I thought it would be worthwhile to post this quote from Admiral Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the Hoizon oil spill incident. He is quoted in an interview in Harvard Business Review (November 2010) as saying:
With social media and the 24 hour news cycle, there will never again be a major disaster that won’t involve public participation.
I believe that his statement applies to advocacy as well. Mmake sure you have your advocates lined up and your “badvocates” or detractors identified. Every event today involves public opinion. Get ready for a new kind of information warfare.
We always wonder at the end of the year who will be on the cover of Time magazine. Who will be the person of the year? I think that the person of the year should be the public. Maybe next year since I know that Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is the person of 2010. Public opinion and the advocates within will ultimately be the drivers of action and thought in the years ahead. You won’t dare leave home without them.
Tags: Admiral Thad Allen, Advocacy, Badvocates, public opinion
We take social advocacy seriously. Our Social Impact team just surveyed with KRC Research over 200 executives responsible for CSR type activities to learn how they were managing some of their challenges today. What did we learn?
We learned how important impact actually is. Having an impact on critical issues is the number one reason why corporations invest in philanthropic or socially responsible activities, according to the executives surveyed. A second reason given for CSR-funding is the opportunity to see an organization’s values in action (25%). I think that is a good reason. Interestingly, having an impact on critical issues (30%) outranked several more business-oriented motivations, such as building customer loyalty (15%), differentiating the company from competitors (6%) and engaging and retaining employees (4%).
The latter finding somewhat surprised me because it underscores the need for companies to better measure the link between CSR and employee satisfaction. Social advocacy deserves to be higher up on executives’ agendas as a primary benefit of good social responsibility. Employees can be a company’s best advocates if they understand how CSR drives growth, attracts talent and retains the best. In this anti-business environment, it is important to make the CSR case at home (the office) and in the community.
In our research lately, we’ve seen how important employee satisfaction is to how corporate communications officers are measured. Communicating about the value of CSR to employees and communities deserves greater attention in order to reduce some of the anti-business perception that seems to linger. CSR is the gift that keeps giving if companies would only focus more on communicating it well.
Tags: CSR, employees, KRC Research, Research, Social Impact, Weber Shandwick
