I was running a workshop earlier this week teaching a group of professionals how to “think like editors” and by doing so, start creating stories and content that have value and are useful to social media audiences.

It’s a course I’ve run many times and, as with anything you do a lot, it’s easy to become a bit complacent. So, when it came to the part of the workshop where I try to demystify the new buzzword platforms and networks that are springing up, I felt pretty calm answering everyone’s questions until someone asked: “So I’ve been hearing a lot about Pinterest. That’s just about images, right?”

“Oh, yes, just images,” I said with the confidence of a man who had spent the previous evening engaged in some hardcore “pinning”.

Wrong. It turns out this hottest of hot new social networks has been offering video pinning since last August.

Why this self-indulgent minor mea culpa? Well, part of my job is to keep on top of the latest social technologies, platforms and apps. So if I’m making such a social media geek schoolboy error about a network as influential as Pinterest, how can more “normal” folk hope to navigate the increasingly Byzantine social tech landscape, never mind use them effectively for sustainability communications?

In the past six months Pinterest has skyrocketed in terms of users and popularity, while mobile photo app Instagram was snapped by Facebook for a cool $1bn (£618m). Yet, away from the headlines, dozens of other smart, creative apps and platforms – startups such as Present.me and Spreecast along with not quite startups such as Slideshare and Storify to name a few – are creating new opportunities for collaborative, authentic and transparent storytelling – the bread and butter of sustainability comms.

At the same time, a host of once adventurous and much loved social media platforms – ventures such as Flickr, Delicious, Gowalla (which was shut down in March) and Ning to name a few – have waned in popularity, been subsumed by other companies or simply crashed and burned.

In this disruptive media landscape it would be very easy to bury your head in the sand, wait until everything settles down and some new social media king of the jungle emerges. Except that isn’t going to happen. So, given that you can’t depend on your online community coming to visit your corporate website (seriously). And given that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in that Facebook basket (seriously), where should sustainability communicators be looking establish a social media voice?

Some of the biggest and most successful social media brands advocate being wherever their customers are. That’s understandable if you’re a major consumer brand such as Ford or Pepsico who have established social media satellites on many different platforms and networks. But does that approach necessarily make sense if you’re selling laundry detergent, banking or energy services?

One way of determining where your social media voice should be is first to work out what you have to say and how it can be of value, useful even, to the social media communities you want to connect to.

Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, Tumbler, even Facebook have trendy techie names. Fundamentally though, they are just publishing platforms, albeit ones that specialise in video, words and images and are either more broadcast or conversational depending on the platform. Once you know the story you want to tell and understand the interests of the platform community, then you can start fine tuning and packaging that story to work across relevant social media.

That’s why Whole Foods chose to highlight the work of its Whole Planet Foundation on Pinterest and why UPS chose to created a dedicated (and “likeable”) sustainability page on Facebook. It’s also why the likes of Suncor, Iberdrola and even the IFC and GRI are using professional document and presentation sharing sites such as Issuu, Slideshare and Scribd to reach their target sustainability communities.

The more sustainability professionals use social media outside of work, the more likely they’ll be to experiment with social channels and platforms for sustainability communications. But choosing the hottest new channel or biggest network is no guarantee of social media success. Understanding how sustainability stories might be of value to different and particular social media communities is a much better place to start.

This column first ran in the The Guardian.

2012 is fast living up to its billing of being the year of Big Data. Investors are in an expectant froth about the imminent Facebook IPO, an estimated $100bn flotation built on harvesting the personal likes of 900 million members (according to its newest financial figures). There’s the smaller but equally eye-popping $3.2bn (32 times earnings) valuation of a Big Data analytics firm, Splunk. And there’s what might be considered the curious acquisition by Walmart of the popular Facebook app start-up, Social Calendar. Curious that is until you start imagining what a retailer the size of Walmart could do with all that data about your best friend’s birthday, your wedding anniversary or your summer holiday plans.

Even as we continue to share extraordinary amounts of formerly private (or at least almost inaccessible) information in our Faustian bargain for better, more useful social media experiences, a privacy backlash is growing. Just last week, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, warned of the dangers in putting so much personal data in the hands of just a few social networking companies, and urged Netizens to demand access to their personal data from the likes of Facebook and Google.

