I have just finally found few quiet minutes to watch Clay Shirky’s talk (NYU professor and great social media thinker) given earlier this month at the TED@State conference on ‘How Twitter Can Make History‘, as we are today witnessing “the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.”
What a very timely talk he has given there as the Twitterized protests were just starting up in Iran. (Actually, he later gave a short interview to the TED team about it, that is now posted on TED’s blog).
Beyond these political implications, I immediately thought about how social media has changed ‘CSR‘, and how it has changed it for the better (even if there is still a long way to go).
With the rise of new social media technologies, power has clearly passed to the people forcing the emergence of a new approach to CSR: CSR 2.0 (or now 4.0). Especially with citizens-consumers that are now extremely informed and aware, talking to eachother on online communities almost instantaneously about what you do whenever you decide to talk about it or not, and with an audience of millions on the web.
The 2.0 has really put the ’social’ back into CSR, by this I mean the stakeholders. And this is a great thing. Now CSR is finally about stakeholder engagement and about meaningful conversations and change. Because if done otherwise, huge reputational risks are at stake.
Rather than being a big scary thing, CSR 2.0 has to be seen as a great opportunity to join forces with the new empowered stakeholders and rebuild the ’social contract’, especially now that the recession has resulted in a dramatic decline of trust in business worldwide.
A very good paper written by Mikkel H. Sørensen & Nicolai Peitersen from Antics.com lists the 10 changes to the CSR landscape that we are and that we will be seeing because of social media. Here are the eight ones I clearly agree with:
1. Inclusiveness – Involving stakeholders directly from beginning to end
2. Innovation – Winners turn market pressure into stakeholder led innovation
3. Sincerity – Be real
4. Co-ownership – A truly embedded value-based culture happens through involvement
5. Dynamics – Standards being replaced by 24/7 engagement
6. Quality – CSR as immersive business strategy
7. Trust your values – Move first, move alone
8. Proximity – Local impact is global
And to conclude on why Shirky and CSR 2.0, I would highly recommend this book: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky, which makes sense of the way people are using internet, how it creates new group dynamics, and how it puts the people back at the center stage.
It is basic, but so useful to understand why locally-relevant and stakeholder-inclusive CSR strategies are so important today.
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