The following is a guest blog post by Jeff Toister,  Founder of Toister Performance Solutions, Inc. Click here to view the original post on the Toister Solutions website. 

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Guest post written by Justin Gauvin, Executive Director of Verego

What does Social Media have to do with Social Responsibility?

As more and more organizations aim to build purpose-driven and meaningful brands, there is a profound opportunity for brands to combine their social media efforts with their ongoing efforts to become a more socially responsible and sustainable brand. The power of social media is continuing to become a critical engagement tool for monitoring conversations about the world’s largest brands, giving companies the ability to create a new channel for customer-driven innovation and online reputation management. Although brands are using social media to engage customers, are brands being proactive about improving their social responsibility in the eyes of the global customer?
This question drives us everyday at Verego, a Corporate Social Responsibility Solution Provider aiming to unite the global economy to promote the responsibility movement. Verego believes there is a massive opportunity for brands to improve their performance as responsible companies in order to proactively manage their reputations with customers and beyond.

Everyday at the world’s leading companies, advanced CRM technologies are deployed across social networks as a means of understanding the voice of the customer. Getting to know what the customer says about your products and services is the critical feedback required by nearly every department of the organization, but one in particular has been disconnected from the power of social media: The Corporate Social Responsibility department.

This disconnection is fading as many big brands like Office Depot and Generals Mills are no longer leaving out their Social Responsibility teams from their company’s social media presence. These once left out departments are now actively embracing social media as their tool of choice for gaining feedback to support the brand’s big bets into becoming the world’s leading, socially responsible companies. Office Depot and General Mills are looking to take advantage the strategic opportunities inherent in becoming a best in class responsible brand, and are some of the first big bands to create specialized Twitter Chats focused on collecting feedback on their social and environmental goals.

On April 23rd, General Mills is launching a live Twitter Chat to discuss their commitment to responsibly source 100% of their 10 most important ingredients by 2020. Social media chats like these are designed as facilitated conversations that engage the broader Online Community. Most notably, these interactive Social Responsibility focused Twitter Chats move beyond the boundaries of normal online customer engagement, to social media enhanced stakeholder engagement, a concept we at Verego like to call #socialsquared: the intersection of powerful social media tools with social responsibility strategies. Like in any form of engagement, the magic comes from using feedback to improve your business, and now, with more and more Social Responsibility teams utilizing social media, we are beginning to witness the growth of the #socialsquared responsibility movement.

What is #socialsquared?

#socialsquared generates a new source for social innovation and environmental improvement by enabling stakeholder dialogue at a scale never before possible. This concept harnesses the power of engaging stakeholders through social media in order to improve the design of products, services, and even the overall operation of the entire organization. Right now, impact-driven brands have the opportunity to go beyond normal customer relationship management, to the new frontier of stakeholder relationship management.

What’s the future of #socialsquared look like?

The future of the #socialsquared movement will involve expanding the notion of the ‘voice of the customer’ to the ‘voice of the stakeholder.’ With this expanded perspective of the brand’s influence, Social Responsibility departments will be able to extract value from the collective ‘voice of the stakeholder’ with powerful social media tools that can generate actionable insights from the vast amounts of data created online everyday.

Digitals Roots, one of the world’s leading CRM innovators is Verego’s partner for bringing the next generation of the #socialsquared responsibility movement to the world’s leading brands. For the past 5 years, Digital Roots has led the way with their “smarter” Social CRM software and with the help of Verego, we are together poised to enable brands to manage the entire spectrum of the online stakeholder experience. Through this partnership, we are looking to the future in order to define what the unfolding world of stakeholder relationship management will look like.

When you think of the opportunities at hand as the #socialsquared responsibility movement evolves, more and more thought leading companies will expand the perspective of their brand beyond just their customer, to the greater stakeholder community, in order to gain the feedback necessary for profound community-generated innovation.

Verego is Uniting theGlobal Economy to promote the Responsibility Movement in collaboration with theVerego Steering Committee who is a group of executive thought leaderscontinuously evolving the open source framework known as The Verego Social
Responsibility Standard (Verego SRS) which is free to all

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