This was the title of a slide presented to the Pepperdine Net Impact chapter tonight by Jeff Hittner, Director of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) for IBM. This declaration cuts to the very core of the CSR movement that I have recently been considering. In the past month I have been fortunate enough to visit Patagonia Headquarters in Ventura, CA, attend the Net Impact Conference in Philadelphia, PA and listen to Mr Hittner tonight on the West LA campus. Throughout the month I have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge and insight from some of the foremost thinkers in the space. Tonight was a chance to reflect on the journey. Read more
Recently I was asked to blog for the Marketing Society of Pepperdine’s business school on the topic of technology in marketing. This will be a weekly post on the Marketing Society’s blog. Check out my first post here:
Perkins argued America has been secretly creating a global empire through the use of Economic Hitmen, Jackals and eventually military intervention. Economic Hitmen use debt as a weapon to enslave entire nations:
To be honest, I’m not an expert on international finance. Perkins verbally stated he wasn’t a consipiracy theorist on several occasions and I’ll you decide, However, I often felt as if he made sweeping assumptions, “there’s no doubt in my mind the CIA was behind xxx…” That being said, Perkins book was a best seller for a reason. It has tapped into the American psyche due to it’s plausibility and near Hollywood plot. Perhaps some research of my own is in order.
The second breakout I attended was aligning Corporate Social Responsibility with your brand. The primary examples that were used were Pedigree and Dove. Pedigree was a good example of the company using traditional marketing strategies in promotion their CSR. This includes having a catchy slogan, “Help us help dogs,” and being aligned with a charity that made sense for the organization. Dove also followed this framework. However, there were some concerns regarding the hypocrisy of Dove and Axe having comflicting PR messages under the same parent company, Unilever.
I am currently in Philadelphia attending the Net Impact National Conference. Net Impact is an organization of MBAs seeking to change the world through business. Coporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become an issue that has been embraced by not only small, enviornmentally friendly companies, but by the Fortune 500 as well.
To kick the event off there was a keynote with John Brock, Chairman and CEO of Coca Cola Enterprises, and Carter Roberts, president and CEO of the World Wildlife Foundation. The two spoke on the topic of climate change and water conservation. WWF and Coca Cola have partnered to lower the amount of water used in producing Coca Cola. The current ratio of water to Coca Cola is 1.7 liters of water per 1.0 liters of Coca Cola. While this is admittedly not the most favorable statistic, it is much better than the 1.9:1 ratio just a few years ago. To give a comparison, the ratio of water to espresso at Starbucks is 144 liters of water per 1 liter of espresso.
After the keynote, we attended up to three breakout sessions and a career fair. The first breakout session I chose was with Priya Haji of World of Good. World of Good started as a small company connecting artisans and suppliers in developing nations with the large markets of developed ones. Through an exculsive online partnership with Ebay, World of Good has been able to create an online market place in which artisans can sell their products directly to consumers in the United States. Priya spoke about the importance of a smaller company to maintain its identity througout a partnership with a company as massive as Ebay and the added benefit that can be derived through leveraging successful partnerships.
The second breakout session I attended was with Mathew Mahan of Causes on Facebook and Ami Kassir, CIO of Advanta and Ideablob. This panel discussed the power of web 2.0 and the role it can play as a tool promoting different causes and campaigns for social change. The basic message was that web 2.0 is another tool that should be utilized for promoting your cause, however it still requires large amounts of time and effort to actually accomplish these goals. One question raised was how to make users take action. Is there a way of presenting material or leveraging social networks that causes people to advocate for the cause.
The career fair was also beneficial. I believe I now have several leads to pursue in terms of internships that I didn’t consider prior to arriving in Philadelphia.
Recently I was given the opportunity to visit Patagonia’s headquarters in Ventura, California through Pepperdine’s Net Impact chapter. I had an amazing time and learned a ton about the company and how to be socially repsonsible while still turning a profit. I wrote a blog post recapping and reflecting on our visit. Check it out!
I know, I know. Advertising is the devil. Or is it? I’ve come to realize my beef with watching advertisements on TV is that 98% of all the time I’m taken away from my favorite programming (Lakers games) is wasted on products I have an exactly 0% chance of purchasing. That is what infuriates me. NO, I don’t want your miracle rug cleaners or get-rich-quick schemes.
