At Green Thing, social media is how we interact with our community and is an important part of how we deliver our inspiration feed – daily creative, inspiring content about all of the happenings in the environmental realm. It’s also how we share and spread ideas and stories.
Custom Communication have recently released the Social Media Sustainability Index. The index is a ranking of how 287 of the world’s most sustainable companies perform using social media (Twitter, Facebook. Blogs, Youtube, etc) as an avenue to share their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies. The index is the first of its kind, and a really interesting comparison of how companies are using (or not using) social media to share the good stuff they’re up to.
The index takes a look at how quite a few companies neglect to use social media as a means of communicating their CSR. Now a days, CSR is no longer limited to a report publishing all the good that a company has done in a year. To succeed in the CSR realm, as the report shows, engaging with users and customers through social media channels can increase a company’s CSR reputation.
What’s interesting is that for the companies that use social media in their everyday PR and communications, there is still a significant disconnect between those which use those channels to communicate their CSR, rather than just for daily updates and information. The report shows that 244 out of the 287 companies use social media, but very few communicate their CSR achievements, strategies and involvement using these channels. Reasons for this could be past #fails that have occurred online, like the cat fight between Greenpeace and Nestle, or fear of being publicly knocked down for greenwashing. (If you want to see more, check out the Good, the Bad and the Ugly: A Short History of Social Media in CSR). Companies that have performed particularly well as highlighted in the index are GE, who ran the Ecomagination Challenge, as well as Pepsi and their Refresh Project.
The index also includes a list of the Green Twitterati – the 100 top green business and CSR tweeters. We’re chuffed that Green Thing has made the cut ;)
Click here to check out the full index.
Katherine Hui is currently the Social site editor at Green Thing, a web-based public service in London that inspires people to lead greener lives through creative content.
Before this, she worked as the Development Manager at Social Innovation Camp, an organization that encourages people to use web and mobile-based technology to mobilise social change. She oversaw 300 ideas submission and helped build 20 prototypes – five of which have gone on to get further funding or investment.
Katherine’s came over to the UK form Canada in 2007 for an MSc program at the London School of Economics. Before arriving in London, she managed a small environmental start-up in Vancouver called the Canadian Climate Change Alliance.
Katherine is football mad. She is a loyal supporter of Arsenal FC, plays for Islington Borough Ladies FC and coaches for Gunners in Islington in her spare time. Her second favourite hobby is kite surfing and she can sometimes be found chasing the wind.
