As companies develop the use of social media in corporate communications, what potential is there for improving sustainability reporting?
Although many companies have begun to use social media for their marketing, it is still only a few that have seriously experimented with it as a part of their sustainability or corporate responsibility reporting.
The received wisdom is that social media is all about moving from broadcasting messages (“one to many”) to conversations (“many to many”). The reality is not so simple.
Some of the more effective engagements through social media have come from campaign groups using the platform to spread their messages virally.
For example, Greenpeace has made significant use of the medium. Most recently, it produced videos of people stripping off branded sportswear clothes outside stores to protest at the use of toxic chemicals in manufacturing. It used Twitter and Facebook as tools to make these videos spread, and to encourage direct contact with the companies to add voices to the protest.
Companies have seen such campaigns with some envy, and would love to achieve some of the same spread for their own brands and messages. In principle, such campaigns are not about two-way conversations, but about an effective broadcast model. That would, in theory, make it highly suitable for companies wanting to amplify their own messages.
Emotional engagement
The difference is in this case that the campaign groups are focusing on an issue that has emotional engagement with the people that spread the message. Emotional engagement is generally not available to companies just because it has released a report. And companies that try to find other ways to achieve the same emotional impact by tapping in to issues people care about run the risk of getting it horribly wrong.
American Express recently found this out. It encouraged twitter users to tweet about people or things that inspired them. For every tweet that used the #amexbeinspired hashtag, the company promised to donate 50p to the Princes Trust.
Very quickly, this went sour. A number of particularly motivated individuals, outraged by what they perceived to be an abuse of the platform, produced a vast number of messages extremely hostile to the company using the hashtag. The incident underlined how the negative consequences of getting it wrong can be amplified more powerfully than your original message.
One commentator, wishing to remain anonymous, says American Express made a tactical error in the way it went about its campaign. “Companies that have done similar things where people can see the link between the business and the cause tend to get more favourable results. The Amex campaign was pretty much guaranteed to get people’s backs up because of the pretty flimsy vehicle. ‘Be Inspired’ – why would anyone associate that with a credit card company?”
The commentator suggests that, over time, there will be fewer of these cause-marketing approaches to social media, and more occasions when the company acts as a convenor of interested parties. “It’s about getting the tools out of the hands of the marketers and into those that hold the authentic voice of the company.”
This message is backed up by the example of SABMiller. Not only did the company hold a live web chat on the launch of its sustainability report, but it also sponsored a section of the Guardian Sustainable Business site focusing on water issues, and has had a presence engaging a very knowledgeable and committed audience on the subject.
It is effective, says Andy Wales, SABMiller’s head of sustainable development, because it’s not all framed as people’s responses to the company and its own operations. “It works best when you can create a collaborative community seeking to solve a problem together. We just become one voice with something to contribute, rather than being the sole focus of the discussion.” As well as the Guardian site, the company also actively engages through the social media portal Business Fights Poverty.
Find your audience
Wales points out that this can be one of the strengths of social media. Rather than expecting everyone to come to your own site to engage with you, rather you can go to the places where some of your most important audiences naturally congregate.
But it also means that social media should not be seen as simply another vehicle to publicise the launch of your latest report. It is about building ongoing dialogue.
Active dialogue is much more time-consuming than simply broadcasting a message, of course. James Farrar, head of corporate citizenship at software giant SAP, highlights the limitations for any user: “I simply don’t want to talk to 3,000 people every day. I’d never do anything else. I do like to see links that people are sharing, and to get a sense of where the discussion is.”
Andy Wales agrees that, for SABMiller, the move towards engaging in more conversations is more resource-intensive. “But we have been pleased and quite surprised by the quality of contributions in some of the web chat events.”
The company found a particularly valuable engagement when it worked with Oxfam, along with Coca-Cola, to produce a poverty footprint report of its operations in Zambia and El Salvador. The Business Fights Poverty network provided a ready platform for knowledgeable and engaged activists for whom this research was a real point of interest and engagement.
The corporate or the personal?
In terms of engagement on corporate responsibility, there are some real advantages to having a human face. Andy Wales recalls how, in a live chat following the launch of SABMiller’s social report, very quickly he was asked the question “who am I talking to?” The answer quickly gave rise to a completely different tone of conversation, including questions around how he had ended up at the company, and what it was like to work there.
