Companies concerned with social responsibilities are finding many new places to carry on their activities, and in the process of talking and doing, they are creating

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value for all of their stakeholders. Add this expansion of business interests to the explosion of media and the advent of social networking, and you get very positive tools for boosting capitalism, as well as some strange phenomena.

It strikes me as  just a little odd, for instance, that a company can now attract a “fan” for good customer service, when it really was Bob in customer service who provided the heroics that resulted in getting what should be expected and given to every customer. Have we lowered our standards to the point where getting a normal result is exceeding expectations?  Also, I don’t think company fan pages is a trend that bodes well if too much celebrity is attached to companies. Many of them simply don’t deserve all the attention — and certainly not our adulation. (But, I digress.)

One very interesting frontier for this new dynamic is what’s being called the post-carbon economy. What previously sufficed as measures of good citizenship will no longer, as companies will have to show us their costs to society so that we can compare those costs to the benefits they bring us.  Customers are increasingly focused on this from the perspective of water, waste, energy use and other previously uncounted impacts. Other stakeholders are able to get their contrary perspectives before large audiences via social media. Good public relations demands a game plan for this new CSR environment, and, with a nod to CRO Magazine, here are a few ways to address some of the challenges they covered recently:

1. If you are in a traditional industry — energy, mining, chemicals, heavy manufacturing and the like — get carbon savvy in the same way your process improvement teams are doing it. Be conversant it all of the measures being used in your company.
2. Learn how employee health and safety, sustainability, governance, risk and compliance activities in the company are being conducted, specifically how they are having an impact on profit, and build this knowledge into your plans for various stakeholders.
3. Track peers, competitors and best practices in Corporate Register or in CRO (link to sign-up page). There is a wealth of information on what others are doing to create value for their companies with the new capitalism.
4. Help your company move from defense to offense. The public relations function is ideally situated on the “border” between a company and its stakeholders. There is going to be increased transparency by regulation, and the public relations function should be in the business making the transparency serve the business. It will be particulary important to translate business practices into benefits for stakeholders. Sometimes this will mean kudos for the company, but more often it will mean making and communicating changes that will allow the company to improve its citizenship over time. (This is tough work.)
5. Don’t be sucked in by the “going green” mantra prevalent in so many businesses. In this age of increased transparency, it won’t be about the labels of “green” versus “dirty.” It will be about innovation in product, services and in citizenship.
6. Move away from the “campaign” mentality altogether. Quarterly themes of green, sustainable, diversity, human rights, etc. must move out from the realm of messaging and into the realm of exchange of ideas. PR is ideally situated to help nurture the values that foster these principles in conscious capitalist companies.
7. Consider a more interactive online presence, built by your Web consulting team or available through such products as Report-Works.
8. Follow your peer group online if they are posting information about their programs. A good example is McDonald’s “Values in Practice” Blog, “through the eyes” of VP Bob Langert, who has posted, for instance, on “The Eighth Sin of Greenwashing,” among other topics.

I may never get used to companies having fan pages, but if just some of the coming challenges in this new social and media world are handled well, there will at least be a reason to salute the top practicioners of conscious capitalism. Corporate Responsibility Officer recently reported, btw, that the best companies in CSR outpoint their competitors in profits by 26%.

That’s certainly enough to create some shareholder fans!

Photo courtesy of Kiwanja

by Jenn Riggle

Let’s just acknowledge the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Social media gives legal departments heartburn. While this is a problem for all industries, it’s an even bigger issue for health care because of a little something called the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, more commonly known as HIPAA.

The irony is that HIPAA standards were created to help hospitals and healthcare providers electronically share patient information. These regulations are so complicated that the Dept. of Health and Human Services needed 25 pages to summarize them on its website. Virtually no one, including privacy experts, understands the rules, which is why hospitals are hesitant to adopt new technology or find new ways to share information. This impacts everything from doctors using e-mail to contact their patients to establishing a hospital Facebook page or tweeting during surgery.

Historically, hospitals like to control the message and limit the number of people who can speak on behalf of the organization. However, this is no longer the case. Hospitals can inadvertently violate HIPAA regulations, even for something as simple as a staff member posting a video or photo taken at the hospital that has a patient in the background who has not given written consent.

The penalties for breaking HIPAA regulations are hefty, so like an 800-pound gorilla, hospitals need to take HIPAA seriously. Civil fines can be as high as $1,500,000 for violating the same standard multiple times in one calendar year. And if someone knowingly misuses patient health information, criminal penalties can range from a $250,000 fine to 10 years in prison.

