Corporate Eye

...compare, compete, excel

The Eurozone, Cricket, and CSR

The Eurozone, Cricket, and CSR

Sometimes you wonder just how committed people engaged in CSR are about changing business and society for the better.  For example, when seriously challenging stories surface about business and governance the news agenda seems to have a blind spot about their effect on the CSR agenda.  Instead the focus is on money alone, not finance or any other broader considerations.

As two examples, I hold up the the “spot fixing” convictions in cricket and Greece’s abortive referendum on the latest Euro bailout deal.  Both of these should cause CSR businessmen and proponents to think very carefully about what they believe in, and here’s why.

[Read more…] about The Eurozone, Cricket, and CSR

Planning Your CSR Content Strategy

It’s one of those big givens in life: if you’ve bought flat packed furniture, READ THE INSTRUCTIONS before you even think about picking up a screwdriver.

In fact, make sure there are instructions for understanding the instructions before you even buy that corner shelving unit which looks oh-so-lovely in the promotional picture.

And also, be prepared to count.  Count all the screws, widgets and little plastic bits in and out of their bags.  Get a ruler, so that you know exactly which ones are the 4mm and which the 4.5 mm long ones.

Finally, never EVER assemble on a carpet. EVER.  No matter how short the pile you’ll lose a bit, guaranteed.

Now that you’ve completed all those steps, you may think about getting your screwdriver.

Putting together a CSR website can be a little like putting together one of these confounded flat pack thingamabobs.

It seems so easy and the standards are pretty clear.  But in the end it can be soooo fiddly and time consuming (not to mention frustrating!) that you have an epiphany about why professional services exist in the first place.

One such professional service is iCrossing, one of the world’s largest digital marketing agencies and part of the Hearst Corporation.  Their UK offices have published an ebook titled ‘How to plan a content strategy’ and it may be worth taking note of. [Read more…] about Planning Your CSR Content Strategy

Indicators for Oil & Gas CSR Websites

The GRI is in the process of finalising a supplement for the Oil & Gas industry.

Many of the participants in this (including serial website award winners Eni and BP) have also taken part in the IPIECA’s guidance for voluntary sustainability reporting, the last update to which came out in December 2010.

What follows is a summary of some of the indicators the guidance recommends and my comments upon them.

However, although these are aimed at the Oil and Gas industry they’re pertinent to many other industries.

Furthermore, as so much of the present economy is founded upon and driven by O&G products, it would do companies outside the industry no harm to have an awareness of these indicators and even discuss how they may be used when making product and supplier decisions.

[Read more…] about Indicators for Oil & Gas CSR Websites

Eight Standards for CSR and Fashion Websites

One of the biggest running sores in the landscape of CSR is the fashion industry.

Clothing manufacture in the UK (outside of Jermyn Street and Saville Row) appears to have all but died out and those garment factories which do still exist struggle to compete with cheap imports from the Indian subcontinent and China.

Trouble is the cheapness of those imports have generally come from grave human rights abuses which, for many a decade, passed along unnoticed and uncommented upon.

Now that consumers are more knowledgeable, shocking health and labour conditions have been uncovered.  Fashion companies throw up their hands and say “we didn’t know”. Right you are then, so do something about it.

One of the ways fashion companies (labels in other words, not retailers) can “do something” is through participation in the Fair Wear Foundation (FWF). [Read more…] about Eight Standards for CSR and Fashion Websites

Barclays and Standard Chartered – Two Sides Of One Coin | FTSE 100 Website Reviews

It’s always interesting to compare two leading companies in a sector and see how they approach their sustainability websites. 

There is a “standard” website design which has pretty well been settled on these days (3 columns, head and footer, menu system etc) but the question always remains how to use this to the best advantage.

Barclays and Standard Chartered are two of the best performing banks in the UK, yet their approaches to how to design a sustainability website are radically different.  You end up wishing they could have got together and produced one super-duper website, but that’s what competition and market segmentation is all about: being different to your rivals in certain, key areas. [Read more…] about Barclays and Standard Chartered – Two Sides Of One Coin | FTSE 100 Website Reviews

Making the most of outposts: Flickr

If you’re looking into the creation of social media outposts, you shouldn’t forget about Flickr.

People have been pointing out the use of Flickr by major companies since at least 2006. I haven’t found anything earlier than that, though if you know of something, please do let me know (Flickr was launched in 2004).

However, there still aren’t very many of the companies we look at on a regular basis that have a link from their corporate site to their Flickr stream. Even GM, who were using Flickr back in 2006, and which still maintains a Flickr stream, doesn’t seem to link the Flickr outpost to the corporate site, though the Fastlane blog does link to Flickr.

TNT Flickr stream

TNT are one of those that do – with a link from the Media Centre, which is perhaps the most appropriate place, though I can imagine that the Graduate Careers section might also be a possibility. Images of happy new recruits, anyone?

The Media Centre is the obvious place on the corporate site to look for corporate images, and Flickr is not a replacement for an image gallery. However, it is another place where people may come across your branding, and as such shouldn’t be ignored. Why not put good quality photos that support your brand out there?

I notice, though, that the TNT images have copyright restrictions. This means that – unlike the images explicitly made available for download in the image gallery on the corporate website – people would not be able to reuse these images without permission. Perhaps these images are actually copyrighted to the photographer, rather than TNT.

Nevertheless, this is an interesting strategy, and I’m particularly impressed that TNT link to their photostream from the corporate site. I like to see these paths between the outposts and the core …