The Problem With Taking The Corporate Approach
The landscape for large, industrial corporations follows a common practice of impressive social and environmental initiatives around sustainability and social responsibility, as well as heavy reliance on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. As the following charts indicate, consumers and mainstream audiences share broad interest of “higher-minded” topics, such as social responsibility and shared collaboration toward a common goal, across an array of social networks, online news sources, community forums, etc. Fortune 500 companies, however, tend to approach disseminating their messages around these same topics much differently, preferring to rely heavily on corporate site traffic and Twitter alone.
Because most Fortune 500 brands tend to not share their more
progressive initiatives on audience-preferred blogs and consumer-generated media sites, the unfortunate result is (besides not joining and productively influencing the discussion where it is taking place), a large cross-section of the marketplace believes that the corporation is simply “cause-washing” regarding its commitment to social causes, paying only lip service to issues that are of great social and/or ecological importance. Note the first chart above, which shows topic activity embraced by the marketplace (measured in number of monthly mentions)—all major online social tools are used heavily by consumers (e.g. news sites, microblogs (mostly Twitter), online forums, wikis, photo-sharing sites, and popular social networks).
This is in sharp contrast to the chart at below-right, which shows the common corporate approach across those same online discussion platforms (also measured in number of monthly mentions). While absolute volume of activity is understandably lower for corporations than the entire consumer marketplace, news sites, blogs, video/photo sharing sites and social networks bear little mention of the corporation’s social programs, further reinforcing a lack of awareness around cause-driven aspects of the company’s mission and brand.
2 Responses to “The Problem With Taking The Corporate Approach”
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Hmmm… the tone of this piece is decidedly more corporate than may of your other posts. Same writer? Or, intentional and done “tongue in cheek”?
Thanks for noticing. It is a more corporate tone, but not with a “tongue in cheek” approach as you suggested.
We’re so close to this topic that its easy to elaborate in an impassioned way about the missed opportunities corporations are experiencing as a result of their decisions. In this case, however, we chose a more data-driven way to tell the story to eliminate any possible confusion about what matters. (Namely, to stop relying on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube like they are NBC, ABC and CBS and this is 1978 or something). The Stands-With-A-Fist tone will resume shortly… or, maybe it already did?