To help address some of these concerns, the Massachusetts Medical Law Report recently published a set of guidelines for physicians who choose to engage in social media.

It’s only natural that lawyers and risk management people get nervous about social media. But the good news is that hospitals already understand the importance of patient confidentiality, requiring written permission from patients before using or sharing their heath information. So in many ways, they just need to take what they’ve been doing all along and apply it to social networking platforms.

Harvard Business Review recently looked at why organizations need “less lawyering and more encouraging” when it comes to social media policies. There’s something to this. Organizations can’t be afraid of using social media, but they need to know the rules and understand how to use it responsibly.

Educate employees so they know what is expected of them if they engage in social media in an official or unofficial capacity. This is particularly important since most hospital employees do not have Internet access during work hours and have to access hospital social networking sites from home.

However, the government recently passed some new HIPAA privacy and security rules. So get ready, things are only going to get more complicated.

As a semi-pro photographer I encounter unique situations everyday involving photography, rights management and social media. Note: every locality has their own laws that any person taking pictures should abide by – this post is not about the legality or rights of taking photos as a photographer (while it may touch on these points). Also in this post I am only speaking about legal/regional areas where I have personal experience, please share your own experiences and knowledge in the comments.

Thomas Hawk, one of the most respected photographers in arena of photographer’s rights, has plenty to say about the moral and legal aspect of limiting a photographer’s public photography access.

As an overview, in the US, there may be limitations to publishing a photo which you take. Essentially, for an amateur photograph, “the display of the photo can’t be maliciously untrue, or humiliate, ridicule, or reveal embarrassing and personal facts about a non-newsworthy person.” So to publish an image of someone you need their permission. Thus photographers carry Model Release forms for such purposes. However, if a person is out in public, they have no reasonable expectation of privacy so you can take their picture. So what does this have to do with social media? Aside from each network’s definition of media rights the usage of this media is expanding the connectivity and control of said digital property.

Since the dawn of the Internet, there have been battles over control and usage rights of digital media pushing beyond copyright. Recently, Facebook jumped into hot water over the issue of digital rights ownership when they changed their terms of service. I believe they are the most notable of any of the digital rights issues based on how outspoken the topic became and overall community reaction. Apparently this was resolved to include more descriptive information protecting the company from content being residual on a users profile etc. However, it begs the question who owns the rights?

During a photo shoot this past weekend, I was asked to solely publish the photos to Facebook and Flickr and tag the models, make up artist and clothing designer. I have all the appropriate releases and permissions. This is the first social media network only publication “release” that I’ve dealt with intrigued me to think about the implications. My Facebook account has switched from a way to just post personal (family) photos to now a distribution platform for other individual’s media.

In my mind this raises the question as to who owns legitimate rights to the photo? Technically, based on copyright since I took the photo, I own it. But ethically, the models who posed and the designers and other individuals who made the shot are also “involved” owners. So what if I decide I want to remove the photos or modify my account in some way that they are no longer accessible to the individuals tagged – do they have a (present or future) right to the media or choices to its publication?

Aside from the legal rights issue – the technical ability to find and tag these photos has been overcome. The release of the automatic Facebook app Photo Tagger , a free third-party application uses facial recognition technology to tag photos of people. Even Flickr has added the ability to tag friends, similar to Facebook, in a photostream. So the question about “ownership” becomes more complex given the many levels of licensing that Flickr (and other social networks) utilize.

After reading this facinating report on exposing that social media sites are less than helpful at letting photographers maintain control of their intellectual property I began to question if social media will help shift the focus of a photo being an individual’s right to manage – to a captured experience that anyone involved has a voice in publication and distribution? Not necessarily talking about quashing or censorship of digital media but rather crowd-sourcing ownership and rights management. Is there good to come from allowing users access to images, video or other digital media that may contain an image or clip of themselves regardless of the media owner?

Finally, with the explosion of mobile usage and the ability to capture still imagery and video and publish – beyond just a photo-journalistic approach what aspects should be considered to properly handle user rights?

Photo: yospyn.com

A survey from the CMO Club bemoans that four out of five CMOs allocate less that 10 percent of their budgets to “experimenting” through social media and non-traditional communications channels.  This is juxtaposed against the rising use of social media – more than 35 percent of adult Internet users have profiles on social media networks up just eight percent in 2005.  Just to add to add more fuel to the fire, Oxford Dictionary just named “unfriend” as the 2009 Word of the Year.

