Actics Blog

News from the world of reports and knowledge. The cool hunting site PSFK featured an abstract of our CSR 2.0 working paper a couple of days ago. We got some criticism for lack of references and examples. We quickly remedied that with a new version (although the paper originally was meant more like a mix between a manifesto and forecast.) However, for the critique of hyping and skepticism on whether a convergence between the public engagement of Web 2.0 and corporate responsibility is actually taking place, here are two pieces that seriously back our claims and predictions.

The core tenet of the latest Trendwatching report on ‘Transparency‘ is quite in line with both Actics and our CSR 2.0 perspective in specific. It contains numerous great examples of what happens if you ride the transparency wave - and if you don’t (the links under 4 are especially relevant for us). The report offers amble documentation for how CSR is becoming a matter for the masses online. Everything is up for investigation, evaluation and comparison – including corporate conduct (It sounds like a no-brainer but is more complex than that, as the recent Edelman report indicate). The solution?

Getting worried about your own brand? While most brands show a Pavlovian tendency to spend even more on ‘disaster-handling’ courses, the real solution is of course to not misbehave or underperform

The Trendwatching report links to a recent Wired article on transparency, The See-Through CEO. It is just as interesting and contains other instructive examples of the value of transparency and honesty in hyper-connected age. This quote alone captures the main point of our CSR 2.0 perspective:

The new breed of naked executives also discover that once people are interested in you, they’re interested in helping you out - by offering ideas, critiques, and extra brain cycles. Customers become working partners.

Highly recommended readings!

If any of you like to comment on and thus improve our CSR 2.0 paper please find an almost daily updated version here.

As web 2.0 demonstrates new media not only make information available but they also enhance social cooperation. The sorts of ethically relevant ties that used to be possible on a local scale are now possible on an extended, or even global scale. This enables the emergence of a new kind of ethical economy, where the production and distribution of wealth unfolds through other media than that of money (or trough different kinds of money). Ethical currencies like affect or respect can work just as well.

First out in our small survey of the institutional framework of this emerging ethical economy is givegetnation, a peer-to-peer gift system. The platform simply coordinates need with excess supply: as they claim, if it was possible to distribute rationally only 1 per cent of the surplus wealth that people have available a lot could be done to ameliorate poverty. And with surplus wealth they mean both the things that we make and want to give away, and the things we simply have lying around without using them, in closets and attics.

‘GiveGetNation is the world’s first free, post-scarcity, values-based, person-to-person economy. We organize the world’s surplus capacity and make it accessible to everyone for free.’

Their vision is that of an ethical economy: a mode of production and distribution primarily based on values:

‘We operate on a very simple principle: Values are the primary sources of human capital upon which all money is based. But what are values? There are thousands, really, but most people agree love, joy, freedom, creativity, growth, abundance, and personal fulfillment are key. And where do values live? Values live in you and your dynamic relationship with others. Think about it.’

The US has decided to file two cases at the WTO over intellectual property. The cases are against China where the enforcement of of IP protection is notoriously lax., in particular regarding consumer brands, music and dvds, for which there is a massive cottage boot-legging industry. And they really have no reason to behave differently: most of this intellectual property belongs to countries like the US, and IP protection means little more than protecting the right of (mostly) US IP owners to siphon off excess profits form China’s booming middle class consumer market. Indeed, the fact that these objects are so frequently copied implies that, for most people in the world today, they are not perceived as particularly ‘american’ or even ‘western’, but as a common cultural property. Nike shoes is the natural aspiration of everybody , everywhere. This is of course the source of the value of the Nike brand, that people all over the world lets t matter to their everyday life, and gives it value in making it a signifier of hipness, ‘in status’, belonging to particular groups, or what have you. But if the value of Nike is something co-produced by everybody (or virtually everybody) then maybe the right to benefit form this diffuse production process should also be redefined. Why not let Nike, Coca cola, Disney be the property of UNESCO? That way brand revenues (currently billions of $ annually could be used for the general benefit of mankind, who produced these values in the first place.

