The seminar drew communications professionals from a wide variety of companies: the environmental and civil engineering company, online retail investment bank Binck Bank, property manager Corio, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly Europe, wind turbine blade producer LM Windpower, fashion label O’Neill, and food producer Unilever. Despite the sector diversity, attendees often had similar view on the charms and challenges of social media.

Cultural differences pose major barriers in taking a consistent global social media approach. The Chinese may have the same tools as the French and Dutch, but their way of using them varies greatly. Getting the right tone of voice is also very culturally determined.

Compliance remains a big challenge and delegates agreed that having a general code of conduct is not enough. What works better is a detailed social media policy that spells out exactly what employees can and can’t do and reminds them of the penalties.

A burning question for all was that of how to measure results. Has anyone devised an effective, accurate return on investment formula to calculate the value of your social media efforts?
We will be reporting on that very topic in our next blog. So stay tuned!

To see a short impression on the seminar, click here.

If you would like to take part in a future Media Wise Social Media seminar, get in touch by sending an e-mail to info@mediawise.eu.

What’s the link between a Dot Com CEO’s gruesome killing of an African elephant and a communications company’s stranded email? Supply chain infection!

For the past 12 years Media Wise and The Green Place have used the webhosting services of U.S.-based GoDaddy, one of the biggest providers worldwide. GoDaddy offered good value for money. We particularly liked the customer service. You can always get a GoDaddy customer service representative on the phone. Even on a Sunday, in the middle of the Arizona night, you can make a local call from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, at local call rates and get help from a courteous and knowledgeable person. This spring, however, the CEO of GoDaddy, Bob Parsons, threw his company’s reputation on the line when he shot an elephant in Zimbabwe and posted a video of it to internet. The incident triggered a wave of outrage and negative publicity. An animal rights group called for a boycott. Many Media Wise associates and staff also immediately called for us to sever our relationship and move our business to a more ethical provider.

Meanwhile, while we were still considering our options, the witchhunt against GoDaddy continued in the Twitterverse and fanned out to reach and infect the next layer of the supply web – the clients of GoDaddy. Alarm bells rang at Media Wise on November 10 when we received an ‘undeliverable’ message from one of our suppliers – T-mobile – saying the client host GoDaddy was blocked  due to “continued hosting of spam/hate sites, ignoring abuse, not enforcing terms of service / acceptable use policy.” The next day we received personal telephone calls from two or three clients and colleagues telling us our emails to them were bouncing. That’s when we realised we could postpone the move no longer and we acted immediately.

One week later we are now with a new provider called Site 5. The emails are flowing nicely once again, safeguarding today’s and hopefully tomorrow’s business, and keeping our CSR conscience clear . Once again this experience illustrates how sustainability rules. Ignore at your peril! — Emma Robson.

Contact the author

Media Wise has hired Charlotte Kroon as an audiovisual communications specialist. Charlotte is a multimedia journalist and designer who provides visual and artistic dimensions to corporate and brand communications. Charlotte’s tasks at Media Wise include website management and design and creating videos and visual identities. Charlotte’s previous work experience includes positions as an online video journalist at leading Dutch daily De Telegraaf and leading Dutch sports news site NuSport.nl. A native Dutch speaker, Charlotte is also fluent in English. She holds a Master of Science in persuasive communication and a Bachelor of Science in communication science and journalism from the University of Amsterdam. She also studied fine art at the Kunstacademie Sint Lucas in Gent, Belgium.

Embracing the world of social media in research, work as well as in my private life helps me to discover new and challenging tools, interesting topics, great campaigns and gives me helpful insights into today’s international marketing world. Nevertheless it is still quite astonishing to see how online-crazy our world has become. Everybody is always engaging in some kind of communication: whether it is checking emails on the way to work, posting on Facebook or reading the latest news on Twitter. Clearly, these enhanced communication opportunities also increase the possibilities for businesses. Social Media is great, but there is one crucial point that is often not taken seriously enough: Social Media compliance amongst employees.

