Authenticity and Audience – Being Human: interview with Mallen Baker
January 10, 2012
It seems obvious that not all your stakeholders are the same, with the same needs; yet for many companies it would seem that one size fits all when it comes to corporate responsibility reporting and communication. Simply producing a CR report isn’t enough to communicate with all of your audiences; and not all of them want all the information there is in your report.
Paul (Corporate Eye CEO) talked to Mallen Baker about the importance of identifying the different audiences for your corporate responsibility communications: about providing them with the information that interests them; about creating the opportunity to engage with them and to discuss the issues that matter.
I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.
Part 1: Tailoring content and conveying authenticity
Key topics:
- understanding the different audiences
- tailoring content for those audiences
- conveying authenticity and generating trust
Soundbites:
“The key distinguishing features between a good report online and a mediocre one are a couple of things. First of all is that the company is clear about who its audience or audiences are… and the second part is the integrity of information and the authenticity of the voice that you’re hearing.”
“If you care about your audiences, you use a medium and an approach that they will relate to as your starting point.”
“Consumers see through the fluff very quickly. And all of the polls show that they’re becoming more and more cynical about the claims that companies make in the environmental and ethical space.
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Length: 8:40
Download: Mallen Baker interview: part 1
Part 2: Communicating commitment
Key topics:
- the Centrica report interviews
- CEO commitment; embedding sustainability in the business
- discussing issues that are in the public domain
Soundbites:
“[they] had the courage to step up and say ‘We are prepared to be placed in an area that’s just slightly outside of the comfort zone’ ”
“Whenever there’s a controversy in the press relating to a company the first thing that I will do is go to their website and see what they say about it… the mind boggles just how often the answer to that question is ‘Nothing’”
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Length: 4:13
Download: Mallen Baker interview: part 2
Part 3: Authenticity and audit
Key topics
- third party commentary
- collaborating with the audience to solve a problem
- using neutral spaces to exchange ideas and information
Soundbites:
“Having trusted third parties who have had the time – and the incentive presumably – to look carefully at what the company’s doing and to talk to them, and then to give their own reflections, good and bad… that generally plays pretty well”
“The other thing that provides authenticity is when people not only are admitting that something has gone the wrong way this year but actually seek to engage their audiences with problems that they face that they haven’t yet worked out how to solve”
“It’s shifted the focus a little bit from ‘the company is the star, the company is the centre of the universe’ and puts it into a position where there are sustainability issues and the company is one of the actors… one of the creators of environmental consequences alongside the rest of society”
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Length: 7:15
Download: Mallen Baker interview: part 3
Part 4: Audience and integrated reporting
Key topics:
- integrated reporting
- importance of the audience
- interim sustainability reporting
Soundbites:
“integrated reporting could be … a very positive thing, and potentially a dangerous thing in equal measure.”
“The encouraging thing is that… it will lead you to be clear about the communication that you send to one of your key audiences… the danger, the downside, is if you begin to believe that that integrated report is whyat you produce for all of your stakeholder audiences.”
“Many of your direct stakeholders do not get their information from reports.”
“Where you are engaging your customers or your supply chain or your employees with what you are doing and what’s happened, then the more up-to-date and current that is, and preferably more of a discussion and two-way flow that is, then the more likely you’re going to succeed.”
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Length: 6:47
Download: Mallen Baker interview: part 4
Part 5: Social media and CSR
Key topics:
- the right social media mindset
- going to where the audience is
- expanding the audience for CSR
Soundbites:
“You can’t have a discussion with a corporate entity. You can only have a discussion with a human being or a highly trained parrot.”
“One of the big challenges for the companies who are used to corporate communications and to being faceless – except for maybe the CEO in certain contexts – is that they find it very difficult to shift to a medium where it’s personal.”
“If you really want to engage the people who are your stakeholders… you need to go to where they naturally gather. And social media potentially creates tools that enable you to do that.”