However, I am a capitalist. I do buy products and those products are brought into my line of sight at some time at which point I am marketed too. If you place an awesome shirt in front of me, I’m going to buy it. In fact, I’m happy that you introduced me to something I will enjoy wearing. Targeted advertising is all about bringing me products that I’m going to find interesting and exciting? Sign me up! Some celebrities pay people money to shop for them! With targeted advertising, the Internet will bring that service to me for free. I even get cool services out of the deal subsidized by the adverts to top it off. Eventually that 98% will approach 0% and I’ll be able to learn about all the cool concerts in my area and new restaurants that I want to eat at and clothes that I want to wear while my boys in the purple and gold are getting ready for a second half push.
My education on marketing is fairly limited, but I’m looking forward to taking my first course on the subject as part of my curriculum here at Pepperdine. My only request is they focus on the new rather than the traditional.
I’ve seriously been considering branching out into the web economy; enough learning about business! It’s time to get my feet wet. Gary Vaynerchuk has built his brand through what he calls hustle 2.0… It definitely gets me pumped to give it my all and see how it goes. Wish me luck! I’ll keep you posted when I can say more.
As you may have noticed, or more likely, I may have rammed down your throat recently, I’ve updated http://www.frankiewarren.com to utilize sweetcron. The following video is a lecture recently given by Yongfook, the creator of sweetcron. In his lecture he argues the traditional blog has died. It has been overrun with people utilizing the medium for commercial interest (a la techcrunch, his example not mine :)). He argues that lifestreaming is the future for personal weblogs and being able to own your data is an important part of this progression. I tend to agree with him and have temporarily settled on a hybridization of blog and lifestreaming as the two main focal points of my site.
That being said, the blog is still an integral part of my lifestreaming experience. It gives me a chance to put my thoughts down in a coherent manner. Short form medium, such as twitter, while suitable for our short attention spans, is not always enough to get our complete thoughts across. The blog has become one piece to the puzzle, where as before it was the entire picture.
The video is defintely worth a watch. What do you think? Has the traditional blog given way to lifestreaming?
-ƒrankie
PS What a tough crowd. I was laughing at some of his jokes that just seemed to get no response at all from the audience.
In case you haven’t noticed, I refreshed frankiewarren.com. The site is now being powered with Sweetcron, an “automated lifestream blog software” developed by Yongfook. Sweetcron is a social media aggregator, much like Friendfeed or Socialthing, which differentiates itself by being an engine hosted on your own webserver utilizing a sql database. The entire project is open source and is highly customizable with a relatively simple API and theme design process.
For anyone with a passion for social media, I think this is a superb way to present your online activity while simultaneously showing off any design skills you may have. While there is still value in community (read: friendfeed), I think that there is added value in being able to host your own information. To make a relatively basic analogy, friendfeed is to blogspot as sweetcron is to wordpress. I think this concept has the potential to really take off and I look forward to seeing people get creative with it.
I have a passion for social media. I believe it is the defining characteristic of our generation. We will forever be the ones who connected in a meaningful way over the internet. Just as Alexander Graham Bell connected people via the telephone, the Tom’s and Zuckerberg’s of today are connecting our lives in an equally significant way (Who will withstand the test of time is up for debate… My money is on facebook though).
I believe what makes sites like Facebook so special is two-fold: first is the user generated content and second is the conversation this content can facilitate. As it stands the paradigm of user generated content is in full effect. Friends are constantly uploading pictures of their recent travels and family get-togethers. Blogging has become a respectable profession and even microblogging services, such as Twitter and Facebook Status updates, have finally come into forefront of the mainstream’s attention.
However this is only realizing half of the potential of social media. To realize the full potential, we must realize that interaction is just as important as the content. Social media is able to broadcast like the radio and facilitate conversation like the telephone. As it stands, some sites are better at facilitating conversation than others. Take, for example, friendfeed and compare it to a more prominent social site, like your facebook account. Notice a difference? Friendfeed, as a function of its early adopter base, is lively with conversation. Facebook is more like reading a newspaper on your friends.
However, there is no reason facebook could not achieve the same conversational success. What it takes is proactive users willing to put their face out there and comment on things they find interesting. Everyone connected to me on facebook is a real friend in some capacity. I am interested in your thoughts and what you have to offer. As is everyone you are connected to, I’m sure. Take the time to add value in the form of conversation. It will improve the community of you and your friends and in the long run will keep us relevant to people we would have lost in previous generations.
I challenge anyone reading this post to add value to their social network of choice. I have been making a conscious effort to do my part.
