Social Media Engagement

“Where are the new ideas going to come from? Where are the existing ideas? How are they going to break through to reach our company to our decision makers? How are they going to get past our corporate ivory tower walls to the real decision-makers?” - Kieran Brocklebank, United Utilities

These questions were among the many concerns discussed at the annual Action Sustainability Conference last week in London. Specifically focusing on the topic of sustainable supply chain management, our sustainability consulting agrees with group’s defined actions for the current year – to increase the engagement of the supply chain in innovation and the creation process.  Key ‘take-aways’ include:

• Bring down costs whilst delivering sustainability 

• Develop an effective sustainable procurement strategy aligned to your organizational goals 

• Align your procurement processes to ensure engagement from your suppliers 

• Effectively monitor the sustainability progress and competence of your supply chain 

• Understand how much you can expect from your suppliers and ensure it works for them too

• Create a team of sustainability champions from your procurement team

Our sustainability consulting research and experiences show that today’s sustainable supply chain organizations are focused on integrating sustainability concepts directly into their purchasing processes.  These efforts are designed to not only improve supply chain performance but to establish the next-generation sustainable supply chain management.  

However, success relies heavily on the effective stakeholder engagement with the company’s internal and external business resource.  Taiga Company offers social media engagement strategies to businesses seeking to optimize this communication gateway within the supply chain.

A common characteristic across sustainable organizations is the ability to recognize public eco awareness and deliver new products that address societal and environmental challenges in a way that delivers business sustainability and long term value.  However, questions still remain unanswered on the most effective way to harness and drive creativity in an increasingly transparent but equally competitive world.

The Harvard Business Review recently weighed in on the “open” debate with its post, Open Innovation and Organizational Boundaries.  Commenting that today’s markets are being transformed into social forums, the article offers some key concepts to consider:

• Leaders and senior teams can take advantage of contrasting innovation modes, paradoxical organizational requirements, and associated dynamic boundaries.

• Leaders need to execute strategic choices with the systems, structures, incentives, cultures, and boundaries tailored to open and firm-based innovation modes.

• Multiple types of boundaries will increasingly be employed to manage innovation. These boundaries will range from traditional intra firm boundaries to complex intra firm boundaries (such as ambidextrous designs), to webs of interdependence with partners, and to interdependence with potentially anonymous communities.

• Senior teams must build their own personal capabilities to deal with contradictions as well as their firm's ability to deal with contradictions. While building internally contradictory organizational architectures is difficult, building these architectures to attend to contrasting innovation modes will be more challenging.

Through our direct engagement with companies and business leaders seeking to inspire and motivate sustainable action in their organization, we find business stakeholders as a valued source for new ideas. Our professional consulting works with clients to step outside of the confines of the business to leverage employee, supplier, and end consumer thinking.  

Taiga Company offers insight into business sustainability programs and social media strategies designed to encourage business sustainability and expand eco awareness as an asset of the organization - particularly through stakeholder engagement and open innovation.

Social media provides individuals, communities, businesses, and non-government organizations the ability to connect with business in meaningful discussion from anywhere in the world in real time.   Our sustainability consulting has observed how many businesses have already realized value by incorporating social media into traditional business processes including marketing, sales, customer support, and product development.  But what is social media’s role in sustainable supply chain management?

“To capture their suppliers' best ideas, leading procurement organizations work with suppliers to accurately define innovation requirements and help business partners understand how and when to be involved to improve process efficiency.”  –Procurement Strategy Council

As our sustainability consulting has discussed in a previous post, Key Components of Social Media for Stakeholder Engagement, there is an emerging role of social media in stakeholder engagement and for businesses to communicate their broader corporate responsibility agenda.  We now explore social media success in sustainable supply chain management.  As with any program, we advise:

• Defining a Clear Vision: What is social media expected to do for your supply chain.  What are your social media goals?  Are you seeking to simply communicate or engage with your key suppliers?  

• Identify Stakeholders and Online Communities: Stakeholders are a bit easier to identify (key suppliers), but online communities can be a little bit tougher to define.  Theme based or centered on sustainability concepts such as efficiency or sustainable materials, where are your existing and potential suppliers collaborating?

• Actively engage:  Social media is an always on platform.  This implies being present to the ongoing conversation: listening, contributing to the conversation, providing timely feedback, and incorporating that information into materials, processes, and products.

