Social media offers great opportunities for stakeholder engagement, and, as CSR/sustainability professionals, we clearly see all the potential lying in digital communications to advance the sustainability dialogue and engagement whether with employees, consumers, NGOs, citizens, etc.
As CSR/sustainability players are catching on, one truth is to be reminded: social media is an attitude, not a technology, as showed on the slide below extracted from SustainAbility’s interesting research on stakeholder engagement through web 2.0 (click here to download the slide deck).
One of the many mistakes organizations can often make with social media is the mistake of getting on social media and learning the technology and the tools/platforms offered (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.), but not learning the best practices of what is called social media behavior.
Social media is about conversations and relationship building. Revolving around trust, social media requires openness, transparency, accountability, and two-way engagement with an ability to listen first….. and this is even more important in our field as all of these elements are fundamental principles of CSR/sustainability strategies themselves!!
Before getting on the social media bandwagon, it is therefore important to “be and live social”. As David Armano noted in HBR’s Conversation blog:
“Social media’s not a product you foist on others, or some rigid business process that, if implemented, yields results. You shouldn’t treat social media like a temporary advertising campaign. Social media is more organic than that. It’s a way of thinking and approaching business that requires passion and commitment and, above all, willingness to participate in social spaces honestly and freely and by the rules of the social network itself. When someone ridicules your organization in the social space, unfiltered in real time, how do you react? If you are trying to control rather than participate in the discussion, then you’re not living social. When your own employees talk about your organization on a social network what do you do?”
What do you think? How do you help your organization or your client be and live social?
(Full disclosure: David Armano now works at Edelman, the PR firm that also employs me.)
2 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
Continuing the Discussion