Of course, excitement and fear about data mining have been competing since the birth of the web. I remember a company all-hands meeting back in 2000 when my then publisher spoke excitedly about how online customer relationship management (CRM) would transform the media business and our publication in particular. (The dot-com crash put paid to the second part of that prediction.) Fast-forward 12 years and the new online analytics boom business is social-CRM – mining social network conversations, likes and follows to intuit and predict customer behaviour.

The reason for the new boom is the explosion in online data being created and shared. According to the technology research firm, IDC, data is growing at 50% a year. One recent report from the World Economic Forum, Big Data, Big Impact, boldly classed data a new economic asset, like currency or gold. As new social technologies and platforms come online, and as the Internet of Things begins to mature these streams of data will explode, and the companies that mine them will likely have even more power over our lives than ever before.

But, hold on a second. Does the Big Data revolution have to scripted like an out-take from Minority Report? Even as companies fine-tune their Big Data targeting in order to sell us more stuff in locations and at times when we least expect it, a growing movement of data scientists are asking the question: how can we use Big Data for social good?

This is the focus of Jake Porway, the founder of Data Without Borders (just renamed Datakind). A data scientist at the New York Times by day, Porway has lit a fire under the data analytics community by mobilising a small army of volunteer data geeks to help crunch solutions for social projects. In one example, Data Without Borders helped the New York Civil Liberties Union understand whether the New York Police Department was guilty of racial profiling (and whether they were working to meet arrest quotas) by analysing and mapping the publicly available arrest logs of NYPD beat officers. Its next collaborative goal is helping Chicago non-profit organisations unlock some of their Big Data answers.

What Porway is enabling in the US, Ushahidi, a crisis-mapping outfit has been pioneering globally since 2008. Ushahidi (testimony in Swahili) started mapping reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout that year. Since then its team of data mappers have created platforms for tracking and crowdsourcing texts, emails along with social media updates from blogs and Twitter that have helped in countless crises, including the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Japan tsunami as well as Libya’s revolution.

The potential for using smart data and social technologies to drive sustainability is also taking root in academia. Smart data thinkers from MIT, Northeastern University, Harvard and the Santa Fe Institute are working on a collaborative project, ESS (short for Engineering Social Systems). Some of the research projects it is considering include using Big Data modelling to predict food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa and using techniques such as expectation-maximisation to create economic systems that enable people to earn small amounts of money by completing simple tasks on their phones. Now imagine the business opportunities for forward-thinking telcos, mobile players and agricultural/food producers that focused their efforts on these types of sustainability projects?
Some of the biggest technology and engineering companies are starting to do just that. Current data-mapping projects in Rio de Janeiro by IBM – part of its Smarter Cities initiative – along with other urban partnership schemes run by Siemens and Philips (I’ll be writing in more detail about social tech in sustainable cities in a different column) all point to a small but important emerging corporate trend of analysing Big Data not just to mainline sales channels but to navigate a path to more sustainable living and business.

According to the New York Times, as the Big Data economy continues to grow, the US needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers. Let’s hope a good chunk of that expertise can be employed towards harnessing Big Data for sustainability. As Porway said in a speech at a recent Poptech conference, “What if we started using data, not just to ask what type of movie we wanted but to see but what type of world we want to see?”

Now that’s “Social” CRM we could all embrace.

This post first appeared as part of Matthew Yeomans’s The Social Business column in Guardian Sustainable Business.

News that the UK’s major high street banks are contributing one third of the £600m Big Society Capital – a new fund to help finance charitable and grassroots social projects – has been greeted with a fair degree of social media disdain, to say the least.

Immediate comments on the Guardian‘s site, along with other major news organisations and Twitter, demonstrate major doubts both about prime minister David Cameron’s “big society” vision in general and the ability of the banks to do anything social in particular.

It was always going to be difficult for this new big society scheme to avoid being seen as anything but a slick new PR stunt to shift attention from a global industry with a very big image problem. Indeed, just this week, a new damning report by The American Banker demonstrated the numerous ways major US banks continued to push predatory lending practices even after the 2008 financial crisis that was brought on by their predatory lending practices. The New York Times summed up the report with a headline that pulled no punches: Why People Hate the Banks.

