Thanks to everyone who helped shape and inform my Innovation Lecture Series presentation to NASA yesterday. You’d be encouraged to know that the comments and ideas you shared in my original post were read and shared by a wide circle of NASA leaders.
While I make the return trip home, I wanted to let you see the slides I used for my presentation. I don’t have the time to add commentary or context, so read into them as you please. Rest assured, I plan to articulate key sections in a series of blog posts here and syndicated thru other blogs, too. This presentation has produced a watershed of new thoughts and ideas for me.
In the meantime, feel free to offer up your thoughts, ideas, critiques, and challenges here.
This post was originally published on the MIT Sloan Management Review Blog:
The era of the oversized check is over. Showing up for a community relations photo op without altering your operations isn’t enough anymore. In fact, words without action are one of your greatest risks in the networked marketplace.
Your company’s filings with OSHA, EPA, USDA and other federal government agencies have created digital footprints. Customers, employees and activists are talking about you online, and this new generation of word of mouth isn’t contained by time or distance. Sooner rather than later, this mosaic of information will be available to everyone—investors, customers, regulators, employees and competitors alike.
Are you ready for the greater intimacy and immediacy that the networked marketplace demands? More specifically, are you ready for how the networked marketplace expects you to care about broader community issues?
Thanks to ubiquitous Internet access, a proliferation of mobile devices and easy-to-use web apps, the executive suite’s relationship to the rest of the world has changed. Corporations are able to engage with their stakeholders like they’re a corner store rather than a faceless multinational. That means the days of separate silos of communication are over. Corporate social responsibility, cause marketing and corporate philanthropy can no longer operate independently as if they serve different audiences. This is especially true for companies that profit from any services or products that contribute to social ills.
It is time for a unified approach to caring, driven by an awareness that your company is part of a larger ecosystem and community. Not only have these audiences converged, their expectations of companies have changed. You need to demonstrate an authentic commitment to the social causes your company has chosen to support. And your operations need to demonstrate this commitment just as much, if not more, than your marketing and communications.
What’s the cost of not aligning operations with marketing when it comes to doing good? As Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab stated in a recent post, “In a disconnected world, the costs of evil are minimal.” Continuing this logic, Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, proposed a new term: “Haque’s Law” Its meaning? “As interaction explodes, the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits.”
While “evil” might seem a harsh word, social issues carry with them implicit and explicit morality. One cost of business in the networked marketplace is exposure to moral judgments from individuals and organizations at an increasingly faster pace.
The Timberland Company is an example of a business trying to move beyond just marketing. Founded in 1952, Timberland has grown into a $1.5 billion company and a leader in effectively integrating corporate citizenship and cause marketing. The company gives 40 hours of paid time off for community service to each employee each year, coordinates an annual company-wide day of service, supports City Year and other nonprofits and has committed to reaching a neutral carbon footprint in all its operations.
After years of walking the walk of corporate citizenship, Timberland overcame its hesitancy to talk about the walk and made citizenship a central theme of its marketing and advertising. In 2008, the company launched Earthkeepers, an eco-line of products, with a comprehensive marketing campaign making sustainability and corporate citizenship the cornerstone of the Timberland brand. The centerpiece of this campaign has been Earthkeeper.com, an online community integrated into all the major social media networks that draws individuals who share the same values and commitment to sustainability. In addition, the company issues a quarterly Earthkeeper report, detailing its progress toward its community goals.
Rather than hide from the greater intimacy of online media, Timberland CEO Jeff Swartz has embraced it. He is frequent user of Twitter, sharing his thoughts, ideas and reactions to what’s happening in the world. For instance, immediately following the Haiti earthquake, he traveled on a humanitarian mission organized through the company’s partnership with Yéle Haiti, a foundation started by Haitian-American musician Wyclef Jean. With company funds originally intended to support an ambitious reforestation initiative, Timberland showed flexibility in redirecting the monies to support the rebuilding of Haiti’s infrastructure.
