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Archives for October 2012

7 Sections for a CSR Website | Part 1 of 2

A recent article by Amita Joseph on the Network for Business Sustainability (NBS) looked at how increasing globalisation is affecting society and the environment within India.

In it she highlights seven aspects of a business where companies should take action to demonstrate their responsibility and sustainability, and goes on to say:

India can be seen as a test case for the adoption of globalized capitalism … If companies are able to learn from the experience of India’s last two decades, the result will be a better economic model in India and elsewhere. Companies must aspire to be responsible corporate citizens and avoid losing reputation and goodwill.

Not all of these are typical items for CSR.  However, as has been long argued, CSR is not a slice of the business but the foundation of responsible and sustainable business practices.  It should therefore be welcomed into all aspects of corporate life.

This article will take the NBS aspects one at a time, quote the article and look at them in greater detail with a website example which addresses the demand to demonstrate the aspect and is not intended to detail all the sections a CSR website should have.
[Read more…] about 7 Sections for a CSR Website | Part 1 of 2

One plus one can be greater than two: the power of We

wooden word we‘We’ can mean something different every time you say it.

For a business, apart from being self-referential (‘we do this’), ‘we’ usually means business + stakeholder.

Here are six types of ‘we’ where working together on responsibility activities creates more than working alone:

  1. Where ‘we’ = business + customer

    There have been a number of initiatives where businesses and customers have combined their efforts on particular corporate responsibility projects. Many of these are in the retail sector, such as:

    • Tesco’s Buy One Give One Free (buy an item of school uniform; Tesco will give an entire school uniform to a child in Kenya, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka)
    • The Big Bra Hunt initiated by Oxfam but also part of the Oxfam/Marks & Spencer Clothes Exchange. Uniqlo also operate a clothing-recycling CSR strategy with UNHCR. These projects support the reuse aspect of reduce-reuse-recycle by asking customers to return the clothes they’ve finished with for reuse elsewhere.

    There are also examples where companies work together to help customers improve their energy efficiency, such as utility companies working with OPower to communicate with customers about their electricity usage using gamification ideas and providing information on how to make savings. When provided with this information, consumers typically respond by reducing their bills by 2.5-4% a month, and the OPower website reports savings of over 1,520,000,000KW so far…

  2. Where ‘we’ = business + NGOs

    There are many, many examples of companies working with NGOs to combine skills for the greater good. Here is just one of the many:

    HSBC is working with three NGOs (Earthwatch, Wateraid and WWF) on a Water Programme. Together, by combining financial strength, scale and expertise in the issues involved, they will tackle problems of water supply and sanitation in river basins in order to benefit communities in need and enable economies to prosper. Over 100,000 HSBC employees will be involved…

  3. Where ‘we’ = business + business

    Businesses working together on CSR projects or initiatives include:

    • companies related by supply chain. An example of collaboration here is Sedex which enables the secure exchange of sustainability information between suppliers and their customers. By working together, it reduces the burden of multiple audits on suppliers, while supporting buyers in managing ethical and responsible practices in their supply chain.
    • competitors collaborating in consortia, such as the Sustainability Consortium which involves companies within a sector working together to develop standards and tools to measure sustainability.
  4. Where ‘we’ = business + employees

    This is perhaps both more commonplace and more difficult to pin down. The usual style of interaction is of the business asking employees which charities they’d like the business to support, or of the business match-funding employees’ fund-raising activities, or of the business supporting employees to work on community projects during work-time. These are at the simpler end of ‘we’.

    A slightly more complex angle is that of businesses supporting employees to change their energy-related choices in their private lives. One example is SwissRe. Their COYou2 Reduce and Gain programme enables employees to claim subsidies from the company for a range of emissions-cutting investments, such as groundwater heat pumps, solar panels or hybrid cars.

