Corporate Eye

...compare, compete, excel

Corporate social responsibility

A Vision of Tomorrow, Where Money Isn’t Everything

mallen-bakerA fascinating blog article from CSR maven Mallen Baker caught my eye last week.  I’ve been chewing away on it ever since.

In Time To Redefine Ethical Investment he strikes directly at the root of what’s widely seen as the flaw in today’s business operations: responsibility.

Not the responsibility of managers and executives: the responsibility of investors.  Not socially responsible investment, but responsible company ownership.

In among everything else we’ve lost the fact companies are owned by their shareholders.  It’s not just an issue of finance; it’s an issue of management and governance as well.  Investors are owners.

. [Read more…] about A Vision of Tomorrow, Where Money Isn’t Everything

CSR through the Eyes of Indigenous People

As the economic and social certainties of yester-century fade before our eyes and a new form of business starts to shape itself around ideas of responsibility and sustainability, a few countries come to the fore as nexuses of change happening right before our eyes(*).

One of those places is Colombia.

For many years—decades—Colombia was a hotbed of insurgency and insurrection.  Competing factions of communist rebels and wealthy drugs cartels sprang up across the country and kept the state in a permanent state of chaos.  Sometimes the two forms of insurrection were confused, at other times it appeared outside governments funded the drugs cartels to keep the communist rebels at bay.

Life in Colombia has become, in comparison, a little easier over the past few years.  Increased aid from the US and EU has led to a steadily diminishing drugs presence in the country and the Marxist rebels are a spent force with little popular support.

In the meantime the country’s President is on an increasingly successful charm offensive on the international stage, wooing international business to his shores and managing to get the US to ratify an outstanding free trade agreement between the two countries.

CSR is starting to creep up the country’s agenda.

[Read more…] about CSR through the Eyes of Indigenous People

Three golden rules of employee engagement

One of my great interests is how western capitalism (as focused through broad based consumerism) impacts those cultures and economies which don’t necessarily share such values.

This inevitably ends up as being a discussion about human and indigenous rights.  How the Bushmen are pushed off their mineral rich land, for instance, or how Apple’s i- revolution appears to have been underpinned by regular suicides.

I firmly believe that if western consumers knew of such tragedies they would think again about buying the goods they take for granted.  Who wants to know that their mobile phone has perpetuated civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or that the cheap fashion they just bought may have just condemned another child to starvation?

There are many NGOs out there who seek to remedy this deplorable situation, and one of those who have my profound respect is Impactt.

Impactt are currently celebrating 15 years since their foundation.  As part of this they’ve released a report, entitled “Finding the Sweet Spot: Smarter Ethical Trade That Delivers More For All”, and will be hosting their first ever conference on the same subject in May. [Read more…] about Three golden rules of employee engagement

Naming standards and the FTSE100

So what do you think is the best term to describe businesses behaving responsibly within their various networks and communities? (See, its difficult even to describe without prejudging or loading the scales, and almost impossible without using the word ‘stakeholder‘).

Fabian Pattberg recently ran a poll, asking which of the following would be the best term to describe this:

  • Corporate Responsibility
  • Corporate Social Responsibility
  • Sustainability
  • Accountability
  • Corporate Citizenship
  • Corporate Sustainability
  • Responsible Governance
  • Sustainable Responsible Business
  • Corporate Social Performance
  • Others – Ethical Business / Business Ethics, Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility, Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability, Sustainable Business Culture, ESG (Environment, Social and Government), Business Ethics, Responsible Business.

On closing the poll, the most preferred term was Corporate Responsibility, with 21% of the votes, though as you can see it was a very close-run thing, with four main contenders and Sustainability coming a strong fifth.

fabian-pattberg-poll

(image snagged from FabianPattberg.com)

Now, when we started the Corporate Eye blog, we were unsure what to call this category of posts. We went for Corporate Social Responsibility – CSR for short – because that seemed to be what most companies were calling it, but at the time some on the team were arguing for Sustainability as a title.

But over the summer Chris MacDonald ran a series of posts on Business Ethics arguing against each of the elements of ‘CSR’ in turn. In summary:

CSR “isn’t (just) about corporations, isn’t just about social questions, and it isn’t just about responsibilities”.

So: what to call it?

This is where I confess that my vote in the Pattberg poll went to Responsible Governance, because I think it’s important that Responsibility – or whatever you care to call it – is embedded within the management and strategy of the company. (More on this another day). Clearly nobody else agreed with me, and it isn’t a term I’ve ever seen used in the wild.

