Gaia Group Blog Posts Tagged ‘thought leadership’
A re-post from Hubspot. Fifty year old advice that still seems fresh today. Worth a few minutes to page through and consider. One our favorites:
By now, we’ve all seen the video of Bob Parsons, the outspoken CEO of domain registrar and hosting company, GoDaddy.com, speak out about his recent vacation to Zimbabwe in which he hunted and killed an elephant. Change.org got wind of the video that was posted to Parsons’ site and urged supporters to pull the plug on their business with GoDaddy. According the Change.org, the film titled Hunting Problem Elephant – My 2011 Vacation is “basically a gruesome, 4-minute elephant snuff film”.The blogosphere has exploded with comments on everything ranging from African village norms to wildlife support and corporate social responsibility. According to one blogger, a GoDaddy competitor has seen 20,000 websites move from GoDaddy to their hosting service which could mean millions of dollars per year depending on account size. If this is true, then his actions could have impacted the bottom line.The real question in all of this is whether or not this crisis has caused harm to the GoDaddy brand. The Editor in Chief of the CMO Site says, “I expect everybody involved in this controversy will score a marketing win.” The Network Solutions management team jumped on the controversy in order to wrangle a few new customers by providing a promo to new customers using the discount code “elephant”. More opportunity for brand exposure for Network Solutions and new customer revenue? Yes!Our wish as communicators is that Mr. Parsons had been somewhat more contrite about his actions. Regardless of the entrepreneurial attitude that’s built into the company, the actions of one person at the top can create harm to employees and public image. We’ve read his 16 rules and wish he had chosen to consider number 11 a little bit longer.
Crisis communicators are pitching themselves as commentators today due to the big news from Japan. Toyota, one the world’s largest brands, is suffering its first big PR crisis all due to mangled communications. By issuing a recall on two-thirds of their inventory on the road without clearly informing their employees of talking points and the resolution process, Toyota has badly bruised their reputation. more
I picked this (and the PDF) up from Environmental Leader today. Worth a read as they give tips on implementation and theorize a process for corporate sustainability.Key ideas from the Harvard Business Review article by Ram Nidumolu, C.K. Prahalad, and M.R. RangaswamiThe Idea in Brief• Sustainability isn’t the burden on bottom lines that many executives believe it to be. In fact, becoming environment-friendly can lower your costs and increase your revenues. That’s why sustainability should be a touchstone for all innovation.• In the future, only companies that make sustainability a goal will achieve competitive advantage. That means rethinking business models as well as products, technologies, and processes.• Becoming sustainable is a five-stage process, and each stage has its own challenges. Here’s how to tackle them and emerge from the recession ahead of the pack.
I recently stumbled across a Twitter thread concerning comScore, a leading digital audience measurement organization. This thread reminded me that I haven’t been to the comScore site in a while and they are practically my neighbors here in Northern Virginia. For those of you unfamiliar with comScore they provide the following factoids on their site that help give some perspective to what they do (and how they make money!):
- · comScore is a leading source of data on mobile as well as PC-based Internet usage
- · comScore data are truly global – the company tracks more than 3 million unique websites worldwide and the comScore panel includes consumers from 170 countries
It was wonderful to see a front page link for the corporate social responsibility (CSR) program, as CSR often gets buried in secondary pages. It appears as though comScore, “…has partnered with Trees for the Future to plant a tree for each new person who joins PermissionResearch (a division of comScore) through the comScore Trees for Knowledge campaign.”Digging deeper into the PermissionResearch site, I realize they have a great CSR pitch and outline very specific, and appealing, member benefits. They have software downloads (free) that range from power management software to screensavers. Additionally, there is a points-based rewards program that is a catalogue of interesting consumer products which might appeal to the CSR demographic (i.e. tents – apparently we like the outdoors a lot).What’s in all this for comScore? Engaged research panelists that likely fit a demographic that is attractive to their customers (opinion-elites) and why, yes, trees planted to offset our carbon footprint. Hats off to comScore for developing a program that wasn’t sent to the secondary or tertiary page dungeon, clearly outlines attractive benefits for participants and also serves to move their business forward. Well done.