Time Magazine: Person of the Year is YOU!
-----What it means to CSR
Today, Time Magazine said that the Person of the Year is YOU! "Yes, you. You control the Information Age." the cover story said!
It is an amazing story. And it is true that nowadays, each person as an individual has more freedom and feasibility to get their voiced heard. Blog, YouToBe, etc. all these new business models provide convenient ways to express your own opinons. So, the Time magazine said, it is an age of "Digital Democracy"! This really indicates a change of communication paradigm.
Actually, many organizations have noticed such change. I remember I read a special report issued by the Edelman Consulting firm, entitled "Public Relationship: Communications in the age of personal media". This report addresses the consequence of the use of blog and its impact of corporate reputation management.
So, what does it mean to CSR? it is an interesting question.
I think the answer is simple, i.e. it changes the operational environment of business, which requires companies to adopt a stragegy that can efficiently respond to stakeholders' concerns. The more efficiently, and more socially responsible.
I read some CSR books written by business schools. Most of these books start the story with the change of the operational environment, which includes economic environment, social environment and ecological environment. For instance, a company begins to concern NGO's campaign because NGOs become stronger and bigger, and their campaigns can mobilize many the power of customers, sometimes even investors. All companies have to adapt to such social environment changes.
The fast development of personal media and so-called digial democracy will have a fundamental impact of business operational environment. Imagine, a customer who is not satisfied with a product would write a criticin his/her blog, and this might be spread through internet in a very short time. Company would face great challenging if this critic gets echoes from the others.
Therefore, all companies need to be more careful about their social performance, environmental performance, etc. And CSR is a way to realize this goal.
Just a small comment, perhaps will write a longer/formal article about this.
Also, Edelman Consulting recently released another report "CSR and Sustainability in the BlogSphere". It looks at a different aspect of blog issues, i.e. to identify who are using the blog tools to support CSR/sustainability development/campaign.
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