So I reviewed the current FTSE 100 corporate websites, to see what was actually going on out there, and found that most companies – by a long way – are calling this section ‘Corporate Responsibility’ (no ‘social’). There are a few unusual cases, as you’d expect: companies that try to find a uniquely tailored title, or companies that don’t have a dedicated section to cover all ‘CSR’ topics, but choose to have separate sections such as Environment and Society.

But overall, the picture is clear:

ftse100-names

Perhaps this isn’t surprising; standardising the names of sections on corporate websites makes it easy for the visitor to find what they’re looking for. What is interesting, though, is the difference between what the FTSE100 companies are actually using, and what the people taking the Pattberg poll thought. The poll results were much more evenly spread among the four front-runners, which aren’t the same as the four front-runners of the FTSE100 usage.

Possibly this comes down to a difference in what terminology people use in speaking or writing about a topic day to day, and what terms people expect to see on a corporate website.

But it is difficult to choose a term that doesn’t carry unintended baggage, because all those phrases mean something slightly different. I think this is why we see FTSE100 companies tending to adopt the same term, so it is easily recognisable by visitors, but people working within that sector will use the term that means the most to them. The corporate term will tend to become bland and inoffensive, and may lose its specificity because of being stretched in many different directions; individuals will use – and will argue vehemently for – the terms that mean exactly what those people want to convey, because the terminology matters.

So, given that we aim to parallel the corporate site, should we change to ‘Corporate Responsibility’ to follow the majority? Or – being pragmatic – to ‘Responsibility’ because it is short, and will fit well on one line in our navigation? I’ll accept that Responsible Governance doesn’t mean enough to enough people to be a sensible choice.

What do you call this on your website?

Twittering Investor Relations

Twitter keeps tweeting, should IR be listening?

The business community has been intuitively skeptical of Twitter’s possible utility to companies since it’s inception.  The list of reasons that Twitter would be useless to most businesses isn’t short.

The allowable message size is too small.  What could anyone possibly say in just 140 characters that would be of any value?  Users are primarily younger, technologically savvy teens, and twenty-somethings who don’t like to be “harassed” by the corporate world, and who wouldn’t have any money anyway except for movies, music, and cars. There is no way to monitor and manage the inevitable replies to any message posted by the company.

And, then there is that terminology.  Can a serious company really be expected to care if its tweets are re-tweeted on Twitter?  The list goes on.

This post is Part 2 in our series.  Get Part 1 here: Investor Relations Twitter Difficulties

For Investor Relations groups, the list is even longer.  There is no ability to include any form of disclosure in a message that is just 140 characters.  Regulatory agencies haven’t given any clear guidance on what is or is not permissible to be discussed on an open forum like Twitter.  People using Twitter aren’t the kind of people who invest in stocks anyway.  Do Warren Buffett, George Soros, Bill Miller, or Bill Gross tweet on Twitter?  Of course, not.

With a compelling list of business reasons stacked against any serious company using Twitter, why would any Investor Relations department even consider making Twitter part of their communications arsenal?

Perhaps it is because of the media’s incessant coverage of all things Twitter such as the breathless headline where AdAge claims Twitter’s news coverage is worth $48 million each month.  Perhaps it is because of attention grabbing publicity stunts like Ashton Kutcher’s race against CNN for 1 million Twitter followers (Kutcher won), or Oprah Winfrey’s arrival as a celebrity Twitter tweeter.  Perhaps the idea of a full-fledged company blog seems like too much, but surely, anyone could handle 140 characters at a time.  Or, perhaps, the official corporate blog has proven itself to be a wide ranging success and something like Twitter seems like a good way to expand on that success.  Of all the possible reasons, perhaps none is more true than simply being worried about falling behind while competitors with a head start race off to good fortunes.

Whatever the reason, IR is coming under increasing pressure both internally and externally to address the runaway train that is Twitter.  Senior executives want to know what the Twitter strategy is.  Investor advocates are vocal about getting vital information to the “little guy” on Twitter and not just to high-floor number Wall Street analysts at industry events and on conference calls. Formally developing a solid, fact-based response to these concerns whether positive or negative is fast becoming a top priority for IR departments.  If you haven’t been asked about what you and the company plan to do about Twitter yet, you will soon.

Is That Tweet Official?

One of the biggest difficulties in understanding just what companies are actively involved in Twitter is getting a handle on just who is and isn’t running an official corporate Twitter profile.  Just because there is a Twitter account at twitter.com/BigCoolCompany doesn’t mean that it is related to Big Cool Company at all. It may be someone who has no connection to the company and just likes to talk about it, for better or worse.

