Simon Mainwaring
Your computer needn't be the first thing your see in the morning and the last thing you see at night.Collection: Computers
We now see numerous examples of brands working together to address issues such as environmental degradations, climate control, pollution, poverty and disease.Collection: Environmental
Creating a better world requires teamwork, partnerships, and collaboration, as we need an entire army of companies to work together to build a better world within the next few decades. This means corporations must embrace the benefits of cooperating with one another.Collection: Work
The simple act of saying 'thank you' is a demonstration of gratitude in response to an experience that was meaningful to a customer or citizen.Collection: Thankful
When people align around shared political, social, economic or environmental values, and take collective action, thinking and behavior that compromises the lives of millions of people around the world can truly change.Collection: Environmental
Many corporate leaders and employees have the right intentions, but it can be overwhelming when you consider how everything is affected from leadership styles, to organizational structure, to employee engagement, to customer service an marketplace.Collection: Leadership
Social media is not about the exploitation of technology but service to community.Collection: Technology
Effectively, change is almost impossible without industry-wide collaboration, cooperation and consensus.Collection: Change
How much do you as a consumer value a positive experience with a brand or its customer service department? How willing are you to share that with your friends? How inclined are you to let that person know that you're interaction with them was positive?Collection: Positive
The keys to brand success are self-definition, transparency, authenticity and accountability.Collection: Success
More and more companies are reaching out to their suppliers and contractors to work jointly on issues of sustainability, environmental responsibility, ethics, and compliance.Collection: Environmental
The private sector must play a role in ensuring the prosperity and health of the people who comprise its market. It is time for the private sector to become a proactive partner contributing to the efforts of governments and philanthropies.Collection: Health
Technology is teaching us to be human again.Collection: Teaching
Ensure your employees understand what your brand stands for so they can be your first line of word-of-mouth advertising.Collection: Mouths
Make the customer the hero of your brand's story.Collection: Hero
We need to develop and disseminate an entirely new paradigm and practice of collaboration that supersedes the traditional silos that have divided governments, philanthropies and private enterprises for decades and replace it with networks of partnerships working together to create a globally prosperous society.Collection: Government
When people align around shared political, social, economic or environmental values, and take collective action, thinking and behaviour that compromises the lives of millions of people around the world can truly change.Collection: Thinking
One of the greatest challenges companies face in adjusting to the impact of social media, is knowing where to start.Collection: Impact
Like all technology, social media is neutral but is best put to work in the service of building a better world.Collection: Technology
The role of social media is critical because it helps to spread cognitive dissonance by connecting thought leaders and activists to ordinary citizens rapidly expanding the network of people who become willing to take action.Collection: Media
If a brand wants to build social communities, capital and influence, it must become the chief celebrant of its community, not its celebrity. This simple shift in approach unlocks enormous transformative potential for brands.Collection: Simple
Social media demands a lot of us on top of our already demanding lives. So let's disconnect as we need to and renew our interest and ourselves.Collection: Media
When thinking through who to bring together to generate new ideas, it is more effective to combine specialists from very different and unrelated disciplines rather than a variety of people with different skills sets in the same field.Collection: Thinking
Companies and their brands need to reach out and speak directly to consumers, to honor their values, and to form meaningful relationships with them. They must become architects of community, consistently demonstrating the values that their customer community expects in exchange for their loyalty and purchases.Collection: Loyalty
In the social business marketplace, brands that hope to build loyal and growing communities do so most effectively when they demonstrate their core values and allow a community to build and engage around it.Collection: Community
Perhaps the most effective way to describe the approach a brand must take is to think of themselves as social cartographers. By that I mean that brands must simultaneously inspire, engage and maintain a series of conversations taking place within certain cultural landscape specific to their business goal.Collection: Mean
Any institution faces two basic choices if they hope to spark new ideas. One is to leverage the brains trust within their organization by creating a special event dedicated to new thinking. The other is to look outside themselves to stimulate solutions.Collection: Thinking
Too many brands treat social media as a one way, broadcast channel, rather than a two-way dialogue through which emotional storytelling can be transferred.Collection: Emotional