After he returned from Haiti, Swartz shared his experience in a blog post. On the three-month anniversary of the earthquake, he accompanied former Senator Bob Kerrey and Billy Shore, CEO of Share Our Strength, on a trip back to Haiti to help scores of amputees created by the earthquake begin the process of regaining their lives.
While Timberland is not without its blemishes, those leading it realize the importance of a unified approach to social good.
Update: You can view the final presentation here: http://bit.ly/NASAsocent2
The #1 Thing You Need to Learn from This Post:
This is your opportunity to influence the NASA culture.
A More Detailed Exploration:
This is an experiment to learn the challenges and advantages of formulating thoughts and ideas in a networked environment. My modus operandi is to spend great lengths of time pondering, drafting, and shaping my thoughts before publishing them with the greater world. However, I am evolving my habits and shifting how I use Rally the Cause to make it more of a networked thought experience.
To that end, I am putting one of my upcoming opportunities on the table to test the viability of this approach. If you’re going to go, why not go big? That’s the entrepreneur in me talking. Here’s your chance to inform and shape a major presentation I am making to NASA on July 28. I’ll be at the Johnson Space Center and my presentation will be beamed to NASA centers across the planet as part of the Innovation Lecture Series hosted by the Space and Life Science Directorate. [Added: They're the folks responsible for the health and productivity of humans in space -- and they are quite interested in collaborations and partnerships.]
Before you begin to think I’m getting lazy, I’ve already started developing my thoughts and ideas. But, I think I would be doing the entire Social Entrepreneur ecosystem a disservice if I didn’t reach out to the broader community to give everyone the opportunity to share their perspectives and ideas, too.
What’s in it for you?
This is YOUR chance to bring our way of thinking into the NASA culture.
Of course, I’ll attribute your ideas. You’ll get access to the final presentation on SlideShare. You’ll be involved in a pretty cool discussion with other social entrepreneurs.
So what’s the topic?
It’s pretty big. Are you ready for it? Open wide and take a bite.
How Meaning Shapes Mission: Inside the Social Entrepreneur’s Mind
Key insights:
- the social entrepreneurism trend and its driving factors
- social entrepreneurial models
- by-products of addressing complex social issues
- profiles and case studies
- strategies and tactics that can be used by anyone
Ready to get started?
Start posting your thoughts, links, ideas, counter-points, and general comments here.
And, remember, failure is not an option. Or is it?
Technorati Posts: Week of July 12, 2010
I’ve started a new soon-to-be-named feature on Technorati exploring the business of doing good. Here are my first two pieces:
Chase Giving Contest Keeps On Rolling Despite Critics
Will Old Spice Guy Leave Alyssa Milano at the Altar of Her $100,000 Donation Request?
Feel free to comment here or on Technorati.
#1 Thing You Need to Learn from this Post:
The World Cup has spawned one of the funniest faux Twitter fundraising campaigns: Cala Boca Galvao.
A More Detailed Exploration:
To help save the endangered galvao bird of Brazil, just tweet “Cala Boca Galvao” and 10 cents will be donated to the cause. Or, not.
It was bound to happen. Our seemingly unending need to spread awareness of important social issues has led to a spontaneous prank by a loose network of Brazilians on unsuspecting Twitter do-gooders. Watch for yourself:
In case you’re wondering, “Cala Boca Galvao” is roughly translated into “Shut up, Galvao.” Who is Galvao?
According to the New York Times, he is “Brazil’s leading sports announcer, Galvão Bueno, a man who, to the ears of some Brazilians, is a bombastic cliché machine.” With the start of the World Cup, many Brazilians will be uttering these words many times over the coming weeks.
This faux-lanthropy campaign illustrates the power of networked people working in loose coordination with each other. What started as a trending topic on Twitter led to a couple creatives to concept and produce the video (in 32 hours with no sleeping). Others have added their creative touches including a poster. It’s snowballed into one of my favorite memes of the year.
One second to tweet. One second to save a life.
Genius. Pure, networked comedic genius.
If you want to join in on the fun, just tweet this out:
Help #bra Save the Galvao Birds. http://bit.ly/galvaocpn