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Length: 9:13
Download: Mallen Baker interview: part 5
Part 6: Trends in CSR communication
Key topics:
- conflicting trends in CSR communication
- legislation and innovation
- the human element; stories
Soundbites:
“The evolution of corporate responsibility reporting or sustainability reporting to date is completely unsustainable in itslef, ironically, because… the current state of the art doesn’t connect with audiences.”
“The trend has been more and more GRI reports, more and more standardisation. And I start to see a counter trend now, which is from the leading companies [who are starting to say] “We’re going to find ways that actually communicate better with some of our key audiences… we’re interested in finding the way that works.”
“It’s the human element, the story. … and it is the most elusive element because it requires you to be prepared to corporately communicate on a human level. That will always be a minority sport. But I think there can be some very, very good rewards for those who will pick up the intelligence about how it’s done well and give it a go.”
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Length: 7:32
Download: Mallen Baker interview: part 6
Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.
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Length: 43.43
Download: Mallen Baker interview (whole interview)
Download: Transcript
Many thanks to Mallen for taking the time to talk to Paul.
Who were we speaking to?
Mallen Baker is a writer, speaker and strategic advisor on corporate social responsibility and Founding Director of Business Respect. He is responsible for the Business Respect email newsletter on CSR, which is the longest running CSR internet newsletter in the world.
He is a regular columnist and contributing editor with Ethical Corporation.
Mallen was formerly the development director with Business in the Community, where he was responsible for developing BITC’s approach to marketplace issues, which includes how companies manage issues that arise around their core products and services. He produced the Marketplace Responsibility Principles working with a leadership team of CEOs from major companies headquartered in the UK.
He initiated the Business Impact Review Group – the group of 20 companies who developed a common approach to CSR reporting, and was responsible for the work of the Business Impact Taskforce which produced the landmark “Winning with Integrity” report.
Mallen chaired Kingfisher plc’s Stakeholder Advisory Panel 2007-2010, and was a board member of CSR Europe 2006 – 2008.
Marketing Your Brand with a Social App
January 10, 2012
Should your brand build a custom social app? That’s the question Michael Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media, tries to answer in an article he wrote for Advertising Age. Michael summed up his opinion quite succinctly when he wrote, “Applications need to bring value to people and should be social by design.”
It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of social apps, particularly when other brands experience great success with social apps that integrate directly into Facebook and puts the brand in front of a huge potential audience of over 800 million Facebook members. However, Michael warns us that the vast majority of social apps don’t work.
He reminds us that apps are not a social strategy. They’re a tool to help a brand connect with people. Your social strategy should be focused on offering those people something so you can interact with them and cultivate relationships with them. To support his view, he referred to a speech Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg delivered in 2011 and explained, “Facebook is not nearly as concerned with how many users they have, as much as how those users are interfacing with the platform and each other.”
With those tips in mind, Michael shared his suggestions for building a social app for a brand so it has a chance for success:
- Useful: Your social app needs to be useful and actually do something for users by making their lives easier or helping them in some way.
- Value-driven: Your social app needs to add value to the people’s lives who use it. Just as products need to benefit consumers, so must your social app or there is little reason to use it.
- Social: Your social app should have built-in social functionality, so a user’s friends see them using it with no additional effort (e.g., on their Facebook News Feeds) and are intrigued enough to try it themselves.
You can read Michael’s complete article with more details about his tips for social app success and social strategy development here. What do you think of his view of social apps for brands? Will you re-strategize your brand’s social app plans? Leave a comment and share your thoughts on branded social app strategies.
Image: Babyben
Chicken suits, chameleons and the one true way
November 25, 2011
Were you at Ethical Corporation’s Corporate Responsibility Reporting and Communications conference last week? If you weren’t, you missed a treat.
1 word
The word of the conference, had we been asked to choose one, would have been:
Humility
The number of times people urged that companies should display some humility in their corporate social responsibility reporting was striking…
1 central theme
Whether talking about reports, communications, stakeholder groups or engagement approaches, the clear message from many of the discussions was that there is not One True Way of ‘doing’ CSR, of reporting on it or of talking about it.