Our sustainability consulting believes that in order to be effective with its business sustainability plan an organization must have a defined engagement strategy.  At Taiga Company , we encourage clients to build sustainability programs that leverage social media engagement tools to implement direct and measurable impacts on social, environmental, and economic goals.  This includes active interaction within the supply chain.

When CEO Larry Page cleaned house and shut down Google Labs, a home for innovative Google projects, many believed the company’s cutting-edge image began to fade.  With their rivals running their own ‘secret’ labs, pressures began to build on Google to re-open its program.  However, a new collaborative and arguably more sustainable approach to next-generation innovation had just broken the surface at Google.

Described in an Information Week article, IW explores Google’s recent approach to ‘Radical’ idea generation.  Breaking the mold on typical in-house development, the tech-giant held a meeting of business stakeholders focused on a variety of business sustainability concepts and innovative thinking, which the company has now shared on its website.

"Solve for X is a place where the curious can go to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems…Radical in the sense that the solutions could help billions of people. Radical in the sense that the audaciousness of the proposals makes them sound like science fiction."

Google, like many other progressive companies, is opening the doors to innovation.  Our sustainability consulting firmly supports this path of collaborative innovation for sustainable business development.  How we communicate and exchange information is becoming a true competitive advantage and in some cases a business sustainability necessity.

For many, success may be determined by selling a product or service.  For others, it is about advancing the businesses sustainability conversation - whether that is in regards to their own products/ services or the conversation as a whole.  The leading-edge and proactive businesses are leveraging both definitions of success simultaneously through social media engagement.  Google’s ‘Radical’ approach is one such example.

LinkedIn is About to Revolutionize How We Volunteer "We all know LinkedIn to be in the business of connecting talent with opportunity.  Now, they are expanding their mission to include the non-profit sector.  In the fall of last year, LinkedIn added a Volunteer Experience & Causes field to the LinkedIn Profile.  Members can now share volunteer experiences, causes they care about and organizations they support with their professional networks. Through this initiative, LinkedIn is putting a stake in the ground that volunteerism can and should be a part of everyone's professional brand, and they are passionately trying to get the word out."  

With LinkedIn’s new initiative—LinkedIn for Good. it makes sense that this form of social media engagement would be an ideal platform to connect with sustainability professionals.  How so?  As the post,  Is LinkedIn the Best Place to Find Sustainability Professionals? explains:
 

1. LinkedIn connects you to individuals, not companies.
Sustainability professionals move around at an astonishing pace, and so connecting with them personally is much more strategic than trying to get an "in" through a company's sustainability department (or a general email to their website or blog). You can easily look up people by name, company, or keyword (think: sustainability consultant, or renewable energy).
 

2. LinkedIn allows you to refer people, or ask for referrals.
Instead of foisting yourself upon an unwitting person, LinkedIn allows you to harness the power of your network to get introduced via "a friend of a friend." Similarly, when someone contacts you, you can see whether you are already mutually connected (up to several degrees of separation). There are a lot of people calling themselves "sustainability consultants" so this ability to do an informal reference check can be invaluable.
 

3. LinkedIn lets you continue the conversation in groups.
Once you're connected to people (or even if you aren't connected to them) you can join thousands of different groups--and literally dozens of sustainability-related groups that range from CSR to Green Packaging to Sustainability MBAs. Jump in and get involved -- post comments, suggest articles, link to Twitter, etc.

As mentioned in our  business sustainability programs aimed at social media success there are numerous LInkedIn groups to share information, engage, and connect with others leading in the business sustainability space.  Three groups to consider include:

Strategic Sustainability Consulting provides organizations with the tools and expertise they need to actively manage their social and environmental impacts. We specialize in helping under-resourced organizations implement sustainable solutions usually reserved for large, multinational companies.

SustainAbility is a think tank and strategy consultancy working to inspire transformative business leadership on the sustainability agenda. Established in 1987, SustainAbility delivers illuminating foresight and actionable insight on sustainable development trends and issues

The International Society of Sustainability Professionals (ISSP) is a non-profit, member-driven association for professionals who are committed to making sustainability standard practice. Members share resources and best practices, and develop themselves professionally.