  5. Where ‘we’ = business + crowd

    Examples here include companies that have asked ‘the crowd’ to come up with sustainability ideas or to nominate and vote for causes to be supported:

  6. Where ‘we’ = business + academia

    And companies work with academics to move sustainability forward in a variety of different ways. For example:

    • Shell developed the Hearts and Minds safety toolkit, based on 20 years of university research. Profits from the sale of this kit to other companies fund research and development to help companies improve their HSE performance.
    • BT is working with the University of Cambridge’s Engineering and Design Centre on a toolkit for “Designing our Tomorrow“, which is scheduled to be launched next year. The toolkit will allow companies to evaluate the costs and benefits, and the environmental impact, of using different materials or of changing their approach.
    • Nestle worked with Swiss College of Agriculture to develop the RISE system for the dairy sector to assess sustainability across multiple dimensions

There you have it: 6 ways in which businesses are grouping and regrouping in different ‘we’ formations to work towards a more responsible future.

This post is part of Blog Action Day, which this year is discussing “the power of we”.

Previous contributions to Blog Action Day have been:
2011: Lessons From Food Security: Telling Us What Matters
2010: Mixing Oil and Water
2009: Climate change and the corporate site
2008: Celebrating the FTSE 100: action on the breadline
2007: Enticing the green investor

Internet Ad Revenues up 14% and Mobile up 95%

ad revenue moneyAccording to the Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Internet Advertising Revenue Report, internet advertising revenues were up by 14% in the first six months of 2012 to $17 billion. It’s hard to believe that when the IAB began tracking internet advertising revenue back in 1996,the first half-year revenue recorded was $82 million.

At the same time, mobile advertising nearly doubled over the prior year to $1.2 billion during the first half of 2012. The online advertising revenue data in the report comes from web sites, commercial online services, free email providers, and all other companies selling online advertising, and it’s considered one of the most accurate measurements of interactive advertising revenues.

Additional highlights from the report include:

  • Digital video commercials (a component of display-related advertising in the IAB report) increased by 18% year-over-year during the first six months of 2012 and brought in $1 billion in revenue.
  • Search ad revenues for the first half of 2012 increased by 19% and brought in $8.1 billion in revenue. That equates to 48% of all 2012 half-year internet ad revenues.
  • Display-related advertising revenues during the first half of 2012 increased by 4% to $55.6 billion. That’s 33% of all 2012 half-year internet ad revenues.
  • Retail made up the largest category of internet ad spending during the first six months of 2012 and claimed 20% of the total revenues at $3.4 billion. The automotive category claimed 13% of total revenues at $2.2 billion.
  • Performance-based ad pricing revenues rose by 19% to $11.5 billion in the first six months of 2012 (67% of all revenues). Impression-based ad pricing revenues increased by 11% to $5.2 billion (31% of all revenues), but hybrid ad pricing revenue dropped by 60% to $368 million (2% of all revenues).

 You can see the specific ad revenue breakdown during the first six months of 2012 for each ad category below:

  1. Search = 48%
  2. Display Related= 33%
    • Banner Ads = 21%
    • Digital Video Commercials = 6%
    • Rich Media = 3%
    • Sponsorship = 2%
  3. Mobile = 7%
  4. Classifieds = 7%
  5. Referrals/Lead Generation = 5%
  6. E-mail = 0%

As you might already know, but it’s always good to see the actual data, search advertising and display advertising still dominate internet advertising but mobile represents a world that’s full of opportunities, which advertisers are just starting to tap into. Furthermore, email has become the forgotten child who deserves more attention, don’t you think?

Image: Leonardini

Capturing the Cognitive Flow of User Engagement

The Internet is technically just an infinite spider web of computer connections, and the laptops, smartphones, and tablets we use to access this massive web are merely a complex weave of mechanical bits, pieces, and wires. While the Internet is a playground for complex machinery, this playground and these machines are orchestrated by live humans. And humans are, and always will be, driven by the principals of psychology.

Because psychological principles drive human behavior, the design of user-centered web applications is the surest route to the success of your corporate website. It all centers upon user engagement.