The Uk has seen a wave of internet-enabled consumer activism lately. High street banks, although cheap by international standards, have been particularly vunerable. They have faced a mass revolt where over a million customers have downloaded forms from activbist websites to reclaim the some 4.5 billion pounds that banks charge in punitive overdraft fees each year. Utilities and roads are next in line. These mass revolts are not only an outcome of the new possibilities for social activism that information tehcnologiy provides. Argueably they also stem forma an emerging popular consiousness, a moral economy if you will, that states that things like money transfers (essentially a communications medium), roads, energy and utilites should be free, or close to free, and that it is unethical to make money out of these necessities, as this means taxing the necessary infrastructure of contemporary life. Given that so many companies make money form precisley this (what is a succesful brand, if not a way of taxing social interaction?) this spells hard times for the business model of contemporary informational capitalism

original post at P2Pfoundation.

The great boom in philanthropy, partly as a response to generous tax regulation and partly as a way for a new financial capital to legitimize itself (see my friend Nicolai Guilhot’s book), has produced a jungle of foundations and NGOs who are, for the most part unregulated. Indeed NGOs and charities are often less regulated and less accountable than most business, and, overall there is no measure of the efficiency or social impact of a particular program or activity This might have been OK if the main role of NGOs was to make business and wealthy individuals look and feel good- just give some money to ‘the poor’ and your conscience clears. But in a world where NGOs are becoming ever more important as development and aid actors, often taking over from states and official bodies, we need a way to assure that their activities are transparent and the impact of what they do objectively measured. It is not just a question of making sure the money arrives to the people that need it, but also of ensuring that particular activities and programs are not directly counterproductive. As today’s Financial Times article on the subject concludes
“Of every $1,000 spent in so-called charity today,” observed a philanthropist both Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have described as an inspiration, “It is probable that $950 is unwisely spent – so spent, indeed, as to produce the very evils it hopes to mitigate or cure.”

IBM’s Global CEO study for 2006, ‘Expanding the Innovation horizon’, focuses (it follows..) on innovation. Building on interviews with 76 CEOs across the globe they conclude that today collaborative innovation is that involves actors outside of the firm or organization is indispensable. Furthermore, ,’business partners and customers were cited as the  top sources of innovative ideas while research and development (R&D) fell much lower on this list’ .

The main challenge for the future is thus to involve your stake-holders in extended networks of cooperation; to ‘ collaborate on a massive, geography-defying scale to open up a world of possibilities’  and to ‘force an outside look, every time,  Push the organization to work with outsiders more, making it first systematic and then part of your culture. ‘

Many of the CEOs interviewed stated that their companies were seriously working with strategies to leverage the innovative potential of stake-holders.  In today’s global, networked and info-tech-saturated (to use a couple of clichés) economy, immaterial productivity has been thoroughly socialized, to quote Sam Palmisano,
Chairman, President and CEo of IBM : ‘ The nature of innovation - the inherent definition of innovation- has changed today from what it was in the past. It’s no longer individuals toiling in a laboratory, coming up with some great invention. It’s not an individual . It’s individuals. It’s multidisciplinary. It’s global. It’s collective.’

download the whole report here

A nice and prominent real world example of the argument: When it comes to public goodwill, damage control is extremely expensive and often comes too late. Transforming users/customers from friends into foes

Google needs to change. They can’t kill the motto [Don't be evil], so they need to live up to it, permanently. They need to stop treating the outside world with disdain, and replace it with transparency and honesty. Users must always come first. Always. And they need to do it soon. Once the shift in public opinion becomes obvious, it will be way too late.

From TechCrunch

The new report from WWF could hardly be hardly be more congenial to Actics. Although focused on sustainability branding and marketing strategies there’s a very short way from Actics’ ethical TQM like advice to ‘integrate your ethics into all parts of your company for better business performance’ to WWF’s advices to ‘integrate sustainability into all parts of your operation and unlock vast innovative and commercial potentials’.

