Today’s article comes from Mashable.com, written by freelance CNN entertainment correspondent, Melissa Jun Rowley. Her article shows several examples of how businesses are now leveraging social media as a vital resource and tool “to trigger a viral chain reaction and interest to the socially responsible work they are doing.”

Engaging with your customers to find out what matters to them and sharing with them by supporting the causes that they believe is most important. And it’s a sure fire way to build an ongoing transparent relationship that is going to keep that customer coming back!

Best Nicole

A cultural and corporate shift is taking place in the world. The result of things like the current economic climate and recognition of global climate change, society is starting to push past awareness and into action. As this transition takes hold, companies are evolving from their reactive states, and moving toward more pro-active approaches. Social media has begun to play a key role in how companies shape their corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and present themselves as good corporate citizens.

Corporate Social Responsibility

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Until recently, corporate social responsibility among businesses has revolved around risk mitigation and self-regulation. Instilled to make sure companies would abide by the law and perform ethically, CSR has focused predominantly on issues of overtime in factories and sexual harassment.Today, CSR functions as more than just a set of guidelines to keep companies out of trouble. Because the end goal for corporations has risen above simply selling a product or service, the standard for CSR is being redefined and is evolving as a driver of innovation. The bottom line is now three-fold, and is centered around people, planet, and profit. As business leaders strive to build more sustainable and socially responsible entities, formal social media strategies are becoming paramount.Panelists at the Justmeans Social Media for Sustainability conference, which was held in San Francisco last month, offered some insights on how social media can aid companies in being more socially responsible.Social Media & Sustainability from melissajunrowley.com on Vimeo.

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1. Getting to Know Your Constituents

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There was a time when companies issued press releases, and operated under the impression that they controlled the message of their brand. Those days are gone. Today, the brand image is linked to the thoughts and conversations of a company’s consumers. Therefore, businesses must get to know their constituents.By sparking authentic and transparent conversations via social media, companies are can learn what their stakeholders expect of them. Absolute transparency, no holds barred, is key.Entrepreneur, Jeffrey Hollender, the Executive Chairperson of the green products company Seventh Generation, says most corporations are not nearly transparent enough. “It’s a mistake for companies to think that they cannot tell the truth and hide anything they do,” said Hollender. “Whether it’s a customer, or an employee, or a reporter, someone will disclose a corporation’s dirty little secrets.”

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2. Influencing Customers as Citizens

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In this age of digital democracy, social media allows companies to influence and view the behavior of their customers after a product or service is bought. In the same vein, more and more consumers are self-identifying themselves as individuals who want to continue ongoing relationships with a business or brand.The dialogue exchanged between customers and companies can be highly beneficial for both sides, and build and strengthen a sense of community, which is the fundamental purpose of social media. When consumers are treated as citizens, they can do everything from helping a company amplify its voice, to voting on the style of a new product, to improving a service.

Hollender says Seventh Generation uses social media to involve the company’s community members with the creation and branding of new products. “We communicate with our people about everything from how they can help us magnify our green message, to what scent we should choose for our next eco-friendly laundry detergent,” said Hollender.

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3. Getting Your Good Work Out There

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A growing number of businesses are leveraging social media to trigger a viral chain reaction of interest around the socially responsible work they’re doing. More and more companies are talking with customers and stakeholders about causes of interest to them, and about how they can work together to have a positive impact on the world.

Chip giant Intel is using social media to improve its earth-friendly consciousness, and to engage with other parts of the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector and consumers. Intel’s Director of Corporate Responsibility, Michael Jacobson, says his department takes advantage of social media by marketing the positive ways Intel is working to minimize its global carbon emissions, as well as the entire industry’s.“There was a time when we only focused on reducing own environmental footprint,” said Jacobson. “Today, we look for ways to help reduce CO2 emissions across the board, and we do that by talking with our stakeholders individually through social media.

