Last week I attended the Just Means Social Media for Sustainability conference, which was well done and quite interesting. I thought I would share some of my notes from the session for those that weren't there.

Opening sessions: "You are not in control: a new paradigm of engagement"

- Moving from CSR 1.0 to 2.0, which is moving from the printed CSR report to the communications platform. This has been something we have seen here at Nortel. A CSR report is nice and ours is well done, but the publication rhythm dictated by an annual report means that some of the results that are communicated in the report are outdated by the time it goes public. That is why I greatly prefer using greenroots to communicate with our stakeholders, since can achieve near real-time interaction. The best example is this post on our partnership with the EPA climate leaders program. If this had to wait for our CSR report, it would have become public months after the fact.

- The majority of the consumers on the net are watchers, not engagers. Can be tough to remember that in the context of that loud and active group

• - Example cited is the core 5k that are primarily responsible for the content on Wikipedia

Advice

- Start with customers- but this is coming from Dell and 7^th generation, which are Business to consumer driven. As a B2B (business to business) company, it can be harder to start with the customers, as this would be much more focused and smaller subset of the net.

Session 2: Redefining Corporate Activism

- ‘To stand out as a leader, you can't be afraid of standing up', if criticisms are valid, there is a need to hear them and social media becomes a platform for the dialogue. I love that quote.

- Social media is a good tool for reaching out to people you need to be engaging anyway.

- The idea that no one person/company is in control of ANY companies brand image on the net has been repeated a multitude of times (and it is only 10:45 am). Dialogue is happening with or without you and smart companies will be an active member of the conversation

Session 3: how tech and social media can propel the good work your company is already doing?

- Case study company: Liquidnet- a classic b-2-b company, which makes focus on doing good interesting. Harder to justify investment and resources on sustainability for such an entity. This company has philanthropy arm/mandate to donate 1% of its revenues coming from its founders.. Seems as if it has gone this route due to the passion of its founders more than anything else. Trying to be a different type of Wall Street Company.

Keynote: Creating value Together- online collaboration and competition

- Youngest generations growing up entirely different than previously, creates new opportunities and new ways of doing business and living

Crowd sourcing: simply put- "the we is smarter than me", smart Money is on 7 billion people+ changing the world. This is not a new idea, with lineage back to prizes given by government to achieve or solve problems.

Now: private ventures are doing this, examples include Netflix and the x prize to launch a reusable manned spacecraft. Netflix is interesting because they allowed/enabled the winners and all competitors to keep their Intellectual Property, in a sense they became partners with innovators.

Overall, crowd-source has been a very big buzz term throughout this conference.

Session 4: How to calculate the ROI of social media

- Ways to measure: conventional metrics include the things everyone is already using, such as time spent on site, twitter followers and page views. Another metric is cost for comparable exposure (this is interesting), for example the cost of the social media versus print campaign. . But are these numbers the ‘right' followers/readers? Value driven versus gross numbers, for example one minute of Obama's time has much more worth than a day of mine. This is a sticky issue to track.

- Getting to a solid ROI takes time, if you have to make the case revenue/profit producing in the short term it can be very, very tough, almost prohibitive. In that vein almost have to have buy-in for theoretical foundation of effort from execs.

- CSR and social media are similar in some respects, both can be hard to quantify concretely and accurately. Looking at your competitors work in both spaces is a common way to get a sense for a specific industry. Obviously, the tech sector has been pretty aggressive, for example we see Intel and eBay on panels at this event. Context ends up being more important in these settings when compared to other venues/strategies

- Best practice is to have a platform that is consistent and replictable across the corporate face, and then each of the specific groups/experts within the company are able to own their efforts.

Session 5: Getting the message out: is the press release dead?

- Social media platform audience is very flexible and demographic dependent, also quite fluid. For example, facebook versus my space users, which has evolved over time.

Quality not quantity: use up people's attention span carefully; you only get so many cracks at the apple. One panelist's advice: ‘be cool', another recommends being authentic. Far more decentralized media environment than ever before.

- Bloggers are often the middle ground between old-line journalism and aggregators, and the middle ground is often a very dangerous place to be in the middle of any dynamic/emerging marketplace

Forward looking, question: Will twitter be smaller in 3 years than it is today? All 3 panels said yes. I am not so sure.

Session 6: Building the Market for Sustainability

Incoming class of MBA students is very interested in doing good work in their professional experience: 15-20% 10 years ago, now between 90 and 95%. But the market for those jobs is not robust; demand is much greater than supply right now.