For decades, media companies have largely controlled the tools through which consumers were told what to buy, wear or think. Now consumers possess the same ability to produce, distribute and curate content and distribute it to their peers in real time across social media platforms.Collection: Real
Everyone living under the social contract we call democracy has a duty to act responsibly, to obey the laws, and to abandon certain types of self-interested behaviors that conflict with the general good.Collection: Democracies Have
By linking with friends and ultimately strangers and building those relationships, social media is reweaving the social fabric that can then be used to scale your non-profit efforts.Collection: Media
The most potentially transformative impact of social media is its ability to encourage brands to marry profit and purpose. The reason brands participate is that such outreach earns those companies social currency enabling them to start or participate in conversations that connect them to consumers in meaningful ways.Collection: Meaningful
Corporations often partner with government after natural disasters, as many companies did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As a rule, however, long-term civic/corporate partnerships are still rare .But this need not remain the status quo, as many opportunities are available for such partnerships.Collection: Opportunity
Brands must have a point of view on that purposeful engagement, whether it's directed towards the environment, poverty, water as a resource or causes such as breast cancer or education. Merely declaring your commitment to a category or cause will not be enough the distinguish your brand sufficiently to see a return on these well-intended efforts.Collection: Cancer
As we approach each of the great social challenges of our time we must acknowledge that old thinking will not provide the new solutions we need. These solutions will be uncomfortable, hard to sell and risky to execute. But the cost of not doing so is even greater.Collection: Thinking
There are many individuals, companies and even countries operating in what I call a 'me first' mentality, which is effectively a purely competitive approach to life, treating the planet as if it has infinite resources and pitting one country against another for supremacy.Collection: Country
As a function of the easy access to information provided by the Internet, and the ease with which it can be shared thanks to social media, consumers are now better informed as to the behavior of brands and the multiple global crises we face.Collection: Media
A world in which government is burdened by historic debt, philanthropy has limited resources, and the private sector is only interested in its own personal gain is simply unsustainable.Collection: Government
If a brand genuinely wants to make a social contribution, it should start with who they are, not what they do. For only when a brand has defined itself and its core values can it identify causes or social responsibility initiatives that are in alignment with its authentic brand story.Collection: Responsibility
The most impactful way consumers can assert their power is to become mindful shoppers, giving their dollars only to socially responsible companies. In today’s world of social media and smart phones, this is easy to do.Collection: Smart
Corporate executives need to re-frame their responsibilities to include the interests of all the stakeholders in society at large; not just shareholders, but also employees, the citizens of our communities, and those who care about the environment.Collection: Responsibility
Brands are facing a new competitive landscape in which self-definition, core values and purpose will increasingly define their ability to reach customers that only allow what is meaningful in their lives to pass through their filter.Collection: Meaningful
Move your personal investments and retirement funds to socially responsible investment (SRI) funds that support only those corporations that uphold higher standards of behavior. Returns on SRI funds are usually equal to, if not better than, many of the well-known traditional mutual funds.Collection: Retirement
Non-disclosure in the Internet Age is quickly perceived as a breach of trust. Government, corporations and each of us as individuals must recalibrate how we live and share our lives appropriate to the information now available and the expectations of others.Collection: Government
How well you tell your story determines how well your customers tell your story.Collection: Stories
Corporate America cannot afford to remain silent or passive about the downward spiral we are undergoing. It cannot turn a blind eye to how difficult the experience of life is for so many of their customers.Collection: Eye
Social media companies must combine their mastery of the latest in real-time, location based or augmented reality technologies in the service of clear and consistent storytelling.Collection: Real
Companies, to date, have often used the excuse that they are only beholden to their shareholders, but we need shareholders to think of themselves as stakeholders in the well being of society as well.Collection: Thinking
Radical transparency has an enormous impact on our personal lives. We can no longer share thoughts, quips, photos or personal opinions anywhere on the web without being mindful that they may turn up where we least expect it (notably job interviews, divorce proceedings or public media).Collection: Jobs
Social technology gives leaders a vital new platform with which to connect their companies to the myriad stakeholders who have an interest in their well being.Collection: Technology