 As a marketer, I just shake my head wondering why we keep measuring social media in old ways – like expenditures.  And using social media like other marketing tools to “push out” our messages. How often do we need to be reminded that social media is about engaging customers and potential customers in a meaning way. Is $5 million of a $100 million budget too much or too little?  Well, social media isn’t all that expensive in the hierarchy of marketing expenditures.  The best money you can spend is on people to staff your social media effort – just look at Southwest Airlines as a great example. (With Southwest, it doesn’t hurt that the social media effort totally supports a brand persona born through years of traditional customer engagement.)

 If the social media effort is old school, then the $5 million is way too much and it’s probably alienating more people than it is engaging (thereby decreasing the effectiveness of the rest of the marketing mix).  If it is well done, then perhaps one less $1 million TV spot is better spent on more, equally effective social media.

 Lots of people have lots of pet peeves about how social media is used in a disingenuous manner. Many organizations and corporations still don’t really know what to do with social media.  Some I know have taken more than a year struggling to create social media guidelines that “stop the productivity drain” while allowing social media to be used for customer support and marketing .

 On the marketing side, a year is an eternity, especially when it’s about half the average CMO’s shelf life of 23.2 months. Like many of my clients and prospects, CMOs are bombarded with requests from non-marketing types, emboldened by all they see and hear about social media, asking why the organization is not doing this or that social media tactic. The result can be launching any social media effort in support of other marketing efforts (i.e., push out strategies) rather than the right social media engagement strategies. Let’s just hope that the crossroads between the need to keep up appearances (increasing social media expenditures) and the real value of the social media programs funded doesn’t end up being the ruin of a good thing.

Overexposed crowd image by Victoria Peckham

by Geoff Livingston

One of the strangest aspects of newfound freedom is the want to run riot over everything. You can see this with attitudes towards free content, popular theories, unconference and crowdsourced conference content, and general crowd-sourcing initiatives. In reality, these initiatives bring great creativity to bear (many outweigh the one or the few), but they require management. Unfettered crowdsourcing leads to hit or miss wisdom.

One of the more interesting articles or blog posts I have read on the topic came from the Harvard Business Review’s discussion of Cisco’s recent crowdsourcing effort. Cisco found the effort to be very productive, but it needed to invest significant crowdsourced product management resources to effectively harvest the raw ideas.

MIT’s Alex Penton found the same phenomena in social networks. Idea markets can laud one idea over and over again, which may or may not be a good one. Meanwhile, other ideas are left to sit on the side of the street, regardless of their potential value. Popularity reigns supreme.

This matches my experiences as well. While I’ve seen some magnificent achievements via the crowd, I’ve seen some really bad things become popular, too. Twitter reminds me more of a high school cafeteria than a place of great wisdom, but then every time you give up, something like the Iran election happens.

One of the reasons I am very selective about attending the various unconferences you see is because the crowdsourced content has been hit or miss. For me the various X-camps have to be taken in the sense of mining. I know I’m going to get a lot of raw ore, and the diamonds are few and far between. If the topic is extremely prescient or the people in attendance meet one of my core targeted stakeholder communities, then I’ll go. Otherwise, it’s likely to be a waste of time (you get what you pay for).

Don’t get me wrong, crowdsourcing offers great benefits and true potential.  But like an unregulated marketplace, you may find it works, or goes terribly awry.  Organizations need to implement management tools to ensure they get the full benefit of the crowd.

Photo courtesy of Chrysaora

Social media can help bring people together and drive social activism. And more importantly, it can help level the playing field when corporate carpetbaggers knock on people’s doors.

Not unlike the California Gold Rush of 1849, oil and gas companies are moving to rural areas across the country to access the precious natural gas that lies beneath the ground — and in people’s backyards.

Last week, I had an opportunity to meet with Chris Csikszentmihályi, director of the Center for Future Civic Media, to hear how the Center is bringing people together through something called “civic media” and “click-through activism.” The idea is that communities can use social media to support grassroots efforts, and in this case, help people defend themselves from opportunists who are using their money and political clout to their advantage.

The Center, which is on the forefront of social media activism, is a joint effort between the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and is funded through a four-year grant from the Knight Foundation.

