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Archives for 2008

Social Web Becomes Mainstream – Is Your Brand There?

According to a new report by Forrester, the social web has become mainstream in the United States.  In fact, it’s grown to be commonplace with more than 75% of Internet users actively participating in some form of social media in 2008.  That’s up from 56% in 2007.  If you were wondering whether or not your brand should have a presence in social media, it looks like the proof is in the numbers. 

Of course, some social web participants are far more active than others, and the trick is finding active social web users to act as brand advocates and word-of-mouth influencers to give your brand a boost.  However, the first step is to get a social web presence for your brand, if you don’t already have one. [Read more…] about Social Web Becomes Mainstream – Is Your Brand There?

Interesting Features in Investor Relations Websites

Palm, the company that more or less started the mainstream PDA movement, has an interesting little feature on their Investor Relations page called the “Shareholder Briefcase.”  It is nothing too complicated really, but a nice touch in the realm of user interaction.

The Shareholder Briefcase is a way for an investor or potential investor using the Palm IR site to collect several documents or files as they explore the information available and determine what they want to take with them to research further.  In many ways, it operates very similarly to the shopping cart feature on most e-commerce sites.

Of course, such a feature requires a user to register.  Actually, it doesn’t, it could easily be handled by cookies, but that wouldn’t work across multiple browsers or computers, and why pass up the chance to get an obviously interested person’s contact information?

Once registered, the user can navigate the IR portion of the site at their leisure.  When they find something that interests them, they just click the “Add to briefcase” icon. This keeps the user from having to click and open every PDF file, DOC file, or PowerPoint file they are interested in while they are on the site.  Instead, the user keeps a running list of what they have found of interest and then when they are ready, they can either download all the files, or even email all the files to themselves.

Either way, the users of the Palm investor relations web site have a great way to collect all that information and then go through it at their leisure instead of maybe skipping important information due to time constraints, or worse, forgetting a useful document that they wanted to review, but did not open initially.

Can something like this work for any Investor Relations page?  Yes.  The software to handle something like this already exists in many formats.  It may actually be possible to use your company’s existing shopping cart software with just a few modifications to handle functionality similar to this.

You can never go wrong giving the user another way to get what they need.

CSR Doesn’t Pay — A Response

This post is a response to David Vogel’s article “CSR Doesn’t Pay” , published on forbes.com on 16th October 2008.

Before writing it I checked out who David Vogel is. He holds the Solomon P. Lee Distinguished Professorship in Business Ethics at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Wow, not someone who I’d readily cross swords with. However, he has his views and I have mine. We disagree. And here is why…..

What Is CSR?

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is all about ensuring businesses do not forget the social cost of their pursuit of financial profits.

A horrendous, but thankfully rare example would be that of Chevron in the Amazon Rainforest where the company extracted oil for the massive North American petrol market.

They left behind them a poisoned ecosystem, drenched with chemicals and thoroughly unusable. Their methods would not have been tolerated in their target market but the company’s primary concern was, it appears, the cost of the operation not the health of those involved or the legacy it left behind.

CSR is about taking responsibility for your actions. Instead of recognising the need to clear up this mess and take action Chevron has consistently ducked the issue and tried to get others to shoulder the burden.

The core of the CSR agenda is to get companies to understand the ramifications of their actions and plan for them ahead of time, not try and ignore them or sweep them into dusty corners when things go wrong.

What CSR Is Not

There are three very important things that CSR is not.

It is not about philanthropy. The general giving of wealth to help needy, social or community programmes should be applauded to the rafters. However, it has nothing to do with responsibility.

Neither is it about the export of values. For example, the western garment industry relies in part on the nimble fingers of children to do the most delicate works of stitching and embroidery. Theirs is a different cultural, social and economic situation to the West’s; the two should not be homogenised.

Finally, CSR is not and never has been about making money. It is about treating the people who work for a company and the community within which it operates with respect.

Money only comes into it because businesses have, by definition, to be able to cover their costs. So CSR should not, without good cause, result in a company making a loss. That is different to CSR making a profit.

What Did Professor Vogel Say?

The Market For Virtue Frontcover

Professor Vogel starts the Forbes article brightly, stating that there’s a lot of buzz about CSR and how it will make a company more profitable. This, he wishes to say, is hogwash and most of the rest of the CSR community will agree with him.

However his rationale for wishing to destroy this myth is jaw dropping:

There is a “‘market for virtue,” but it is a very limited one. Nor is it growing.

I was so taken aback I had to read this several times just to make sure I had read it correctly. Still unconvinced that I’d understood the argument correctly, I went and leafed through a list of his publications.

Included in these from 2006, is “The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility”. An extract from this book states:

There are important limits to the market for virtue. The main constraint on the market’s ability to increase the supply of corporate virtue is the market itself … There is a place in the market economy for responsible firms. But there is also a large place for their less responsible competitors.

So no, I hadn’t misunderstood. Professor Vogel considers CSR to be a commodity, something to be valued and traded. Having taken this in and fully digested it, I wasn’t too surprised to find the Forbes article continued:

Part of the reason why CSR does not necessarily pay is that only a handful or consumers know or care about the environmental or social records of more than a handful of firms. “Ethical” products are a niche market: Virtually all goods and services continue to be purchased on the basis of price, convenience and quality.

What’s Wrong With This?

For starters, I’m rather shocked that Professor Vogel has chosen to make CSR synonymous with “virtue”, a word loaded with overtones of morality and righteousness.

No one is suggesting that businesses should replace spiritual organisations as the ultimate paragons of virtue. To say that they are, when the only purpose is to knock the suggestions down, seems self serving and base.

Then there’s the market. Professor Vogel states in the article:

The market has many virtues, but reconciling corporate goals and public purposes is unfortunately not among them.

Good. In that case let’s be clear. CSR is not a “niche market” … it’s not about making profits or being financially valued. In fact, it’s the very antithesis of this.

It is a public purpose. It is something which is necessary for the greater good of all mankind. It’s about ensuring the pursuit of financial value doesn’t get put before caring for our fellow humans and our environment.

The Future Of CSR

Responsibility

In the quote above Professor Vogel states that consumers don’t know or care about the intricacies of CSR. They don’t know or care about the intricacies of financial reporting either, but that doesn’t stop it being important.

The truth is that this commoditisation of CSR has come about because businessmen are desperate to try and stave off regulation in this area. They’re trying to fit something into the market which doesn’t belong there.

If Professor Vogel is a leading CSR academic then he needs to be listened to. If the market cannot take on board CSR then the only option is far reaching and robust legislation.

Professor Vogel’s alternative, to allow some companies to be more irresponsible than others, is like saying we can have some politicians who are more corrupt or some businessmen who are more fraudulent. This is unthinkable.

At the bottom line there is no room in the advancement of human decency and respect for any talk of money. On the other hand, to suggest there should be a market in selling human misery sounds awfully like an argument which leads to slavery to me.

Picture Credit: “Haas Business School” by toolfan.hess from Flickr under Creative Commons Attribution License.

Cause Marketing in Ads Boosts Brand Sales for Some Categories

If you’re in the business of selling personal hygiene products, then you might want to look into tying a cause to your ads ASAP based on the results of a new report from Cone and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.  According to the press release, the unique study followed the purchase patterns of 182 consumers after viewing ads with and without cause marketing messages included in them.  Those consumers were then sent shopping in a convenience store mock-up created for the study and asked to purchase items from four categories: shampoo, toothpaste, chips and lightbulbs.

The results showed a big jump in sales for shampoo (up 74% when the ad was tied to a cause) and toothpaste (28% increase).  The study also found that consumers spent twice as much time viewing ads with cause-related messages in them than they did viewing non-cause ads. [Read more…] about Cause Marketing in Ads Boosts Brand Sales for Some Categories

How the giants measure & manage human capital

We all know that you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Measure to manage

Knowing what to measure, and how to do it isn’t always easy – and in Human Resources, just as in Operations, getting it wrong can lead to bad decisions. Setting performance measures can change people’s behaviour as they work towards the measures, and if the measures aren’t good, there can be unforeseen results: not always good ones. Let’s just not discuss the bankers rewarded for taking high-risk positions, leading to the current financial problems …

But measuring the right things is a far broader topic than just performance measures; it involves getting a proper handle on the ‘people’ data. If – for example – you don’t track the age profile of your staff, you may find that one year you lose a great deal of human capital and knowledge because many of your most experienced staff retire, with a consequent loss of expertise within the company. If you’d been fully aware of this risk, you could have set up flexible retirement schemes, or managed the succession planning process better, or come up with a scheme to capture the critical knowledge that those individuals had.

Infohrm are holding a conference in November to look at how to use data analysis and data-driven decision making to improve business outcomes. The keynote speakers include very senior staff from RBS, Metropolitan Police and the National Australia Bank (all people-driven businesses) as well as academics who specialise in strategic workforce planning and human resources. Other presenters will be there from Nokia, National Grid, Royal Mail, BAA, Deloitte, Allied Irish Bank and Unilever.

That’s a group of speakers with a lot of experience talking about their companies and how they measure, analyse and report on workforce data to meet consumer demands, control costs, drive business change and maximise stakeholder engagement. Should be very interesting … and it may be a cliché, but learning from the experience of others, particularly the giants in the field, might just get you a better view.