One size does not fit all
There were, though, lots of examples of different ways that companies had found that worked for them, and so might work as part of someone else’s toolset. It helps to be a chameleon, using different language and information for different groups.
4 quotes
There were many tweet-worthy snippets that came out of the discussion. Here are 4 that I noted down:
Corporate responsibility reporting is not PR jazz hands
The corporate responsibility report is not for communication: no-one reads it for fun
Stop communicating and start talking
A CR report, then, is both more and less than people might think. It isn’t – or shouldn’t be! – spin; it isn’t – or shouldn’t be – about sitting in a bathtub of baked beans; it does matter to the business and it is necessary but not sufficient to explain your approach to responsibility to your various audiences.
6 topics
It wasn’t physically possible to attend all the sessions without a time-turner, so this is my pick of the themes I identified; it would be interesting to see someone else’s selection.
My six:
- Driving performance: integrated reporting and Board conviction
- Different stakeholders; different stories
- Global-local, sector storytelling and authenticity
- Collaborating with activists
- Stakeholder outreach
- The investor view of your CSR work
I hope to look at some of these topics in more detail over the next couple of weeks; I’ll add links in this post as I get to them. Or, of course you could subscribe to our RSS feed.
If you’re intrigued, make sure you get to the next conference; this is my pick, and I’m quite sure others will have gone home with a different set of ideas.
Social Media: Extending and Connecting the Recruitment Conversation
November 22, 2011
This is the third in a series of three interviews focused on careers, employer brand and social media: Paul (Corporate Eye CEO) interviews Matthew Berry, Resourcing Director at Centrica.
Often there’s a gap – particularly for graduates – between the time of recruitment, and the first day of work. How do you keep that relationship fresh?
And then again, at the end of employment: how can you keep communication channels open?
In this interview, Matt Berry explains how social media can be used to extend the conversation at both ends—and, indeed, to connect/reconnect employees with the company:
“alumni and onboarding… there’s a lot of potential, and the reason is that these networks are about relationships and communicating, and that’s what these tools are for. They’re designed to build a network and to communicate with people.
“the key in all of this: it’s about initiating a conversation. It’s still got to be a quality conversation
“with social media—and this is something that a lot of people underestimate—you must constantly turn the handle to engage”
Paul and Matthew talk about Centrica’s experience of extending relationships with candidates, employees and alumni through social recruiting techniques… do listen, this interview is crammed full of insight and information about how one of the largest companies in the UK manage social media recruitment.
I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.
Part 1: Social media and recruitment
Key topics:
- Facebook, interns and graduates
- LinkedIn, professional hires and the advantages of being a direct recruiter
- targeting on LinkedIn
- importance of investing in skilled social media people
Soundbites:
“We have up to 500,000 applicants per annum… so trying to find a simple way of getting messages out to that fairly large audience is not easy, but social media lends itself very nicely to that”
“‘RateMyPlacement’, for example, is very important around the summer placement in the intern programmes because via that feedback and word of mouth via our participants we are building a reputation in delivering a great work experience. We encourage all our summer placement to leave their views on those ratings sites…”
“one of the big benefits we see in LinkedIn is that certainly half to three quarters of anyone [professional hires] that we would hire is already on it”
“when we do our executive recruitment [LinkedIn] would be the place we start no matter what”
“social media doesn’t just happen. It is an interactive thing by its nature and it needs some skilled people to really get full advantage from it”
“We have our applicant tracking system … linked in to Facebook, so you can physically tap into any job in our organisation in the UK from our Facebook page”
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Length: 19:18
Download: Matthew Berry interview: part 1
Part 2: Social media and onboarding
Key topics:
- social media and decision-making
- using social media for support
- control, pragmatism and the front line
Soundbites:
“it’s about trying to put information where people are already… our graduates, four or five years ago, were creating a Centrica 2007 intake Facebook page. We didn’t. And we couldn’t stop it if we wanted”
“so we just started tapping into that, giving them a framework… we’ll have induction days which we completely schedule via these groups, and they communicate, talk and support each other”