I was struck by the work the Center is doing with the ExtrACT project, which uses Web-based and mobile tools to help level the playing field when representatives from oil and gas companies, called “landmen,” knock on people’s doors to negotiate gas leases. Many landowners are caught unaware and don’t realize they have negotiating options – or that these companies often use toxic chemicals during the exploration and drilling process, which can seep into the ground water and pollute the environment.

To empower these people, the Center has developed the Landman Report Card (LRC), which provides resources for landowners in Colorado and Ohio, and eventually New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, states that are experiencing booms in natural gas exploration. The Report Card serves as a resource where people can find information, learn about the options they have and share their experiences with landmen.

We’ve seen social media activism gaining in popularity, with everything from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign to videos posted on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter that showed the death of 26-year-old Neda Soltan, who was hailed as a martyr and became the face of the Iranian protests. Even The Washington Post wrote about this growing trend earlier this year.

According to a 2009 report from the Pew Research Center, 37 percent of Americans 18 to 29 use blogs or social networking sites for political or civic involvement, compared to 17 percent of online users 30-49. By the same token, the report states that people who use social media for civic engagement are more active participants in traditional political and nonpolitical engagements.

Knowledge is power, and by working together, people can make a difference.

Real life relationships are complex enough, add the digital medium with a sprinkle of ego and the relationship points become more complicated. In a social network defining relationships beyond friendship is a tough problem to solve.

In the story “Are You My Mother?” by P. D. Eastman, the baby bird explores the world looking to find his mother, confused he asks if each character in the story is his mother. In the end a digger ends up dropping him back home to his real mother. Just like this, it seems every social network touts the idea of being a friend, but none offer ways to satisfactorily address the complexity of the relationship.

The issue of the complexity of digital relationships started with linking to other websites. Defining the link relationship has been an issue since the early days of the Internet, thus the creation of NoFollow and the XHTML Friends Network (XFN). These tools were developed to define in the code what human relationships exist between the two websites. According to Wikipedia, the “nofollow” HTML attribute was originally designed to stop comment spam on blogs. Stemming from this concept the XFN specification outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. Thus, using XFN, machines that parse your web pages, as well as other humans, can see how you are related to the pages you link to.

But it doesn’t stop with links, relationships involve the action (or lack of action) taken between users on a given social network. It can be like high school all over again.

Of all the large digital networks, Facebook has the greatest to gain by improving relationship classifications and tools to manage the dynamics of human relationships. For example in the event of a relationship fallout – the possibility to loose digital property such as tagged images when the relationship status changes is a real problem. But taking an aggressive approach to the relationship such as disliking a friend or their action could add balance to the existing reconnect strategy.

The advent of life streaming added more dynamics to relationship algorithm with more immediate conversation tools and ways to define and track a relationship by time. Sites like LinkedIn have an advantage of defining the relationship based on a time and professional association. Yet, still fall short when truly giving information into how connected you really are with someone because you’re afraid of fallout from six degrees of separation. Below is an example of my Facebook network and how interconnected the relationships are with each other.

In the early days of Twitter it was etiquette to just friend back anyone who followed you. Now, unless the user is of interest it is fine to not reciprocate the follow; however, with the addition of the list feature being exclusionary in nature misunderstandings in the network relationships have begun.

Now with geo-location tools like FourSquare – I believe some connections shouldn’t know every move you make. I understand the benefits of advertising your location – such as getting friends together for karaoke; however, I really don’t care if you’ve been to Starbucks 15 times this week. Or more dramatic, announcing your attendance to a Democratic convention with Republican parents who follow your stream can lead to icy conversations around the dinner table. Having location data is great for location aware networks and the ability to offer additional features, yet the ability to merge privacy with relationship classification will be a big advance in social networks.

When it comes down to it, being a big deal is not as big as you think, but I think there needs to be continued thought given to online relationship classifications. The next big thing in relationship dynamics online will be the ability to go beyond just measuring compatibility between individuals to being able to craft (control) your life message based on the individual audience. The concept of a digital “friend” will morph into the classification structures like we have in real life. Be honest, do you really want to be “friends” with a brand? What ways do you think relationship dynamics will change on the Internet in the next 3 months to 5 years?

 Wind Power. Renewable Energy. Green Economy. There is an awesome amount of momentum in the America right now around all of these topics. We’re on the cusp of real change in how we create the gobs of energy we increasingly consume in a manner that is kinder and gentler to Mother Earth.