Online networking can help significantly improve a brand’s image externally, as well as boost company morale, which is what Nike is focusing on currently. The shoe giant recently launched an internal social media network called the We Portal, which serves as a platform for employees to discuss ways they can socially engage with one another, and how the company can be more sustainable.

Nike’s Digital Advocacy Director Laura Adams says social media has become instrumental in Nike’s evolution as a brand and as a socially responsible and more sustainable enterprise. “At the end of the day, it’s the people out doing work that are going to get us to achieve our goals,” said Adams.

We want to hear your thoughts. What constitutes “green” to you?

Best Nicole

When it comes to going green, intention can be easier than action. Case in point: you decide to buy a T shirt made from 100% organic cotton, because everyone knows that organic is better for Earth. And in some ways it is; in conventional cotton-farming, pesticides strip the soil of life. But that green label doesn’t tell the whole story — like the fact that even organic cotton requires more than 2,640 gal. (10,000 L) of water to grow enough fiber for one T shirt. Or the possibility that the T shirt may have been dyed using harsh industrial chemicals, which can pollute local groundwater. If you knew all that, would you still consider the T shirt green? Would you still buy it?

It’s a question that most of us are ill equipped to answer, even as the debate over what is and isn’t green becomes all-important in a hot and crowded world. That’s because as the global economy has grown, our ability to make complex products with complex supply chains has outpaced our ability to comprehend the consequences — for ourselves and the planet. We evolved to respond to threats that were clear and present. That’s why, when we eat spoiled food, we get nauseated and when we see a bright light, we shut our eyes. But nothing in evolution has prepared us to understand the cumulative impact that imperceptible amounts of industrial chemicals may have on our children’s health or the slow-moving, long-term danger of climate change. Scanning the supermarket aisles, we lack the data to understand the full impact of what we choose — and probably couldn’t make sense of the information even if we had it.

But what if we could seamlessly calculate the full lifetime effect of our actions on the earth and on our bodies? Not just carbon footprints but social and biological footprints as well? What if we could think ecologically? That’s what psychologist Daniel Goleman describes in his forthcoming book, Ecological Intelligence. Using a young science called industrial ecology, businesses and green activists alike are beginning to compile the environmental and biological impact of our every decision — and delivering that information to consumers in a user-friendly way. That’s thinking ecologically — understanding the global environmental consequences of our local choices. “We can know the causes of what we’re doing, and we can know the impact of what we’re doing,” says Goleman, who wrote the 1995 best seller Emotional Intelligence. “It’s going to have a radical impact on the way we do business.”

Over the past couple of decades, industrial ecologists have been using a method called life-cycle assessment (LCA) to break down that web of connection. The concept of the carbon footprint comes from LCA, but a deep analysis looks at far more. The manufacture and sale of a simple glass bottle requires input from dozens of suppliers; for high-tech items, it can include many times more.

The good news is that industrial ecologists can now crunch those data, and smart companies like Coca-Cola are using the information to clean up their corporate ecology. Working with the World Wildlife Fund, Coke analyzed its globe-spanning supply chain—the company uses 5% of the world’s total sugar crop—to see where it could minimize its impact; today Coke is on target to improve its water efficiency 20% by 2012.

Below the megacorporate level, start-ups like the website Good Guide are sifting through rivers of data for ordinary consumers, providing easy-to-understand ratings you can use to instantly gauge the full environmental and health impact of that T shirt. Even better, they’ll get the information to you when you need it: Good Guide has an iPhone app that can deliver verdicts on tens of thousands of products. Good Guide and services like it “let us align our dollars with our values easily,” says Goleman.

But ecological intelligence is ultimately about more than what we buy. It’s also about our ability to accept that we live in an infinitely connected world with finite resources. Goleman highlights the Tibetan community of Sher, where for millenniums, villagers have survived harsh conditions by carefully conserving every resource available to them. The Tibetans think ecologically because they have no other choice. Neither do we. “We once had the luxury to ignore our impacts,” says Goleman. “Not anymore.”