If you are looking for more information on how to use LinkedIn to grow your sustainability practice of create social media success for your business, consider checking out our 8 -week, self-guided, online course called Social Media for Sustainability Professionals. It includes an entire section devoted to LinkedIn (with additional sections focused on websites, Twitter, Facebook, blogging, Google+ and more!).

“Problem solving is an integral part of the project review process for R&D organizations, as companies must identify and correct R&D process barriers, boosting project success rates by ensuring reapplication of lessons learned from past projects.”  –CEB Views

Described in further detail in the article, Problem Solving Is More Than Method, an author from Manufacturing.net takes us on a tour of popular tools and strategies to address business and process improvement.  Common to all and imbedded within most this concept is an inherent need for active engagement.   It is this level of participation that most often defines the quality and sustainability of the outcome.  Thus, our sustainability consulting poses the question: What is the most effective way to engage these process stakeholders?

Referring back to our professional consulting experiences, we picture a room full of moderately engaged individuals sometimes lead by a facilitator but more often not.  This face to face discovery was limited by those in the room and by their willingness to share.  While it's an effective approach- if done properly, there is another way.

Our sustainability consulting practice believes that social media engagement tools offer an evolved approach to stakeholder participation.  By expanding the scope of contributors and encouraging increased feedback, a decision maker opens the ‘suggestion box’ to a variety of untapped view points. In building an active social media engagement strategy, there are several things to consider:

• Social Media is an ‘Always-On’ Platform: This implies being present to the ongoing conversation: listening, contributing to the conversation, providing timely feedback, and incorporating that information into products, services, and ongoing dialog.

• Start with a Clear Vision: What social media is expected to do for your organization?  What are your social media goals?  Increase website/ blog traffic? Enhance brand image and credibility? Communicate and engage on CSR/ sustainability related topics? 

• Identify Stakeholders and Online Communities:  Stakeholders are a bit easier to identify, but online communities can be centered theme based and centered on sustainability concepts such as recycling, CSR, water, energy, social investing.  Or, they may be geographically based. 

The propagation of sustainable information to effectively communicate business sustainability successes is becoming a more active dialog.  Stakeholder feedback is being used to solve problems and drive innovation.  Our sustainability consulting encourages businesses to provide even greater transparency into the implementation of sustainability concepts and open the conversation to business stakeholders.

How does the old adage go?  Two aspirin a day keeps the doctor away?  Well, we subscribe to the idea that blogging 2 posts a day, inspires eco action each day.  Truth be told, as sustainability consultants, we like to lead by example.  

Within our business sustainability consulting practice, it's not uncommon to encounter those executives that say sustainability is too hard, too resource intensive, or that it's a passing trend.  With big aspirations, 3 years ago Taiga Company set out with the intention of writing 2 blog post each day to dispel the myth that sustainability and living a sustainable lifestyle is hard.  Blogging is sort of like writing an essay. Imagine writing 2 essays, every week day, in addition to your regular workload, the requirements of your personal life, sick or not sick, holiday or not holiday, vacation or no vacation…you get the picture.  

There are ups and downs in life and there are easy days and harder days.  While it's easy to be green or execute sustainable business strategies when things are good, most fall short when the challenges increase. The intention of writing 2 blog post each weekday is a living example that you do the best you can with what you've got.  Some post are great.  Others, not so great.  But, the posts demonstrate the commitment to sustainability regardless of the ebbs and flows of life.  And, it demonstrates that sustainability isn't all or nothing. Short story: we all can take eco action daily and we don't have to be perfect about how we do it.

So what about blogging for a sustainable purpose?  To have an impact in communicating the sustainability business strategies of your business or consulting firm, it's not required that you blog as frequently.  However, there are benefits to blogging.  Blogging on sustainability related topics offers a host of benefits: insights to new, fresh perspectives of sustainability; a resource for tools, services, white papers; and more importantly, how your business is leading in the sustainability space.  

If you are new to blogging you may not realize there are ways to spread the great green news that you are writing about in your blog posts.  

• Consider building your community of linking your blog post to LinkedIn and Facebook updates.  
• Engage with stakeholders on Twitter to promote relationships.
  
• Collaborate and participate in conversation on LInkedIn groups specific to sustainability concepts of water, energy, and carbon.  
  