Your online marketing strategy may be fantastic, you may be able to involve your Facebook fans and have lively conversations on Twitter, but what good is that when your employees keep giving you bad publicity, or even communicate in a way that’s destructive to your company?

Of course I am not proposing to start spying on your employees on Social Networking sites. But it is absolutely crucial to implement Social Media compliance rules into your companies’ confidentiality agreement and, most importantly, hammer home to every employee the importance of following your guidelines to the letter.

Negative examples of defamatory social media blunders are manifold: the Domino’s Pizza guy that snorted on deliveries and got published on Youtube, the employee that rants against ethnic groups on Facebook, or communicates his dissatisfaction with work. But, what are the points that need to be emphasized in such a confidentiality agreement?

First of all, get your employees to understand that they always represent you as a company: making offensive statements, posting nude party pictures, attacking other people will not only show your employees in a negative light, it will also darkens your own reputation.

It is up to you to implement general social media checks, but if you  tell your employees you are doing thisyour plans – this will give them an additional reason to think twice before actually publishing internal information or possibly defamatory content. Whatever they post, they should always bear in mind that you, as their employer, could read it.

Make sure your employees understand that it is always best to not say anything if nothing good can be said. Try to discourage them from so-called Twitter rants, especially when they openly communicate their affiliation with your company.

Also, it is crucial to emphasize the permanence of a digital footprint, that once it is online, it is — and will stay–visible. A great example of this is the Facebook timeline, which publishes all your posts of the last years – and forces users to recheck the appropriateness of their comments. I sure did.

Of course, a little extra publicity is always nice, but make sure your employees do not go overboard and start spamming their friends and followers with company marketing material. That might come across as being desperate.

In the end, make sure that your employees understand that abiding by your social media compliance rules is their own responsibility: not understanding privacy rules on Facebook is no excuse for publishing defamatory comments.

For more information please contact: Susanne Lehr, social media strategist. Susanne@mediawise.eu

Innovation literally took centre stage at the International Water Week held in the first week of November in Amsterdam. During the opening event, moderated by Media Wise Managing Director Emma Robson, triple Olympic gold medal winner Pieter van den Hoogenband and sports journalist Jeroen Grueter watched Amsterdam canal water get transformed into pristine drinking water through a portable and compact water filter. But this year’s overall winner of the  water technology innovation prize was a fish-friendly water supply pump Pentair Nijhuis. The week-long event, held at Amsterdam’s RAI Conference Centre, drew more than 20,000 water professionals from all over the world. Among the speakers at the opening event were Joop Atsma, State Secretary for Infrastructure and Environment and Garet Graves, Chairman of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana (CPRA).

I have been mulling over this: if we are successful in our jobs of fully integrating CSR into a company ethos, its business practices, and its product development, then surely we CSR practitioners will have made ourselves redundant?

Our extinction, then, will become proof of a job well done.  We have made visible progress and are now seeing an acceleration in the trend towards applying CSR to the actual business.  More and more companies and investors are  seeking and reporting information on non-financial key performance indicators, especially environmental indicators.  We have gone from no reporting on CSR (1980s-1990s) to a flourish in superficial reporting on CSR (2000-2010) and are now are moving into a push for fundamental, integrated CSR reporting.  Companies are now atually integrating CSR into all of the business.  So where will responsibility for CSR go? I imagine it will move into the hands of the CFO for reporting, the engineers for innovation, HR for training all employees, compliance officers and supply chain specialists. As more companies are maturing in their CSR and integrating it into the overall strategy and development, we are witnessing a brave new re-structuring that threatens CSR specialists as a species.  I applaud our extinction because it means that we will have helped change the company model from one based solely on monetary profit to one based on being responsible. But even though the job of communicating it all will still exist within corp coms, I still wonder:  what next for me? All morphing suggestions warmly welcome.

- Vicky Valanos

You can read the report here: