Society and the economy are evolving and in today's über-connected world companies and organizations face greater scrutiny than ever with a need to answer to more and more stakeholders beyond just shareholders. The social web provides both opportunities and threats.

CSR, or corporate social responsibility, is a much abused term. According to that fount of all wisdom, Wikipedia, CSR is “a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model”. However, it is frequently misunderstood and recently has often been used to refer just to sustainability, which is only one aspect of CSR. In Europe – and the explanation of CSR that I favour – CSR usually means focusing on operating the business in a socially responsible way. In the USA, CSR is often used to refer to corporate philanthropy, where companies donate a certain share of their profits to charitable causes, which may include arts, sports and culture. Corporate citizenship is another useful way of thinking about CSR, as it doesn't just limit itself to philanthropy.

Therefore the definition of CSR can vary for different organizations, geographies and industry sectors. Elements can include environment and sustainability, employment practices, social welfare, diversity, charitable giving, human rights and volunteering. Increasingly some aspects of corporate social responsibility are becoming regulated by legislation, such as taxation policies to penalize polluters and anti-bribery laws.

One driver for the increased importance of CSR is that while national governments find it challenging to regulate multinational enterprises across countries, citizens and consumers don't face the same constraints. The social web makes it easier for anyone with knowledge and expertise to scrutinize the behaviour of companies and publish their criticisms. The social web provides the tools for citizens and consumers to self-organize and rapidly create a tsunami of criticism against companies that they perceive as not behaving responsibly.

An example of this emerged in the UK in the latter half of 2012 when there was a climate of big companies such as Amazon, Google and eBay being criticized for using complex offshore inter-company relationships to avoid paying their fair share of corporation tax. Starbucks was one of the companies criticized. When faced with a rapidly increasing consumer boycott organized on Twitter and Facebook it attempted to deflect criticism by “volunteering” to pay an extra £20 million in tax.

The social web should be integral to CSR

Companies and organizations can use social media in their CSR for far more than just communications and promoting what they are doing. It can and should be a fundamental aspect of how CSR is integrated into the business. Some of the ways that the social web can be used to make CSR more effective and successful include:

Even before companies start to use the social web proactively to support CSR they should be using it as an intelligence system. One large multinational commissioned a global online audit of both social media and online traditional media to identify the websites, individual influencers and issues that were most likely to have positive or negative impacts on its corporate reputation. As a result it started regular monitoring of environmental forums and identified an increasing amount of conversation about palm oil, enabling it to predict forthcoming campaign activity against it by NGOs on this issue.

By analyzing online conversations a UK-based power generation company looking at potential new sites was able to establish that the local community was not as concerned about potential emissions from the power plant as it was about increased traffic on local roads. As a result the company changed its site plans to make more responsible use of the roads and changed the focus of its communications and lobbying campaign.

Innovative uses of social media for CSR

One of the most powerful uses of social media for CSR is to share ideas and knowledge. A great example of this is Cisco's GETideas.org,²⁰⁰ which is part of a larger CSR effort. GETideas is a web community that describes itself as an “incubator where education leaders can develop their professional learning networks. Think of this space as a professional idea generator – a place where education leaders can be inspired to make change happen in their school, district, or university. Our goal is to bring people together to exchange ideas toward solving education challenges.” It uses blogs, discussion forums and a variety of social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube.

GE was founded more than 100 years ago by inventor Thomas Edison and today the company continues to innovate. In 2010 it created the Ecomagination Challenge²⁰¹ to crowdsource innovative clean energy ideas from stakeholders across the USA. The site has continued to evolve and is now not only a great example of CSR social media, but also of a company that has become a media publishing company in its own right, with a team of professional journalists producing an editorially rich site that has the hallmarks of popular science, engineering and technology magazine sites. GE's latest developments include launching its Healthymagination²⁰² initiative, where it has created several mobile, tablet (iPhone and iPad only) and Facebook apps to help people manage exercise, diet and live healthier lives.

If CSR is a fundamental part of how a business operates then – just like a company's financial performance – it must be reported. If CSR is about what affects all stakeholders then it follows that CSR reporting must be directed at all stakeholders. However, groups such as employees and customers aren't necessarily going to be the most avid consumers of a traditional CSR report.

The social web provides a way for companies to be more engaging and interactive in the way they report. One example of this is nikeresponsibility.com²⁰³ which provides an interactive “journey” through Nike's CSR, along with a more detailed “Our Value Chain” that enables stakeholders to drill down into different aspects of Nike's operations. Another emerging trend is companies creating dedicated mobile and tablet apps to improve CSR reporting, such as GE's sustainability report.²⁰⁴

In the current climate banks are in the firing line for many people who question their commitment to corporate social responsibility. BBVA's Banca Para Todos or “Banking for All” corporate responsibility blog²⁰⁵ is an attempt to redress this. BBVA recognized that a glossy, printed CSR report didn't sit well with its sustainability policy and made the switch to digital, which also complemented its existing commitment to social media (bbvasocialmedia.com) with more than 100 initiatives on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and blogs.²⁰⁶

BBVA wanted its CSR report to be conversational and give stakeholders an opportunity to question it and challenge claims. It did so by dropping both its print and online reports and replacing them with a blog to provide a permanent forum to talk and discuss with stakeholders, analysts, NGOs, academics and ordinary consumers. It deliberately takes a low-key approach using a standard WordPress template and providing links to online forums where related discussions are already taking place.