Social media provides individuals, communities, businesses, and non-government organizations the ability to connect with business in meaningful discussion from anywhere in the world in real time.   However, according to the recent study, Business Pain: Social Media Proliferation Propels Corporations Toward Uncontrollable Risk, " brands have jumped into the social space at a dizzying pace, incorporating social media into traditional business processes including marketing, sales, customer support, product development, and beyond. Yet adoption has occurred haphazardly, with little control or quality assurance.  

There are challenges to effectively and clearly communicating the business sustainability message internal and external to the organization.  With sustainability concepts and definitions still subject to interpretation and debate, the ‘active’ engagement and dialog with stakeholders cannot be overlooked when building effective business sustainability programs and communication plan.   

As we've discussed in a previous post, Key Components of Social Media for Stakeholder Engagement, there is an emerging role of social media for stakeholder engagement and for businesses to communicate their broader corporate responsibility agenda.  With preferences shifting as to how we communicate and exchange information, social media is becoming the transparent, engaging, competitive advantage that business sustainability delivers.   However, to effectively harness the power of social media to create business sustainability value, what are the key components for success?   

Therein lies the very secret to social media - How do you define success?  What does success look like and how do you measure it?  For many, success may be determined by selling a product or service.  For others, it is about advancing the businesses sustainability conversation - whether that is in regards to their own products/ services or the conversation as a whole.  Proactive businesses are leveraging both definitions of success and the key components to winning strategies include: 

• Defining a clear vision of what social media is expected to do for your organization.  What are your social media goals?  Increase website/ blog traffic? Enhance brand image and credibility? Communicate and engage on CSR/ sustainability related topics? 
• Identify stakeholders and online communities.  Stakeholders are a bit easier to identify, but online communities can be centered theme based and centered on sustainability concepts such as recycling, CSR, water, energy, social investing.  Or, they may be geographically based.
• Actively engage.  Social media is an always on platform.  This implies being present to the ongoing conversation: listening, contributing to the conversation, providing timely feedback, and incorporating that information into products, services, and ongoing dialog.

The days of the controlled and scripted press release may be coming to an end.  The propagation of sustainable information to effectively communicate business sustainability successes is becoming a more active dialog.  Our sustainability consulting encourages businesses to provide even greater transparency into the implementation of sustainability concepts and open the conversation to business stakeholders through social media.

The post, Reassess the Effectiveness of Your Business Sustainability Plan, offers suggestions for reflection but how can your business capitalize in 2012 on the benefits sustainable business strategies offer?  

The secret sauce includes: Get others involved.  Consider green teams.  Include social media for engagement and collaboration with stakeholders. Look for ways within the 15 areas for sustainability improvement to engage and collaborate:  

1.  Office Energy Consumption – Evaluate the average energy use per square foot of office space and implementing best practices to reduce: energy consumption studies, efficiency practices, equipment modifications, etc.

2.  Employee Commuting – Offer employees incentives to ride public transportation or participate in car/van pooling.

3.  Employee Telecommuting – This offers reduced office space and transportation as a potential win-win-win practice for businesses, employees, and the environment. 

4.  Sustainable Design – Consider materials selection, energy consumption, manufacturing, product use and operation, and final disposition, early in the product development process.

5.   Water Conservation – Manage water entering the company and look for opportunities to reuse water.

6.  Management Systems  – Raise eco awareness and company commitment through established sustainability policies, standards, metrics, and self audits.

7.   Environmental Philanthropy – Move beyond just corporate volunteering efforts  and provide access to technology, engineering support, information and research that benefits the local community and the environment.

8.  Packaging – Focus on using as little packaging material as needed and making packaging as recyclable as possible.

9.  Pollution Prevention – Keep attention on both source control and waste reduction

10.  Recycling and Waste Reduction - Anywhere there is a trash can, there should be a recycling bin.

11.  Resource Conservation – Consider material and energy consumption across the entire value chain…reduce, reuse, recycle.

12.  Printing Less – Paper makes up about 35% of a typical company’s total waste stream, how can you reduce your paper use in 2012?

13.  Go Digital – Reduce paper use and get contracts and documents signed more quickly by using electronic signatures.

14.  Sustainable Partnering – A key aspect of business sustainability is making sure that you manage your supply chain and partner with companies with similar values.

15.    Sustainable Education and Development - There is always more you can do to make your business more sustainable.  Encourage education and innovation within the organization. Green teams are great here.

