A change in tone for Corp.US ?

Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Media - two ends of the marketing spectrum

More and more large caps appear to be taking a serious look at corporate social responsibility reporting. Momentum is building in Europe and appears to be rolling in and catching interest on the US mainland. Some examples are listed:

Office Depot talks about Sustainability Reporting
DowChemical Talks about Better Internal Controls
Dow Chemical - a human face
The Audit Committee: Key to Effective Corporate Governance

However, and here's the gotcha, few "Socially Responsible Investing Funds" have shown a better than market index return with very few exceptions such as Neuberger Berman Socially Responsible fund.

Other useful links for SRI investing:

Social Investment Forum
Green Money Journal
Calvert
PAX World Funds
Social Funds

On the other hand, there is a growing interest in using social media for marketing . . here’s a collection of podcasts about marketing from Marketing Voices, a weekly podcast that discusses how social media is affecting marketing strategy and practices, by Jennifer Jones.

1. Seth Godin, marketing expert, author. States that small is the new big. People need to target audiences of 4 not 400. Told marketers he feels they have the biggest opportunity in at least thirty years to make an impact given social media.

2. Robert Scoble, blogger and vice president of media development for PodTech. Talks about how blogging has evolved and why it is important for corporations to blog today.

3. Peter Rojas, co-founder and editor of Engadget, one of the most popular blogs on technology today. Discusses the publication, its strategy and how to best contact editors for the publication.

4. Phillip Bodzenta, director of global communications for Coke. Describes how Coke used bloggers to build audience during the World Cup. Shows pictures of bloggers at the World Cup.

5. Sharon Wienbar, managing director, Scale Venture Partners (formerly BA Venture Partners) on what is hot/ not in social media venture investing.

6. Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, talks about how to measure social media.

7. Steve Rubel, senior vice president of Edelman Public Relations. Speaks to how social media is impacting the practice of public relations.

8. Dick Costello, chief executive officer of Feedburner. He speaks about how to get blogging and podcasting content is found and distributed.

9. Bill Kircos, head of consumer and enterprise media for Intel. Describes how Intel implements social media programs, most specifically, podcasting.

10. Kelly Wagman, head of customer relationship marketing for Juniper Networks. Talks about how Juniper used social media to build a community.

11. Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, a wiki company. Describes wikis and how they are best used in marketing.

The entire collection of Marketing Voices is here.