The blog is a hub for BBVA's other CSR social media channels on YouTube and Twitter, although not Facebook as research indicated that CSR conversation wasn't happening there. The blog gets about 8,000 visits a month from 6,300 unique visitors who read about 2.5 pages each visit, as well as 3,000 subscribers on YouTube with more than 32,000 views.²⁰⁷

The social media trap for bad CSR

Green washing is a term of abuse often levelled at companies that are seen to be using “CSR” to disguise damaging or unethical business practices. BP is one of many companies that has been accused of green washing and in particular was criticized during and after the Gulf of Mexico crisis when its Deepwater Horizon drilling platform spilled millions of gallons of crude oil into the ocean.

BP was criticized for buying relevant keywords and phrases to use Google Adwords to drive web traffic to statements on its website. BP also faced a social media attack from the spoof @BPGlobalPR Twitter account,²⁰⁸ which amassed more than 100,000 followers in less than a month, compared to less than 10,000 for the official @BP_America account.

The account was set up by a California-based comedian who was annoyed at what he saw as BP's “spin” after the disaster. Some of the spoof tweets included “Catastrophe is a strong word, let's all agree to call it a whoopsie daisy.” and “At night the gulf really doesn't look that bad.” One reason the spoof account was so successful was that BP's own social media presence was so weak, enabling the spoof account to quickly fill the vacuum. Another was that frequently it was difficult to differentiate between the spoof tweets and some of the equally astounding quotes by BP executives, such as “What the hell did we do to deserve this?” and “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume”, both by BP's then CEO Tony Hayward.²⁰⁹

Also in 2010 Nestle provided a classic case study of how to get it wrong. Greenpeace produced a hard-hitting YouTube video parodying the “Take a break” advertising tagline of its hero KitKat brand. The video²¹⁰ showed an office worker opening a KitKat, but instead of a chocolate bar he unsuspectingly takes a bite of an orang-utan's finger, as his horrified colleagues look on at the blood dripping down his chin. Nestle responded with threats of legal action and clumsy community management on its Facebook page with moderators attacking and threatening consumers. The campaign eventually resulted in victory for Greenpeace, with Nestle capitulating and agreeing to implement a plan to remove palm oil from its supply chain.

Another problem area of CSR is companies attempting to exploit CSR-related issues for publicity and marketing. A prime example of this is Kenco's Fan Forest Facebook app. For every 20,000 “likes” up to 100,000 Kenco donates £500 to buy an “acre of land” through the World Land Trust to protect Rainforest Alliance-certified farms.²¹¹ This isn't CSR and is simply a crude attempt to buy likes and works out at a grand total of £2,500, or less than a penny a like. Kenco will almost certainly have spent more than that on creating and promoting the app. It doesn't instil confidence that it is anything more than a marketing gimmick in that almost two months after launching the app doesn't give any indication of the number of likes or success of the campaign.

New opportunities for CSR social media

It is perhaps no surprise that some of the companies that rank highest for CSR performance and reporting are also some of those demonstrating the most innovation in using social media to enhance and support their CSR programmes. This includes moving rapidly to adopt emerging new social media channels and networks such as image sharing website Pinterest.

Amongst those using Pinterest for CSR are IBM, which has a Pinterest profile that includes pin boards for “Building a Smarter Planet” and “Smarter Cities”. Another is GE, which has more than 20 pin boards, many devoted to CSR-related activity such as “Eco Efficient” for “Small #green acts that help our environment in a big way”. Pinterest can be used as an attractive “shop window” to share the best CSR imagery and refer people back to your other CSR platforms.

NGOs are also fast to take advantage of new platforms, as Greenpeace's use of Instagram for its Detox “Star in Our Next Video” campaign²¹² shows. Greenpeace asked Instagram users to upload photos of themselves wearing plain t-shirts then tag them #detox #peoplepower with a caption saying the name of the fashion brand they want to stop using toxic chemicals. Greenpeace will use the images to make a video using the t-shirts as a canvas for the detox campaign images and text.

As the social web becomes ever more integral to people's lives it will become even more important for companies to start embedding social media into every aspect of their corporate social responsibility. By not doing so not only do they miss out on the opportunities it provides, but also open themselves up to vastly increased risks to their reputation and future survival.

Biography

Stuart Bruce MCIPR (@stuartbruce) is an independent international public relations trainer and consultant specializing in online corporate communications, digital public affairs and corporate social media. Based in the UK he travels to provide PR training and counsel to corporate and government clients in the European Union, Middle East and USA. In 2011, in partnership with the United Nations, Stuart led the world's first global study into FT Global 500 companies using social media for CSR. He was MD of a PRWeek Top 150 online PR consultancy, counselling clients such as Unilever, Sony Mobile, PayPal, HSBC and GSK.