Often, official looking Twitter accounts are actually just the personal accounts of a company’s employees.   The catch is that it can be somewhat less than clear under what circumstances these employees are tweeting under.

All the same, just because a Twitter account isn’t twitter.com/BigCoolCompany doesn’t mean it is NOT the official company Twitter account, like ebayinkblog (more below). Or, do you see where the Corporate Eye Twitter account goes?

corporate-eye-twitter-account

Some Twitters have the company’s explicit permission to post on Twitter, but are not endorsed by the company, meaning any postings are the employee’s opinion and responsibility and not the company’s.  Meanwhile, some twitter users have either no permission from their employer, or that permission is implicit, meaning that not only are their tweets not the official position of the company, they aren’t even acknowledged by the company.

Corporations Tweeting on Twitter

learning-studying-together One of the high profile Twittering companies lately is eBay.  The online auctioneer started a corporate blog in April 2008 and within a couple of months, corporate blogger Richard Brewer-Hay was tweeting on Twitter as well.  The Twitter profile is called ebayinkblog, which at first blush may make it seem to be an unofficial Twitter account.  However, the “Bio” section of the account clearly states its position as, “The Twitter feed for the official eBay corporate blog…” which is called eBay Ink.

A recent Wall Street Journal article notes how once tweets containing information about quarterly earnings and other financial info began appearing, eBay’s attorney’s showed up and required regulatory disclaimers on some of the tweets.  If even a technology savvy Internet based corporation like eBay seems nervous about what goes up on Twitter, what does that say about the chances of a useful IR Twitter account at other companies?

Actually, it turns out the answer isn’t as clear as it might appear.  While eBay does have an official, active Twitter account, other technology giants do not.  Microsoft, Cisco, Dell, Oracle, Google, EMC, Texas Instruments, and Amazon all have corporate Twitter accounts.  There are dozens of IBMers who have Twitter accounts, though there is no official IBM account.  Likewise, there is no official Intel Twitter profile, despite how close twitter.com/Intel comes to looking like it is.

Just because a company has a Twitter account doesn’t mean that they do anything with it other than sending out customer offers, responding to customer complaints (usually from other Twitter users), and promoting marketing events.  Indeed, EMC VP Chuck Hollis notes in his social media blog (as opposed to his “day job” blog, both hosted at emc.com) that many companies do nothing more with their Twitter accounts than re-post a one-line with links to press releases.

However, Mr. Hollis goes on to note the vast potential of social media sites like Twitter.  If this company bigwig gets it, maybe that fear about your competitors taking off and leaving you in the dust isn’t so far fetched after all.

Investor Relations Twitter Beginning Strategy Steps

Without a clear cut path to point to, what should the savvy IR Department group do?

First, make a list of your direct competitors.  Twitter is not a zero sum game.  Your competitors do not have to lose for you to win and vice versa.  However, the world of Twitter is just too big to try and monitor everyone, so start with a short list of your closest competitors.

Monitor what they do with the official Twitter accounts if they have one.  Pay particular attention to what they do and do not tweet regarding things like financials, analyst meetings, conference calls, regulatory findings and so on.

Next, start Tweeting; not as a company official, but as a private citizen.  Use your name or a pseudonym, but leave out your connection to your employer.  You want to be able to practice your tweets.  There is a whole world of etiquette and terminology to learn.  It’s best to do that as Joe Public instead of as the official spokesperson of Big Cool Company.

Search out friends, family, and coworkers, then follow them.  Read their tweets.  Pay particular attention to what they “re-tweet.”  Also, watch what, if anything, they blast from other Twitter users.  What is considered spam, or rude, or newbie mistakes.  Then, start making your own tweets and see what the response is like.

Once you have your feet wet, it is time to make a more in depth analysis about Twitter’s possible future at your company, particularly on the IR Website.

Next up: How To Use Twitter Power for Investor Relations

Grab the Investor Relations RSS Feed to keep up with our whole Twitter analysis.

Oh No, Not MORE Ethical Business!

Gunslinger art trim

Earlier this week, I forget why, I was wandering around the internet looking for something (as you do) when my eye lighted upon an editorial in The Progress Report.

I’d never come across the Progress Report before so I had a good look round.  “Interesting”, as Sir Humphrey Appleby might say.

The editorial focussed upon ethical businesses and on one proposal in particular: “On being Ethically Certified”.  I have to say, I read it, groaned, held my head in my hands, and (as techno-gunslingers might say) prepared to blog.

[Read more…] about Oh No, Not MORE Ethical Business!