Social Media and Stakeholder Engagement: Justmeans Conference

Customers, employees, activists and other business stakeholders are demanding far more from companies than ever before, and social media are helping to empower these stakeholders to foster new forms of engagement.

I'm at Justmeans' Social Media and Stakeholder Engagement conference in London today to hear some of the UK's top businesspeople compare notes on what works and what doesn't in their early efforts to use and build online communities to engage employees and customers in more meaningful ways.

"There's a new revolution in the way business is being done," Justmeans Founder and CEO Martin Smith said in kicking off the conference today at The Brewery in central London. "Companies cannot adapt to the challenges of 21st century without engaging their stakeholders. A wider array of issues will be put on companies over the next decade, and customers, employees, activists and others will be demanding more. We're entering a time of immense challenges. We need to have an all-hands-on deck approach to solving global problems; social media and stakeholder engagement is the best way, we believe, to catalyze action."

Among highlights (see also Sara Wolcott's more detailed posts on this site):

* Robert Nuttall, director of GreenMandate, talked about his key role as former head of internal communications for Marks & Spencer and his work devising and implementing the internal and external brand and communications strategy for Plan A -- one of the most comprehensive and acclaimed corporate sustainability programs in the UK. Nuttall said many companies still don't fully understand the new medium and are still using social media to be in one-way communication with their stakeholders -- what he called "telling mode" versus listening and engaging. "Some managers and leaders in companies have no idea what it's all about and the need for (online) engagement," he said. "On many fronts, there is still a long way to go." Nutall also said that despite all of the early experimentation by companies in the use of social media, "at some point, "there will be a point at which companies will be called to account much more harshly than they are now" by customers. His point: companies that aren't now building stakeholder engagement loops online and off will miss critical opportunities to build brand and seed innovation.

* Bjorn Edlund, former executive VP of Royal Dutch Shell, agreed that many companies are struggling in their effort to harness social media. He cited three types of current media -- old media (corporate sites and publications); bought media (advertising and billboards), and earned media (such as favorable news stories by online journalists and traditional thought leaders.) Social media, he said, reach beyond all of this. In the old business world, he said, finance and technology were the things that mattered the most to companies. In the new world, social networking will increasingly matter, bringing with it new dialogues with customers and stakeholders, as well as new pressures on management to change and adapt. Sure, there are structural and managerial challenges, he added, but these will lead to greater learning. The key to success in this new world? "You need to have to give up a little control; you need to be less afraid of making mistakes," he said.

* Dan McQuillan, Head of Digital, Enterprise UK, and Co-founder, Social Innovation Camp, said social media aren't so much about corporations engaging with others, but rather about getting input from customers and employees and consumers about the issues that matter to them -- and that target the issues that organizations exist to resolve. "If you want to be part of social innovation, then you need to make yourself hackable," he said --open to the input, scrutiny and wishes of your stakeholders. In that context, he and others said, measuring impact becomes a critical part of an organization's credibility and contribution. He also said that social media --when used to crowdsource input from real-world interest groups and communities -- can encourage iterative change and "honest" feedback loops for organizations. ButMcQuillan also said that for most people, "all this talk about engagement is rubbish ... It's kind of like the term sustainability; we all want to get there but these are ideas and vague terms" that rarely get us closer to the reality of change. McQuillan said he started Social Innovation Camp to bring people together for 48 hours, hand them digital tools and enable them to "simply get it done, not talk about it." Change, he told the mostly corporate attendees, "is going to happen with you or without...It's about what people want and need, regardless" of what their institutions are delivering. People will construct change on their own if they see others dropping the ball. "The key is to be in the conversations where innovation is occurring," he said.

* Tim Johns, VP of Corporate Communications for Unilever, said corporate engagement with employees, across industries, is at an all-time low. "It's a trust issue; employees don't listen to us," Johns said, speaking about the employee-management credibility gap that now exists at many companies. The one place where trust is rising? Among PLUs, he said -- "People Like Us." Thanks to social media, Johns says, employees and customers tend to trust peers, not corporate managers and mouthpieces, as a source of credible information about new products or company initiatives. Additionally, he said, "the explosion of social media means the corporation no longer is the sole channel of corporate information for employees, and most companies tend to forget this." Finally, Johns said, employee engagement strategies need to "rescue internal communications from the dead hand of HR." Johns added: "I think the dead hand of HR in most organizations has killed employee communications" with its hierarchical, one-way approach to communication. A fellow panelist, Ed Gillespie from Futerra, said managers are generally skittish about the need to open up further to employee input via social media. He says his firm is finding that it needs to shift away from "command and control" to "trust and verify" as an approach to improved company-employee relationships and influence.

* Stuart Handley, the communications director at Dell, said the computer manufacturer has been using social media for the past two years to build customer feedback communities. In February 2007, Dell created Idea Store, one of these communities. So far, so good: Handley says the initiative has reaped more than 12,000 ideas and some 400 product improvements. The communication goes both ways: Dell asks this community to tell the company which ideas matter the most to them. "This gives us a sense of what is really driving consumer opinion," he says, and it influences customer choices. "We want to make sure that when we bring a product to market, it taps into the (questions and concerns and suggestions) of the most active and most vocal" customers, he said. A new initiative, called "storm session," is intended to segment discussion demographically among customers to get deeper feedback and more detailed insights. "We've found that people are incredibly passionate about sharing ideas," Handley said, "...but you've got to be in the conversation. The key thing is to create the platform, enable people to give you feedback, listen to it, aggregate and discuss it and then make change--and then once you do, get back to people who suggested it."

* Justmeans Managing Director Deb Berman and a panel of company communicators talked about how social media and the evolution of independent stakeholder groups online and off are changing the way companies get the word out about their initiatives. Berman suggested "the press release is dead" and said many new ideas about how to better engage customers using social media already exist at most companies. She said companies might step up the ways they tap the knowledge of employees most actively engaged in the use of social media to help communicate the company's sustainability initiatives. Fellow panelist Jo Confino, executive editor of the Guardian, said it is becoming more important for companies to more fully tell the stories of their experiences experimenting and creating new ways of doing business, both to share best practices and to build a more credible bond with their stakeholders. [For more on Confino's views on the subject, see his post in this section.]

Watch this space for additional highlights from the day and check the Tweetstream from the event #socialmediaCSR.