According to research scientists at Yahoo! and Microsoft, and other academic experts, user engagement can be defined as “…the quality of the user experience that emphasizes  the positive aspects of the interaction, and in particular the phenomena associated with being captivated by technology.”[1]

…being captivated by technology…

How can one captivate another with technology? While there are several elements to user engagement, the classic psychological concept of flow is a primary factor. [2]

Flow is defined as a psychological state in which the Internet user feels motivated, efficient, and happy. When in this state, an Internet user will become completely immersed in their activity, enjoying the absence of irrelevant  thoughts and perceptions. The concept of flow is broken into a cluster of factors:

  • Clear goals: Most likely the user will have clear goals when they are surfing the web. Is your website topic relevant to user expectations?
  • Immediate feedback: While you cannot control the speed of the user’s connection, you can control the efficiency of your navigation.
  • Personal skills well-suited to the challenge: Know your audience and be aware of what will motivate them to delve deeper into your website.
  • Merger of action and awareness & Concentration on the task at hand: Be sure to remove any unnecessary text or aesthetic distractions from each page of your website.
  • A sense of personal control: Once again this goes back to navigation; the user wants to feel in control of their navigation. So be sure to clean up any broken links and streamline your navigation system.
  • A loss of self-consciousness: This can somewhat circuitously be applied to any privacy concerns of the user.  They are more likely to feel relaxed and engaged if concerns of privacy are far from their mind. Be sure to display a privacy/security policy and any associated badges you may have.
  • An altered sense of time: If you meet all elements of a user-centric site, your visitors will be so immersed they will lose track of time – this is a crucial goal of flow.
  • Experience which becomes autotelic: This means internal curiosity – Incorporate interesting elements such as a resource page or share interesting and relevant research to satisfy the intrinsic curiosity of your users.

In summary, when designing your website, be sure that nothing is inhibiting or blocking the potential for user-flow. For those corporations in the fashion industry, flow is especially important, but it is important in other industries as well. [3]  Regardless of your industry, user-engagement is a universal staple of website design so make sure to cover all of your bases.

1 Towards a science of user engagement: Attfield, S., Kazai, G., Lalmas, M., Piwowarski, B. http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/8642/

2 The psychology of optimal experience: Csikszentmihalyi

3 Bringing virtual reality for commercial web sites: Bhatt, G. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1071581903001344

Getting People Talking

The term ‘social networking’ is so ingrained in our daily life that it’s easy to forget why it started out that way. Of course, social networks don’t deliver tangible products or services, rather they allow you to socialise with others on a level that wasn’t possible beforehand. These may well be people you know, but they could just as well be people you’ve never met: perhaps they’re just people you’d like to know.

The reason social networks are so successful are that they bring people with common interests together and get them talking which, if you’re trying to interest people in your corporate site, is exactly what you need. Trading information allows people to become better informed about your opportunities and you about theirs. One of the finest ways of doing this is by creating your own social network online: a forum.

Questions and Answers

Whichever side of the table we’ve been on, we have all been through that interview where the applicant isn’t very clued up on the role. This is particularly common for difficult technical positions and, really, it’s understandable: the fine details of a role are what you learn on the job. Forums can be fantastic ways of allowing applicants or even recruits to talk with each other or current employees about the role and to help themselves prepare for that big interview or the big first day.

Letting Networkers Network

Using a homegrown forum allows new or potential recruits to talk to and find other people who could well be useful to your business in the future. Whether interviewees get the job or not is not important – connections are useful inside and outside of your firm. If you think about the number of people you’ve met at interviews alone, you’d be amazed at the expertise available at your fingertips: a forum can do that on a huge scale.

Innovation in Moderation

It’s true that forums need to be closely moderated and that anything inappropriate should be removed, but it can also be interesting to see what potential applicants have to say about a role online. Beware – candidates will talk much more openly on a forum than in an interview, but a forum could even be a useful pre-interview tool for seeing who does and who doesn’t have the right online communication skills.

A good, well moderated and active forum can be an invaluable tool for a recruiter. It can draw in applicants or introduce recruits to one another and can act as a useful SEO tool.  If  you’re still unconvinced, take a look at sites like thestudentroom.co.uk to see just how useful the right forum can be.