Ideaplants

Here an interview from a Social Media presentation I gave at The Hub last week together with Oihana (eMarketeer at The Hub):



You may wonder what this post has to do with Sustainability: I do believe that the shift towards social media is not only important for Corporate Marketers. The fact that corporations have to become more transparent also means they have to start reviewing their current business operations: How compliant are we really? And how do our stakeholders perceive our performance?

Some years ago it would have been a great opportunity for a Business to move towards social & environmental responsibility to gain a competitive advantage. Today it becomes more and more a must to not fall behind your competitors and to avoid a potential crisis.

Being truly transparent does not only mean that a corporation needs to implement a CSR report that is compliant with GRI standards we are talking about a process of change management that is not to underestimate. It’s not just about the numbers but also about the motivations & meaning given to these values by each and every employee.

Only in the moment a researcher from the R&D division, your supply chain partners and the external maintenance guy live up to this philosophy and come to work every day because they truly believe they help save the environment and add benefit to the community by working for an organization, one can talk about a successful implementation of this approach. It’s not just a one-off exercise. It’s rather a cultural transformation of the whole organization.

I’m currently reading ‘Strategy for Sustainability’ by Adam Werbach (Harvard) and am realizing also based on my own experience that Communication will play a key role in solving the dilemma most corporates are facing when running a number of sustainability programmes without linking these back to their core business strategy.


The result is a number of scattered, isolated activities and projects where neither people involved in the project nor external audiences can find a purpose.

I can only recommend you to read this book. For me it was a real eye-opener.
Here an interview with the Author:





Interestinly enough most corporates fear to communicate about the ‘green thing’ as a result – rather than trying to show more transparency they end up stepping back from communicating. Especially in the 24/7 virtual space, this creates issues since conversations will continue without you if you don’t join them.


Best wishes,
Mira