Wales says companies need to get employees who are comfortable with the tone of voice that social media demands, and they need to be prepared to have semi-independent voices. People representing the company need to get away from slavishly following a script written by the PR department.
That leads to an interesting challenge for companies – how much should they empower individuals to engage through social media as individuals rather than simply behind a corporate mask? After all, if Joe Smith builds a blog readership and Twitter audience of thousands of people, when Joe Smith leaves the company to work with a competitor does that audience belong to him or to the company?
Farrar recognises that the personal voice can give more conservative executives within the business cause for concern. But he believes that little of this is really new. “Social media hasn’t created new communications,” he says, “it’s just altered the scale of them. If I do a presentation at an event, or even just talk to friends at the pub, I am there as a named individual representing the company in my own words. The same rules of common sense apply in how I do that.”
SAP – more stakeholder insight
Business software giant SAP has already used social media to great effect with its customer base – it runs the SAP Community Network, which is a gathering point for three million people including SAP professionals, software developers and others that use the company’s products. The success of this network meant that nobody had to debate within the company whether social media is an appropriate tool when it comes to the company’s sustainability communications.
SAP’s James Farrar says that one of the important areas has been to get stakeholder insight into key issues. “It is becoming clearer now, but defining the sustainability context for SAP is not as obvious as it is for heavy industry. We have used social media, as well as traditional off-line approaches such as an expert panel, to provide insight and challenge on how we find our way forward.”
SAP has a sustainability Facebook page and Twitter handle, although communications and discussion tend towards a focus on volunteering. On SAP’s sustainability report itself, the company has an interactive materiality matrix that visitors can not only comment on, but can build their own version showing the issues which are key to them.
One of the key areas for engagement has been internal. SAP has a complete internal platform including a network of sustainability champions that uses social media tools to more effectively communicate across the company.
How much difference has this all made to the way SAP sees the issues? “We have had a lot of input,” says Farrar. “There’s nothing new under the sun, and I don’t think anyone’s come up with something hugely important we hadn’t come up with before. But the strength of feeling in certain areas has surprised us, and the urgency and speed that people expect.”
And it’s not all about the channels that the company owns or can control. “Social media activists want to drive traffic back to their own centre, so a lot of the feedback over what we do is federated out there. We look to aggregate the feedback across extended networks, while giving people the choice, the open door, to come to us and interact directly.”
www.sapsustainabilityreport.com
http://twitter.com/sustainablesap
Best Buy – C-suite tweets
One challenge the retail giant Best Buy has not had to face is getting buy-in from the chief executive for the use of social media. Brian Dunn is himself a prolific tweeter and keeps a “white board” on his website to offer thoughts and encourage feedback.
Best Buy has an ingrained culture of using social media internally, including the “water cooler”, which is a chat facility for employees to talk about what’s on their minds.
Mary Capozzi, senior director of corporate responsibility, says the company wants to allow employees to help customers by engaging through social media. “We have a large percentage of millennials among our employee base, which means that most of our employees are heavy users of social media. It’s second nature that we should use it to engage around areas such as sustainability as well.”
Best Buy held a time-specific web chat for the launch of its latest corporate responsibility report. It attracted “a lot of good, and quite tough, questions”, Capozzi says.
One of the benefits can be the ability to occasionally channel the sustainability messages to mainstream customer networks, widening the audience awareness of what the issues are. Generally, for instance, the company will use Facebook and Twitter to engage customers on what they most care about.
But when the company used its generic Best Buy handle for sustainability messages around the launch of the report, its Twitter account received 5,832 new followers within 48 hours. This meant the audience for the company’s communications had absorbed a group that was going to ask more knowledgeable and critical questions.
The company also uses sponsored tweets to get its message out. For instance in mid-September on searches around the “CSR” term it had a message about e-waste.
Of course, there can be a downside. Any large retailer, for instance, will attract the criticism of individuals who have had a bad service experience at a local store, giving it significant prominence.
Capozzi accepts this. She says: “This is just the latest medium where people can talk about us.”
The difference is, of course, that these conversations now take place in an area where the company can see and respond to the evidence that something may need improvement.