One problem – we have a power grid infrastructure (i.e., those big transmission lines that cut across the landscape), once the best in the world, that has gone neglected for many years. The current system was built for few big energy on-ramps (like coal-fired power plants and nukes) not a lot of small, variable energy outputs like the on ramps needed for renewable energy sources like wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and biomass. Expanding and updating the transmission system is perhaps the most contentious project you could ever undertake. They are often ensnarled in protests and lawsuits so it takes decades to build even small additions to the grid. And the current transmission grid is far from smart right now.

We’re making progress. Last week President Obama cut loose $3.4 billion dollars worth of stimulus money to roll out the American smart grid. Realistically, $3.4 billion is just a drop in the bucket, but it’s a move in the right direction.

According to ABB, one of the major players in the power transmission game, North America is “not close” to developing a true smart grid. ABB CEO Enrique Santacan, cut a YouTube video where he says:

• The process of developing and implementing the smart grid is just starting in North America.
•  Lots of old equipment will have to be replaced.
•  And, many new automation technologies will have to be deployed in order to get there.

According to Dean Anderson’s blog  the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory defines a smart grid as having the following characteristics:

• Self-healing from power disturbance events
• Enabling active participation by consumers in demand response • Operating resiliently against physical and cyber-attack
• Providing power quality for 21st century needs
•  Accommodating all generation and storage options
• Enabling new products, services, and markets 
• Optimizing assets and operating efficiently

If you saw this weekend’s 60 Minutes broadcast. we should all be greatly concerned about creating a smart grid that is resilient to cyber-attack. In typical 60 Minutes style, our electrical grid was “exposed” as a prime target for cyber terrorism potentially dropping our nation into darkness and confusion. More alarming was the interview that pointed out that some of the components damaged in a cyber or physical attack could take four months to replace. (I once spent 11 days without power due to an ice storm. I can’t imagine what four months would be like!) Remember that in 2003, a simple tree limb on a power line in Ohio resulted in a power failure that in mere seconds enveloped the Midwest to Broadway in darkness.

It will take time to develop a smart grid system designed to be more like your office and home wireless LAN but less susceptible to hacking.

Patrick Mazza’s blog on Grist from more than 27 months ago  pointed out that “It’s time to bring the grid into the foreground because it positions at the exact center of the world’s most crucial issue, global climate change.”

Two years later, we’re enthralled with harnessing wind and solar, but all that excitement won’t get us far if we don’t address the much more mundane but essential infrastructure needed to turn all that excitement into real progress.

by Geoff Livingston

It doesn’t matter what the property is (image by junkerjane). From Twitter and email to document and blog post titles, your ability to write great headlines (or 140 character writing) matters more than ever. Great headlines drive traffic and interest.

Attention spans have shrunk, and if you can’t interest someone right off the bat with a great, witty headline then you’re out. Done, finished, out! That’s why Peter Shankman is right in valuing writing skills above all else.

Below find five basic tips from my experiences writing headlines:

1) Active versus passive: Man, it drives me crazy when I see one of my posts using a passive verb. People want exciting, fun titles. Active headlines inspire emotive responses, while passive ones invite reader to click visit someone else’s feed! Passive headline writing means I’m sloppy and that I didn’t care enough to review my work thoroughly.

2) Get sassy with it! Yeah, I said sassy. Seriously, throw some edge into it. You can call it tabloid, I call it interesting. Who wants to read business writing anymore? How exciting are all of these press releases? Oh boy! No thanks!

That doesn’t mean write sexual entendres into every communication. You may not like what you get back! Plus, great writers infuse edginess and excitement into their writing without resorting to juvenile tactics (at least most of the time). This is a great segue for…

3) Genuine headlines: Your headline serves as a preview. It should be genuine in describing the actual content, as opposed to teasing readers into a false experience. Consider this: You want them to come back, right? So write authentic headlines that do relate to your copy. Further, back the headline up right away in the first paragraph with a great thesis statement.

4) Less words: My dad used to be managing editor of the Philadelphia Daily News. Growing up with him editing my documents was a Dantean experience at times, but one for which I am now eternally grateful. His mantra: Cut the fat! What can you cut? How can you say a six word headline in four? What words can you replace with a new singular word. Take the time time to relentlessly review and cut the fat.

5) Intentionally incomplete: Sometimes I’ll just drop a phrase or even one word as the headline. It accurately depicts a part of the story, but is so open ended it’s the complete tease that draws them in. The post or document must be well described by such a phrase so the headline’s abstract depiction resonates.

What would you add to these five headline tips?