If the £600m project dedicated to funding micro and macro social projects is to prove its value, and if the sketchy track record of the coalition government’s other big society projects is any indication, it will need to be communicated effectively through a medium that is deemed authentic, convincing and transparent by a public that no longer settles for PR spin.

So it’s just as well that, over the past 12 months, a number of financial services companies have proved themselves adroit at communicating innovative new social responsibility and sustainability ventures, often through collaborative communities and social media.

Whether it’s Barclays’ volunteer network, BNP Paribas “For a Changing World”, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s “PlanBig” or BBVA’s “Friends and Family” (all profiled in SMI-Wizness Social Media Sustainability Index), major financial institutions the world over are looking to rekindle a connection with their customers and greater community through sustainability ventures and community projects.

It’s not been an easy journey for the banks. Realising that they no longer have control over consumer marketing and coming to terms with a very vocal and often angry customer base has been a steep learning curve for most financial institutions. Along the way, many banks have preferred to retreat into their shells rather than adapt to the new social media communication landscape that their customers are embracing.

But, as episodes such as Bank of America’s 2011 fee fiasco made clear, pretending social media doesn’t matter is no longer an option. In that classic case study of a social media screw-up, the recipient of some $45bn in federal bailout funds decided it would impose a new $5 monthly surcharge for debit card holders – only to hastily scrap the plan when confronted with a blogger, Twitter and Facebook backlash. Studying HSBC’s student-fee Facebook fiasco of a few years before would have saved Bank of America a lot of trouble.

Want to learn more about social media mistakes? Check out SMI’s new book #FAIL: The 50 Greatest Social Media Screw-Ups

Slowly, consumer banks have come to terms with the need to provide social media customer service – often supported via Twitter (Citi, Bank of Scotland and, yes, Bank of America are just a few examples). Still, answering customer queries is surely the bare minimum of what banks should be doing with social media. Communicating sustainability or social commitment should be a far more rewarding challenge, not least because communities on Twitter, Facebook and company blogs or social networks deliver the authenticity, reality and transparency that good sustainability and CSR projects need to be judged by.

VanCity, a Vancouver community bank, understood this back in 2006 when it launched a pioneering new social network called Change Everything. That simple venture – asking Vancouver residents what they would like to change for the better in their city – became a blueprint for banks enabling social conversation and action online. You can see its influence in Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s Plan Big and in BBVA’s Friends and Family — two of the most innovative social media community ventures of the past 12 months.

Closer to home for Big Society Capital, the Co-operative Bank’s Join the Revolution initiative offers a good steer for how social media storytelling can shine a light on financial-sector social investment, while BNP Paribas’ For a Changing World shows how a big consumer bank can communicate the intricate nature of micro finance in a way that connects with customers and, yes, shareholders.

Perhaps then, before the Big Society Capital fund spends any of that £600m, it might consider a social media strategy for how it will communicate what and how it is doing well. Putting those plans before the UK “crowd” would certainly go some way to help counter the accusations of big bank spin. You never know – it might be just the test needed for the entire big society.

This column first appeared in The Guardian Sustainable Business. More information on social media sustainability strategies are available in a free download from our Social Media Sustainability Index.

It’s been just over two weeks since the aptly named, under-the-radar NGO Invisible Children released to YouTube a classic piece of agitprop video, KONY2012. And what a two weeks! The video has been viewed more than 100 million times and Invisible Children have been lauded for their actions in shining a spotlight on the atrocities carried out in central Africa by Joseph Kony, leader of the Lords Resistance Army. At the same time the very success of KONY2012 has shone an equally bright spotlight on both the finances of Invisible Children and the factual accuracy of the video.

And that global scrutiny apparently led to the mental breakdown of the charity’s co-founder Jason Russell, a bizarre episode that played out in broad daylight on the streets of San Diego and was, of course, filmed, becoming a social media sensation in its own right.

Away from the main event of bringing a despot to justice and the TMZ sideshow of Russell’s breakdown, KONY2012 also has generated massive interest from marketers, eager to understand exactly what social media alchemy helped create this perfect viral event. Already the web is spewing with blog posts and articles with headlines like: “10 tips marketers can learn from KONY2012″. Social media gurus and marketing MBA tutors no doubt are deleting their Obama 08 Campaign PowerPoint slides and replacing them with fresh, new KONY2012 insight.