The traditional view of business sustainability has been that companies must be firmly committed, heavily engaged, and fully mature to reap the benefits of applied business sustainability concepts.  The truth is that sustainability is a never ending journey of incremental progress.  By assessing and reassessing your companies current state and the goals of your business sustainability plan, your organization can set itself up for definable success. 

“Social networks aren’t about Web sites. They’re about experiences.” – Mike DiLorenzo, NHL social media marketing director

The path of business sustainability is a journey.  And what makes up a journey?  Experiences.  As sustainability consultants, we're aware that high level sustainability concepts are universal and easier to understand.  However, what is compelling is the expression of how an individual or a company embraces those sustainability concepts to deliver results.  We're all captivated by the unique sustainability experiences but equally important is its delivery and expression.  Social media has proven to be an innovative and effective way to address two of the biggest hurdles around sustainability: defining what it is and providing the means and channels for sharing sustainability experiences.  

Question: Are You Making the Most of Social Media? 

Leveraging today’s tools, progressive organizations armed with business sustainability strategies are reaching new levels of communicating sustainability successes.  But what about the sustainability professionals helping them?  As more and more of our colleagues have asked for guidance on online presence with blogging and profiles on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, we've discovered that both larger organizations and individual consultants are faced with an initial tripping point. 

• What exactly is social media?  
• How can social media support and enhance sustainability?  
  
• How to define the voice, tone and expression of online communications?
• What are the best platforms to express sustainability views, successes, and experiences?
• How can social media support sustainability consulting business development and branding?

Many sustainability consultants know they *should* be using social media. But getting up to speed on the different platforms can be overwhelming, and setting aside the time to create a social media strategy can be downright daunting.  After blogging for 3 years, gaining 25,000+ twitter followers, Taiga Company has been down that road, made the mistakes, and created best practices to effectively use social media as a tool for sustainability professionals.   

Answering the question of Are you Making the Most of Social Media, we have teamed up with Jennifer Woofter at Strategic Sustainability Consulting to offer an 8 week, self-guided, online Social Media for Sustainability Professionals program that includes video lessons, discussion forums, additional resources, and homework assignments that will help you communicate sustainability via social media. 

The role of social media shares similar values to sustainability: authenticity, transparency, and engagement. At Taiga Company, our sustainability consulting encourages all to leverage social media tools to communicate and share the sustainability success stories on social, environmental, and economic goals.  Start sharing your experiences today! 

As 2012 quickly approaches, our business sustainability consulting practice encourages our clients to look at risks through the lens of business sustainability.  Business sustainability is a vehicle enabling your business to meet your goals of profit, growth, and revenue while positively impacting the environment and the social realms of your business.  

Consider how asking the following questions from a business sustainability perspective differ from the traditional approach and how your 2012 could be different.  

•    What business are we in?

•    What are the industry risks?

•    What's our unique positioning within the industry, and what gives us competitive advantage?

•    What are the strategic imperatives that are tied to our overall strategy? 

•    What are the processes that are tied to the strategic imperatives, and then the risks that are tied to those?

Early adopters of a pro-environment policy are answering these questions differently.  Business sustainability reshapes the business conversation.  By evaluating business risks through the lens of sustainability, small businesses are benefiting from the tangible and intangible rewards of going green:

•    Improve Business Reputation

•    Create Brand Differentiation

•    Capture Industry Synergies with other Sustainable Businesses

•    Reduce Business Cost

•    Improve Employee Satisfaction and Retention

•    Lead Your Industry in Best Practices

•    Improved Stakeholder Engagement

•    Respond to Consumer Eco-Preferences 

Are you looking for ways to green your business in 2012?  Our small business resource offerings include:

1. 15 Small Business Tips to Going Green
2. Sustainability: A Small Business Differentiator
3. How Cloud Computing Helps Small Business to Reduce Emissions and Improve Productivity
4. IdeaScale: Small Business Tool for Stakeholder Engagement
5. Social Media Advancing the Business Sustainability Conversation
6. Telecommuting: help your Business, help the Environment
7. The Growing Role of Virtual Conferencing and Webinars in the Sustainability Meeting Landscape
8. 5 Ways to a Greener Website
9. A Guide for SME's: How and Why to go Paperless
10. Intuit's GreenSnapshot: Do You Have it in Your Green Biz Toolkit?
11. CRM: Golden Nugget for Sustainability in Business 
12. Top 10 Benefits of Bicycle Commuting Programs for Businesses