  Conversations amongst a relative few in government, NGOs or other third parties won’t adequately address the various problems we face.  We believe social media is a catalyst for enabling these conversations as more companies try to figure out how to engage with stakeholders in this new world that demands transparency and crowd sourcing to solve our most intractable problems.

It’s important that we get more people talking – this conversation needs to move mainstream and engage with more people where they are instead of trying to get them to specific CSR communications.  Let’s face it very few people read CSR reports much less specific CSR communications.  They need to be a part of regular corporate communications and not a separate stream if we are going to truly embed this in mainstream culture, engage more people in the discussion, and inspire the change we want to see in the world.

Please help to continue this dialogue – would love to hear your thoughts!

Beth Bengtson, Partner, SDialogue