Okay, maybe I’m being a little glib here. KONY2012 definitely does offer companies some insight into the power of social media but I’d argue it has more to do with smart reputation management than creating a viral marketing buzz for a brand.

Take Joseph Kony for starters. He may be a genocidal tyrant with a global price on his head but he’s not exactly a social media force to be reckoned with. The first rule of good social media crisis management is to be prepared and that means listening to what is being said about you online and being able to respond. Given that Kony’s diminished LRA continues to hide out in the forests of central Africa, the Invisible Children campaign was targeting a foe that was never going to be able to respond. Indeed it was left to other local NGOs, journalists and politicians to point out some of the holes in the KONY2012 narrative (though not the central accusations against Kony of course).

Now, take a step back and consider just how prepared your own company is to defend itself from an activist YouTube video as compelling, heart-string pulling and, yes, perhaps factually-fuzzy as KONY2012?

It’s not hard to imagine an anti-corporate social media campaign ravaging a brand in the future. After all, just a cursory look back through the annals of YouTube would have provided Invisible Children with the blueprint for its hit.

As early as 2005 Irish activists campaigning against Shell’s plans to build a pipeline and refinery in the West of Ireland were loading protest videos onto YouTube. By 2007 and 2008 YouTube was being used to greater effect as a campaigning tool by Greenpeace. Just ask Kimberly-Clark and Unilever.

Both multinationals were targeted by the NGO during this time with creative, original video campaigns aimed at stopping the practice of clear-cutting old growth forest (a charge aimed at Kimberly-Clark brand Kleenex) and, in the case of Unilever, linking its Dove brand to the destruction of Indonesia’s lowland forest for the development of palm oil. In both cases, Greenpeace pressure was a factor in the companies changing their supply chain policies.

Neither the Kleenex nor Dove attack videos could claim to have the unbelievable viral reach of KONY2012. They didn’t need to. Just a few hundred thousand or so views in a short space of time are enough to demonstrate to customers, the media and the companies themselves how people feel about an issue. And in the new social media world people throw their sentiment around pretty loosely, often without bothering to get to grips with the meat of the issue.

Already the average web user watches hours of video content each month. As we spend more of our time online, and as mobile social media comes to dominate our browsing habits, the power of video to inform and persuade will grow and the prevalence of video campaigning as a form of online activism will also increase. That will put major corporations and smaller companies in the social media spotlight like never before.

The smart companies will be the ones who have tuned their reputation management to listening, watching and understanding what is being said about them, and have also put in place the social media platforms and internal organisational structures to respond accurately and quickly to a brewing social media crisis. Belatedly, that’s just what Uganda’s prime minister, Amama Mbabazi, did this week when he released a YouTube response to KONY2012, noting that the campaign, “fails to make one crucial point clear. Joseph Kony is not in Uganda.” And YouTube was also the medium that Invisible Children CEO Ben Keesey chose to rebut the mounting criticism directed at his charity.

In doing so, both embraced another of those new social media lessons – to be relevant and focused in a connected highly diversified online world it is best to respond to a crisis using the same medium you were attacked with.

Matthew Yeomans is the co-author of #FAIL: The 50 Greatest Social Media Screw-Ups and co-founder of SMI

Way back in 2006, in the infant days of the social-media economy, Chevrolet launched an edgy marketing campaign for its Tahoe SUV. Tapping into the new collaborative power of crowdsourcing, Chevy asked online folks to create their own Tahoe ads. The reaction and the results were spectacular in a car-crash type of way as anti-SUV campaigners delivered a wake-up call to the marketing industry — namely that the future of online advertising would be out of its control.

Fast-forward to January 2012 and McDonald’s was hoisted by its own crowdsourced petard — this time a Twitter promotion called McStories that was remarkable for the amount of vitriol anti-MickeyDers managed to pack into 140 characters. Then, just last week, Coca-Cola in Australia got nailed by yet another misguided crowdsourced Facebook campaign asking its “fans” to indulge in some off-the-cuff word association that quickly descended into the depths of frat-house humor.

Do none of these guys read marketing blogs?

The answer is of course they do. But time and time again, that traditional marketer and PR mentality — dominated by the desire to create an impressive, big bang of a campaign without really thinking how it’s going to play out in real time and in an online world where everyone talks back — lets brands and agencies down.

