Social Media for Sustainability

“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.

Escalating conversations on topics such as climate change, carbon legislation, energy independence, and growing consumer eco awareness generate innovative forward eco movement for some but simultaneously create confusion for others. Many in the field, including our sustainability consulting practice, agree that the gap between eco awareness and action may represent the single largest opportunity for global sustainability progress. While traditional ‘green’ efforts have focused on expanding awareness, the recent explosion of information and global interest indicates that the message has been sent out and received. How do we convert eco awareness to eco action? 

As sustainability professionals look to close this gap, different approaches are taken:  information sharing, reports, pictures, videos, blogs, tweets, shares on Facebook and the like.  There are external forces of good working in our favor too.  As written in the post, Nudging and Gaming: A New Green Best Practice?  explored are the concepts of nudging and fun as methods to guide us into better, more sustainable practices that help the environment.  

At the core, these communications are calls to actions.  In marketing terms, a call to action  is a request/direction to ‘do something’—often the next step that a consumer could take toward the purchase of a product or service.  But as mentioned above, from a sustainability perspective, as sustainability professionals, our calls to action are intended to convert environmental awareness into actionable and measurable eco actions.  There are key elements inherent in effective calls to action:

• They have a sense of urgency.
• They conjure creative images.
• They use numbers and statistics.
• They indicate a specific action.
• And, they convert. 

The most effective call to action is one that converts.  In the physical world that equates to taking eco action.  Online, conversion equates to a user clicking a link, downloading a whitepaper, requesting more information, or buying your product or service.  When you think about it, throughout our day to day life as individuals we are all looking for conversions in many areas of our lives.  By asking others to do something for us or help us we are requesting them to take action.  How can we create compelling calls to action in our physical and online worlds to convert eco awareness to eco action?

If you found this information helpful, you'll love our Social Media for Sustainability Professionals, an 8-week, online and self-guided program that provides everything you need to make the most of social media in 2012.

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.

Where does eco inspiration come from?  Everywhere! In a recent Agrion webinar, Exploring Catalyst for Corporate Sustainability Culture Change,  we stated that eco inspiration can present itself in many forms and specifically via social media.  Using twitter as an example,  #WastelessWed is a day to analyze how much we are wasting and uses the day to focus on ways we can all reduce, reuse & recycle more.

First, what exactly does reducing waste mean?  When you avoid making garbage in the first place, you eliminate the disposing of waste or recycling it later.  It's the first component of the sustainability concept of the three R's: reduce, reuse, recycle.  In honor of #Wastelesswednesday, let's take a look at different areas to reduce waste.

Reduce Food Waste:

• Pre plan your meals, buy in bulk, and prepare what you need.
• Compost and turn your old food into healthy soil.
  

• Purchase products that are returnable, reusable or refillable.  Use reusable and refillable containers in your home instead of disposable items.
• Purchase products with the least amount of packaging.
  
• Get the most out of what you buy by comparing warranties and cost to repair or replace the item.
  
• Look for products designed with the environment in mind.  Organic clothing, sustainable furnishings, and solar powered products are just a few examples.
  
• Rent or borrow instead of purchasing.
  
• Reduce paper consumption
  
• Find new life for old furnishings, appliances and clothes
  

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.