“one of the things we’ve recently built is an onboarding site, specifically for anyone that joins our business the moment they say ‘Yes, I’d love the job’. And one of the key things there is linking people into our social network”
“we can’t stop people saying what they say anyway but at least we know what’s being said, which is of huge benefit”
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Length: 5:49
Download: Matthew Berry interview: part 2
Part 3: Social media and alumni
Key topics
- risks and niche knowledge
- maintaining relationships with talent
- sharing internal information with alumni
Soundbites:
“We’ve got some demographic challenges where we have to think a bit more flexibly about how do we capture some of that talent”
“not to have some mechanism to keep in touch is a bit of a risk, particularly where some of these individuals have such niche knowledge that’s very hard to replace”
“we’ll always be doing projects or elements of work that will still be of interest to that professional community”
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Length: 6:39
Download: Matthew Berry interview: part 3
Part 4: Social media and referral recruiting
Key topics:
- social-media-enabling the referral process
- tracking and transparency
- engaging internally to get people to embrace it
Soundbites:
“social media is an underestimated tool for referral programmes”
“It’s not how do we engage the external marketplace, it’s how do we engage the internal marketplace”
“we make sure that any role we have running an internal person can look at it and within [...] two clicks they can share that job with their friends. So you could send me a link [...] and I could apply straight away, and that would also help the business track the fact that you were the person that had introduced me”
“the external team now handles all internal recruitment as well… that team is now directly talking to all of these candidates. We would have 5-10,000 applications internally per annum, so we’re making sure that we’re the hub of all that communication”
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Length: 5:28
Download: Matthew Berry interview: part 4
Part 5: Social recruitment governance
Key topics:
- social media policies, freedom and message control
- presenting a coherent front to the external candidate world
- avoiding the cold-call scenario
- merging of the social media and recruitment platforms
Soundbites:
“we have a social media policy of course which is a fairly straightforward thing [...] social media is part of everyone’s lives. Use it but use your common sense”.
“The big challenge with social media – or one of them – is that if you don’t keep your content relevant and fresh and up-to-date then there’s no reason for anyone to look at anything that you’re doing”
“it’s about the engagement activity that would get you interested to come in rather than pushing hard to push opportunities at people”
“Businesses will have to get more mature in the social media space, which is going to take a little bit of time. I think it’s an opportunity to make the process a bit more engaging. But I don’t think it’s going to make life easier.”
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Length: 8:24
Download: Matthew Berry interview: part 5
Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.
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Length: 45:39
Download: Matthew Berry interview (whole interview)
Download: Transcript
Many thanks to Matthew for taking the time to talk to Paul.
Who were we speaking to?
Matthew Berry started his career as a chemical engineer in the steel industry covering a number of operational, technical and management positions.
With a desire for travel, Matthew moved from Australia to the UK and worked as a Search and Selection consultant for European energy and process industries.
For the past 8 years, Matthew has worked with Centrica in a number of HR roles and is currently Resourcing Director for the Centrica Group.
Measuring and Communicating Your Best Asset
October 25, 2011
This is the second in a series of three interviews focused on careers, employer brand and social media: Paul (Corporate Eye CEO) interviews Andrew Mayo, Director at Mayo Learning International, and President of the HR Society here in the UK.
Companies often claim that their people are their best assets, but just how do you measure and communicate the importance of people to a company?
Good applicants – like investors and other stakeholders – will review the corporate website and the annual report to find out more about a company. Obviously company culture, talent development and employee engagement all matter to current and future employees, but they can reveal a surprising amount about the company for other stakeholders, potentially supporting the case for investment.
But measuring, and reporting on, human resources isn’t easy, and nor is it easy to compare the results between companies.
Do listen as Andrew gives us some valuable insights into people related measurement and discusses how companies promote employer brand, measurement of – and reporting on – human capital and employee engagement, and the risks that social media can pose for human resources.