The story of social-media lessons not learned is the overriding theme of the last eight years in social-media communications and the focus of a new book, #FAIL: The 50 Greatest Social Media Screw-Ups that I’ve co-authored.

In it we catalog a litany of mistakes and faux pas committed by major companies since 2004, and our conclusion, it has to be said, isn’t so much that shit happens but that it happens again and again and again.

In compiling the book we divided the social-media screw-ups into chapters such as Crap Customer Service, Plain Dumb Marketing and PR Asleep at the Wheel. We studied iconic #FAILs like the 2004 Kryptonite lock hack, the 2011 Chrysler Twitter F-bomb that saw a social-media agency lose its contract on the automaker’s phoenix-like “Made in Detroit” campaign and Motrin’s 2008 migraine brought on by incensed mommy bloggers and tweeters.

At the same time we tried to analyze the real reasons incidents like Maytag’s Dooce encounter, Bank of America‘s fee fiasco and Unilever‘s Dove Onslaught touched such a social-media nerve. And throughout our research we looked for the lessons that could help advertisers, marketers and PR specialists avoid being the next social-media screw-up.

There are many lessons that can be gleaned from these 50 screw-ups but five broad points indicate why brands get tarred with the hashtag #FAIL:

1. They fail to take social-media complaints seriously. By they time they wake up to the threat, the supercharged nature of social-media conversation has overwhelmed them.
2. Year in, year out, brands dismiss the relevance and influence of new social-media technologies and platforms. It happened with newsgroups (Kryptonite), blogs (Target) and Facebook (HSBC). Who is to say Pinterest won’t be next?
3. A nascent social-media problem becomes a full-blown #FAIL because the brand hasn’t allocated the necessary resources and experience to managing social-media comms, or that it has lost control of the chain of command. Habitat and Vodafone, you know what I’m talking about.
4. Marketing, PR and corporate communications are used to working in silos. Social media creates challenges that means they have to learn to work together.
5. Crowdsourcing means anything can happen. Just ask Chrysler, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Chevrolet.

Eight years on from the first major social-media screw-up, there’s now a wealth of best/worst practice to help companies avoid messing up themselves. Just don’t bet on it.

Matthew Yeomans is the co-founder of SMI and co-author of #FAIL: The 50 Greatest Social Media Screw-Ups and How Not to Avoid Being the Next One. He tweets @mateoy and @socialinfluence. This column originally appeared in Ad Age.

This week I was invited to chair a roundtable on the topic of green communications and, specifically, what the experience of McDonald’s recent McStories Twitter misadventure might tell us about social media sustainability communications.

In January, you may remember, McDonald’s found itself embroiled in a social media mess after a marketing campaign to get people tweeting about their best McDonald’s experience using the hashtag #McStories backfired spectacularly.

Everyone on the roundtable agreed that the stream Twitter invective levelled at the fast food giant through #McStories was an obvious signal that companies can’t control marketing messages in the social media age. Some in the discussion also thought it might make companies think twice about getting involved in social media. Yet, all agreed that the potential power of social media was too big an opportunity to ignore for companies looking to communicate sustainability. Indeed, we all agreed that social media and sustainability should be a particularly powerful combination given that both are rooted in the principles of authenticity, transparency, collaboration and community.

So what is holding companies back? Well, putting it plainly, companies are petrified of screwing-up, and that fear is magnified when their social responsibility is put under the microscope. It’s not hard to understand their reticence. Twenty-three of the case studies in our new book, #FAIL: The 50 Greatest Social Media Screw-Ups, are sustainability or CSR-related.

Obvious examples are BP’s experience during the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Unilever’s Dove brand getting ambushed by Greenpeace, and, yes, the recent #McStories fiasco.

Others are less well known but just as enlightening. They include Kenneth Cole, Microsoft’s Bing and Habitat’s tin-eared marketing approach to Twitter communications, along with Carnival Cruise’s recent confused approach to social media crisis communications.

Each screw-up is slightly different but trends do emerge. Through analysing all the ways since 2004 that companies have been caught short in a crisis, ambushed by the voice of the people or engaged in plain dumb marketing it is clear that, time and time again:

• Companies underestimate the collaborative and viral power of social media

• Marketing, PR, crisis and sustainability teams fail to communicate with one another before communicating to the public

• Brands think they can use old-school marketing tricks and messages to control conversations.

