October 22nd, 2009

Social Media for Sustainability

I attended the Social Media for Sustainability conference organized by Justmeans in San Francisco on Monday. Along with hundreds of others who attended, I was excited to see a conference so laser-like in its focus on the intersection of two topics our firm seems to be addressing on a daily basis now.

The conference was designed to help answer such questions as: How should your company using social media to engage your customers, employees, activists, and other stakeholders online?  What are the best tools and platforms? How do you develop the right incentives for building community and keeping your community engaged? What is the ROI of social media and what metrics should your company be using?

While the conference didn’t answer all of these questions, many great insights were provided by both panelists and audience members from companies like Intel, Cisco, Nike and Disney, as well as Seventh Generation, Treehugger.com and TriplePundit.com.

Some major takeaways included:

• Empowered by social media, customers, employees, activists, and other stakeholders are demanding far more from companies than ever before — with the power to affect and even define brands (e.g., United Breaks Guitars is closing in on 6 million views)
• Social media helps co-create great ideas (e.g., MyStarbucks Idea)
• Your brand is being discussed, whether or not you are part of the conversation — Google it, YouTube it, Twitter it and see for yourself (we’ve tried to stress this with clients ourselves — at the least, you should be “listening” in on the conversation with basic tools)
• Sustainable brand leaders like Seventh Generation and Timberland are moving away from annual sustainability reports and towards more real-time storytelling and data — they’re looking for meaningful conversations (we’ve been helping clients with this type of activity for a while)
• Leading brands are starting to crowd-source their efforts around sustainability
• “‘Open companies are already performing some 30% more profitably than closed companies” (Dwayne Spradin, Innocentive) — “we” are smarter than “me”; but this requires a different mindset and culture than traditional or closed innovation — “culture eats strategy for lunch”
• @katbaloo A good overview of Social Media Listening and Monitoring Tools as you think about tracking ROI: http://bit.ly/VBlmY

What’s been your experience with social media and sustainability?  Let us know!  More commentary at Twitter, of course (#justmeans).