Browsing H&M to see if I could buy a voucher online (I can’t – only in stores), I inevitably ended up in the corporate pages “just to see”, and found something rather interesting on their CSR landing page.
This is the CSR Manager answering questions in a ‘column’ – which she’s been doing since February. It’s not quite a column, although it does convey corporate opinion; it’s not quite a blog, though it does express personality; it’s not quite microblogging, either. It may even be achieved technically by RSS.
The technology doesn’t really matter – or only in that there isn’t really a conversation going on, and whatever technology they’re using at the moment wouldn’t allow that. What does matter is that the person responsible for CSR in that organisation (Ingrid Schullström) is showing their face, taking responsibility, discussing issues and responding to questions – presumably, questions that have been emailed in.
She gets a name-check on the corporate organisation page too, as responsible for Environment and Corporate Social Responsibility. That is unusual – good for H&M.
So what next for H&M; will they feel able to remove the timelag between emailed-question and posted-reply by allowing a blog-style comment and reply? Or even a microblogging connection? I know it takes a lot of time and effort, and is a significant step (from which it might be difficult to retreat) but it would be very interesting to see.
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
have a look at this
http://www.centrica.com/index.asp?pageid=738
or this
http://www.centrica.com/index.asp?pageid=58
for something similar
rgds
hayn
Nice examples, Hayn, thank you for pointing those out. I like what Centrica are doing with their site.
What do you think about corporate sites getting more conversational – is it a good thing, or is it inappropriate?