CSR: Aligning with digital world
There is no gainsaying the fact that, in today’s digital world, information marketing and content development has prove to be necessary for companies.
Before now, blog writing was only thought of as personal diaries published to the Internet. However, checks by Daily Times showed that, today, almost forty per cent of companies use blogs for marketing purposes, and more than forty six percent of people read blogs more than once a day.
To this end, digital marketing campaigns are critical for every business these days. Like everything when it comes to business, the more thought you put into your content and your media, the better results you will get.
The elements above are ones that should not be left out of any digital marketing campaign; and they are ones that you can’t afford to miss. The right time to take a good look at your marketing strategy is right now. Ask yourself if you could be doing better in one of these areas. If the answer is yes, be sure to address that issue right now.
Analysts are of the view that, regardless of the industry – whether you are running a bakeshop, law firm, or technology start-up – creating content should be a top goal in order to increase more inbound traffic to your website and become a trusted advisor.
For these analysts, identify a handful of employees who could provide quality content about corporate social responsibility and keep your website updated.
Commenting on this issue, a CSR analyst, Inès Seddiki said; “company using big data are now able to predict with more efficiency how much stock they need to supply to their factories; and when they need to ship them for example. They reduce their carbon emissions by reducing transportation, and by ordering the exact amount of product they need they diminish their energy consumption implied by stocks and their waste as well. In other words, these tools help them both save money and reduce their impact on the environment.
For example, a consulting firm, Accenture, has released a report on this topic, explaining in details all the ways big data is changing the supply chain and making it greener. Their work shows, for example, that big data seem to increase the efficiency of their supply chain by ten to thirty six percent! Big Data has impacts on every pillar of a CSR strategy, even topics, such as, well-being at work or equality in the workplace. Some implementation of Big Data in CSR strategies have become case studies in the universities around the world.
According to him, the scope of possibilities has become so wide the United Nations has launched an international competition called, “Data for Climate Action”. One of last year’s winner was a project called “Aclimate Colombia”. They came up with a tool, a decision support system, based on data sets related to the weather, the market and many other topics to help rice cultivators manage their crops and avoid shortages. Big Data can be ground-breaking in so many ways and on so many levels.
Commenting on the importance of data to CSR, an information technology expert, George Kleru, told Daily Times that; “a new and relatively unused term — Corporate Data Responsibility — is a bit different, yet very much a part of CSR.
“The twenty first century is riddled with big data, analytics, machine learning, and millennial stereotypes. Increasingly, all companies are recognizing or reimagining themselves as technology companies. They understand that they are data-driven enterprises, even if they aren’t typically part of the tech sector.
Putting aside traditional types of trade secrets and proprietary data, the most valuable commodity upon which to base business decisions is consumer data: personal information, behavioral histories, and customer intent. Indeed, there is an abundance of information and innovation hubs that are leveraging data to provide services for finance management, healthcare, retail, and shifts in our daily habits and lifestyles. For example, Apple’s new Wake Alarm is designed to help improve your sleep schedule through data monitoring and reminders — an artifact of the quantified self movement.”
According to him, sometimes ago, “Accenture published “Guarding and Growing Personal Data Value,”identifying five principles to guide responsible data management: stewardship, transparency, empowerment, equity, and inclusion. While Accenture does a good job of combining each of these ideas into a single framework, it does not go far enough. Creating an organizational culture of data ethics and responsibility requires that the right stakeholders be empowered with the correct mission. Specifically, the Chief Information Officer function — or the top-level executive responsible for information governance — must be integrated into the organization’s CSR function, and the business must identify that Corporate Data Responsibility is really, in fact, a CSR issue.”
He said, “Without trust, people share less information, bad information, or no information at all. They become anxious, bewildered, and suspicious. They lie or self-censor otherwise beneficial information. If people don’t trust a company, they are more likely to switch to a competitor or resist or fail to become fully invested in the commercial relationship.”
On transparency, he said, “It only comes with good stewardship. It is incredibly difficult to provide transparency to consumers about internal business processes and information governance when the data life cycle of different products and marketing strategies is either poorly understood or undocumented.
“Consumers should have full access to clear data collection policies and data use, and the visibility should be easily accessible. The goal is to ensure consumer trust to the benefit of the company’s bottom line. More consumer trust means access to more relevant data, leading to more revenue opportunities.”
“In such an abundance of data, what responsibilities go along with the feast? If businesses are stewards to their communities and ecology, they are also stewards of the data they collected.” He stated.
Godwin Anyebe