Here’s a very lightly modified (most of this is quotes!) list of WWF advises we can very much agree to:

1. Observe and understand the values of your present and potential customers
2. Get your own house in order: improve your internal processes, from office management to production and logistics
3. From CSR to CSO: The Corporate Responsibility Function should be a driver of innovation. Focus on opportunities rather than risk
4. Motivate employees: Make part of their performance review depend on how they perform their job, in line with company/brand values
5. Collaborate: Include personnel from all relevant functions
6. Communicate: If you are open, honest and heartfelt then a bit of sniping here and there from your critics will just be grist to your mill. Think about how consumers interact with the new media landscape. Facilitate new channels of dialogue.
7. Engage your consumers in your ethical journey
8. Measure and monitor: Find ways of identifying, measuring, evaluating and reporting various elements of brand value, including those that relate to ethics, so they can be used by managers as indicators of performance.

Go read the report. Good stuff!

Check out this link for a beautiful example of how AdWords sometimes offers bad branding guaranty. Perhaps Google need to upgrade their context sensitivity with a little sentiment analysis

As we are about to launch the widget version of the Actics concept very shortly at Actics.com, we have naturally been discussing the issue of centralized vs. distributed community a lot. A couple of recent blog posts seem to support my intuition about the development toward more distributed services. So, as a kind of ‘trailer’ preceding our launch, allow me to briefly present the case for distributed communities that Actics will also support.

Fred Stutzman recently argued for designers of social networking software (SNS) to adopt OpenID to bypass the problem of achieving critical mass on your SNS to get the social going. There’s a lot of network effects (no wonder) and rich-get-richer in social networks, and you simply cannot push everybody on to new sites however great they might be. So, you should simply connect them between their present ‘homes’. OpenID is a new standard offering cross media authentication and ID management. In this context it means basically providing for socializing across different SNS’ (being friends, sending/leaving messages, logging visiting friends from other SNS’ etc). Stutzman’s compelling analogy is allowing people to mail other recipients than gmail users when using gmail yourself.

Today Steve Poland of Vested Ventures writes on TechCrunch:

MyBlogLog has built the next generation social networking service. If Friendster/MySpace/etc are v1.0 of social networking websites, this is v2.0. The service has created a distributed social networking platform — allowing websites and blogs to enable social networking amongst their community of visitors.

Poland’s argument is very much in line with Stutzman (and he actually already voiced it back in June) and what I havce been arguing in Actics. Why not provide cross media socialization? This should be equally obvious as cross service mailing or cross carrier phone calling. People are more than ‘Studying’ at Facebook, ‘Music’ at MySpace and ‘Ethics’ at Actics.com. There’s something quite old fashioned provincially local about the big social sites refusing things like OpenID. ‘Go ahead and socialize as much as you like - but only in our silo’. People are signed up to all sorts of sites due to chance, timing or personal taste. But that shouldn’t keep them from forming all sorts of communities across their different ‘villages’. This is simple web-globalization.

Naturally, I also agree with Stutzman and Poland’s expectation to see an explosion of services offering cross-media socializing soon. And MySpace, FaceBook and the other major players to support these services in order not to loose members expecting this new natural freedom offered at the next social site. Distributed communities seem such a natural development. And all the talk about widgets the last couple of months is an indicator of this as well.

Back to our coming widget; we simply want to give people the option of engaging their proxies in ethical dialogue in their own meaningful setting, be it a blog, webpage or SNS profile page, rather than dragging all their online and offline friends, families, and readers to Actics.com. For a lot of users, stating and getting feedback on their ethical ideals and activities is simply more interesting in the context of their existing online activities rather than on another new community. Especially as Actics is still new. However, we will still develop a ‘local’ community at Actics.com (launched next year) for those wanting to dig deeper and get more ethical leverage (wait and see!). But if the widget really does support the distributed communities processes we hope for, we’ll roll out a lot support for across the web inter-member engagement via the widget infrastructure. Exciting I think!