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Innovations in Sustainability Reports

By on Nov 5, 2013 in News, Sustainability Social Media | 0 comments

            Innovation is the sustainability buzzword of 2013. So, for the August 2013 update of the SMI-Wizness Social Media Sustainability Index we’re taking a look at the more innovative ways companies are using social tools and technologies to communicate their sustainability activities and Sustainability Reports in particular. Why Sustainability Reports? Surely these are graveyards of innovation, the place where great strategies and case studies become entombed in dull, passive corporate speak, safe in the knowledge that no one is going to read the report anyway. That’s one way of looking at sustainability reporting and it’s the approach still favoured by the majority of FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies. As our most recent Index showed, just 40 of the top 100 companies profiled took the time and effort to either share their entire...

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The Social Media Sustainability Index Update

By on Nov 4, 2013 in Sustainability Social Media | 0 comments

Read the 2013 Social Media Sustainability Index at Sustainly.com Does your heart sink at the thought of reading yet another Sustainability Report? Over the last three years I’ve been documenting the ways companies are communicating sustainability online and using social media in particular. Time and time again, even those companies that demonstrate real panache in their sustainability communications fail to make the best use of the research, data and information that goes into their sustainability report. Often, as a result, a company’s most interesting sustainability work is left buried in these dull but worthy publications that no-one really reads. The reason for what we might call, “a failure to communicate” often can be attributed to a fundamental disconnect between corporate communications and marketing. Sustainability Reports have become an important calling card that major...

Are kids being over-saturated with digital technology?

By on Jun 26, 2013 in Engagement, Social Gaming, social media advertising, social media marketing, Sustainability Social Media | 0 comments

How much time should children spend online or playing apps and games? That question is one of the overriding parenting conundrums of our modern digital and social age. It’s also a question that has become of particular interest to me as I develop my own app for kids, The Gross Food Guide. As I try to create a digital experience children will find so much fun that they’ll tell all their friends, I’m aware that I might be contributing to a growing childhood development problem. The facts about children’s digital consumption are eye-opening. A 2010 Kaiser Foundation study found that US youths spent more than seven and a half hours a day using a smartphone, computer, television or other electronic device. In another study conducted that year by the Joan Ganz Cooney Centre, which specialises in children’s media, two thirds of children aged four to seven had...

Zombie kid gamers for social good

By on Apr 23, 2013 in News, Social Media News, Sustainability Social Media | 0 comments

I’m a bit obsessed with kids’ games at present. Not because I’m regressing (though that might also be true) but because I’m trying to find a ray of light in my 10-year-old son’s insatiable appetite for online games, and the YouTube videos showing how to do better at online games. Sound familiar? Thought so. If you’re a parent of a certain age you’re likely to have a similar fully digitised creature in your own home. The positive way of describing this generation of pre-teen online addicts is “very digital natives” though my son and his connected friends are more like fully-functioning digital zombies – they play and converse quite fluently with each other even as they shrug and grunt at the rest of the outside world (their parents). Given that most other 10-year-old boys have the same appetite and, given that I would have been doing...

Unlikely Fortune 500 company uses Facebook in anti-hunger campaign

By on Apr 10, 2013 in Engagement, News, Social Business, Social Media News, Social Sustainability Spotlight, Sustainability Social Media | 0 comments

“One in six people in America don’t know where their next meal is coming from. We think we can do something about it. And you can help.” That’s the rallying call of a new anti-hunger campaign being run on Facebook. No big surprise there. The social network is full of cause-related projects organised by charities, NGOs and local community groups. The difference here is that this food drive is run by Panera, a Fortune 500 company with 1,652 bakery-cafes in the US and Canada that posted $2.1bn in sales during 2012. Not exactly the type of do-gooder organisation you might at first associate with this type of project. Panera’s goal is to donate up to 500,000 bowls of soup to people in need. To achieve this it is looking to tap into Facebook’s viral connectivity by launching what the company calls a “food chain reaction.” It works a bit like a...

Custom Communication creates the SMI-Wizness Social Media Sustainability Index

By on Feb 22, 2013 in Social Media Influence, Sustainability Social Media | 0 comments

Yesterday SMI and Wizness launched the third annual Social Media Sustainability Index. In the report we look at how more than 400 companies are using social media to communicate sustainability. Here are some of the key findings: