Social media activism
Recently Jeremiah Owyang did an interview with Greenpeace about their social media activism and how they had used social media to get companies to change their policies and activities, while also raising public awareness about what the companies are doing. As Jeremiah explains, activist groups such as Greenpeace have been using technology for a long time to aid in their activist work, and social media is no exception. In fact, I would suggest that businesses should study such activist groups and learn what they are doing right. Then businesses can co-opt what the activists are doing to develop closer relationships with the clients they serve.
I think businesses should study how other types of organizations are using social media to communicate with their constituents, donaters, supporters, or whatever you want to call the people that these organizations are communicating with. Its clear that some of these organizations get results in their activities, and its worth studying what they do, and then reverse engineering it. For example, what would have happened if Nestle had been transparent about their activities and actually solicited advice from their fans about what to do? They might’ve gotten the public support and been able to leverage it with Greenpeace. Instead Greenpeace leveraged their response against them and forced Nestle to pledge to make changes. Clearly Greenpeace understood the social psychology involved a lot better than Nestle did.
Ideological movements will trump corporate cultures in a public setting, because if everyone can learn about the effect that corporate policies are having, and those people start to care, corporate culture won’t be able to justify their continued actions or lack thereof. Consequently social media activism comes down to leveraging social influence…finding the opportunity and people who will take up the cause, raise public awareness and effect the bottom line of the company. And it’s very important to understand that its the bottom line that matters the most to a company, often to the detriment of that company because people can rightly accuse the company of only thinking about the money.
If a company were to re-orient themselves in terms of thinking not only about the bottom line, but also the social implications of the activities they use to feed the bottom line, that company might find that the long term cost of focusing just on the bottom line would be a lot more expensive than the short term gain justifies. And this is why if companies study how organizations such as Greenpeace are using social media to raise awareness, they can start asking some tough critical questions about their own practices and how they can be socially transparent with their clientele. The result is that they can then leverage that social influence to get client support for the changes they are making. It’s a different approach, but if companies were to employ social media activism to themselves, there’d be a lot less upset, because they’d be using what the activists were trying to use to promote socially responsible change.
What do you think? How should companies learn from Greenpeace and other organizations that are using social media to raise awareness and public outcry for change?
Categories: social influence, Social Media, social media behavior
Tags: Greenpeace, social influence, Social Media, social media activism, Taylor Ellwood
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