I’ve broken the interview down into smaller pieces, so that you can quickly find particular points you’d like to hear about. I’ve also included the whole interview and a transcript.
Part 1: Attracting Talent and Employer Brand: The Balancing Act
Key topics:
- company brand vs employer brand
- attracting vs filtering applications
- appealing to graduates vs experienced candidates
Soundbites:
“The first thing that has always mattered most to new graduates is not, as often thought, the salary and benefits particularly. It’s the training they will get… but also ‘What kind of work will you give me?’”
“I’m often amazed how people come to interviews and they’ve done practically no research on the company itself, they’ve just been focused on the job.”
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Length: 11:47
Download: Andrew Mayo interview: part 1
Part 2: Measuring and Communicating Human Capital
Key topics:
- annual reporting on people: ‘our best assets’
- difficulties in measuring human capital
- what the numbers can reveal about the company
Soundbites:
“… Vodafone, Shell and Smith & Nephew have done good work in producing numbers and comparing with previous years and even in some cases saying ‘These are our targets’. For me, that tells me a lot about the strength of the workforce and the strength of the company ethos, the strength of engagement of the people and so on.”
“Figures like ‘We only went outside to the market for 20% of the vacancies that arose’ tell me they’ve got a very robust internal development and growth system…statistically, that correlates with sustainable business performance, and so that tells me this is a company worth investing in.”
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Length: 7:12
Download: Andrew Mayo interview: part 2
Part 3: Measuring and Communicating Engagement
Key topics
- efforts to standardise measures
- the measures that matter:
- labour turnover
- absence rates
- what employees say
Soundbites:
“Engagement means we actually care and we’re committed to what we’re trying to achieve here.”
“The problem is that at a corporate level in an annual report you’re going to report an average, and an average is always the enemy of truth.”
“The three measures I think are relevant are labour turnover…absence rates… [and] to ask people carefully thought out questions. Not only about ‘are you engaged?’ but also checking out the factors that you know lead to engagement.”
“Research in engagement says that there are a relatively small number of things that really make a difference to people, and whether they understand company strategy or not is not one of them.”
“Engagement correlates with performance as well. And the more engaged a workforce is, the better an organisation it’s likely to be both for its customers and for investors.”
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Length: 8:36
Download: Andrew Mayo interview: part 3
Part 4: Social Media, Human Resources and Employer Branding
Key topics:
- issues for HR: privacy, currency, cynicism and authenticity
- importance of monitoring social media
- cynicism and the need to provide evidence
Soundbites:
“You can’t stop anybody asking the question ‘is there anybody out there that’s worked for X?’ However from a company point of view that’s extremely dangerous. You don’t know whether they had a good experience or a bad experience. They might have worked five years ago and the company’s completely different today. So organisations have really got to take an initiative here.”
“People are cynical, and they’ll be cynical of what any company tells them. So whatever you put on the website, you’ve got to back it up with as many facts as possible”
“It’s a big challenge for HR… it really needs the best image possible to be able to attract people. And yet a lot of the things which cause the image of a company to be a problem are out of their control.”
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Length: 10:32
Download: Andrew Mayo interview: part 4
Here’s the whole interview, in case you’d rather listen to it end-to-end; and the transcript, for those who prefer to read.
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Length: 38:10
Download: Andrew Mayo interview (whole interview)
Download: Transcript
Many thanks to Andrew for taking the time to talk to Paul.
Who were we speaking to?
Professor Andrew Mayo has nearly 30 years experience in industry. For the last decade he has been a Fellow and Programme Director at the Centre for Management Development at London Business School, Associate Professor of Human Capital Management at Middlesex University Business School, and Director of the highly regarded consultancy company, Mayo Learning International. He holds degrees in Chemical Engineering, Operations Research and Management, and a Diploma in Finance and Accounting, and is a frequent conference speaker and author. His specialities are in HR Strategy, Workforce Planning and Human Capital Measurement.
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