Ironically, one of the most revealing case studies is Carnival Cruises, a company that has been lauded for its smart social media marketing. It has 1.4 million fans on Facebook and keeps them dreaming of that next vacation with sunny, upbeat updates on exotic locations. However, all that changed on the fateful evening of 13 January when the Carnival-operated Costa Concordia ran aground on the rocks of Italian island, Giglio, killing 25 people and leaving seven missing and presumed dead.

Initially, Carnival turned its conversational clout to informing the world about the rescue efforts and the company’s dedication to safety. Then, on 19 January Carnival posted this on its Facebook wall:

“Out of respect for all those affected by the recent events surrounding our sister line, Costa cruises, we are going to take a bit of a break from posting on our social channels. We will still be actively listening and answering any questions you have about your past or upcoming cruises, but for now, the majority of our time will be spent focusing on all those affected by this event. We thank you again for all your support.”

Except that it didn’t take a break. One day later Carnival’s Twitter account retweeted a Friday Follow (#FF) shout-out for the company, as well as some other upbeat marketing messages. At the same time, news broke that Carnival had offered to compensate Concordia survivors by offering a 30% discount off their next Carnival cruise … and social media channels lit up with outrage over the company’s insensitivity.

Unfortunately for Carnival, between 19 and 24 January, when it was getting roasted, the company was silent on Facebook and bumbling on Twitter with a few inane posts that neither suggested respect for victims of the tragedy nor any indication that it was listening to the social media storm brewing around its insensitive discount offer.

So where did Carnival go wrong? The key to successful social media crisis communication is all about having structures and processes in place to deal with information and innuendo that is spreading virally in real time.

At first, Carnival gained social media kudos for responding promptly, and with useful information, to customer concerns and queries. But the longer the crisis continued it seemed the company was caught between its default social media marketing mentality and an emergency response directive. The result was Carnival sent out a series of mixed messages. Also, by “going dark” during a crucial point in handling the crisis, it lost the ability to use social media to answer growing criticisms of how it was treating the victims.

Corporate experience of social media is only eight years old but, as the many instances of screw-ups and mistakes make clear, communicating successfully in this new online landscape requires a sea change in the way companies operate. That is especially true when it comes to sustainability communications. Yet, as those thinkers at the recent roundtable quickly identified, if companies adhere to the jointly held values of authenticity, transparency, collaboration and community, social media should hold no fear.

Once in a while you come across a company initiative that makes you think: “Here’s a firm that’s putting sustainability into action.” That was my reaction (and that of many others) this week when British Gas announced a new incentive to help the most vulnerable members of society cut their energy bills through free loft and cavity wall insulation.

British Gas isn’t appealing directly to the elderly, the poor and the disadvantaged. It’s done that in the past with only limited success. Instead, the company is offering £50 to “anyone who refers vulnerable family, friends or neighbours to us for free insulation. We’ll also pay the vulnerable customer £50 for having the free insulation installed,” it declares in a press release.

There’s a compelling reason for vulnerable households to accept largesse from British Gas. First, home insulation takes only a day to install and, once completed, can save households as much as £175 on annual heating bills, while cavity wall insulation can bring savings of £135. Indeed, British Gas estimates that “£1 in every £4 spent on heating is wasted due to poor insulation, so energy efficiency can have a massive impact”.

The British Gas plan has generated a lot of chatter on news sites, including the BBC, the Guardian and the Telegraph. The company has also cranked up its not insubstantial social media machine – including a new British Gas News website, Facebook page (8,100 likes) and Twitter account (8,900 followers) to highlight the story.

So how exactly will British Gas be building this movement of caring friends and family members? “If you are interested in referring someone,” the company says, “tell someone you know who qualifies, remembering to give them your address and phone number [and] get them to ring us on 0800 975 1195.”

Is that it?

Now, it may well be that a lot of market research went into evaluating the most appropriate technologies for this umbrella group of vulnerable folk to use when contacting British Gas. It may also be that using the phone was deemed the most discreet and secure way of protecting the privacy of the recipients. Nevertheless, I can’t help but think that the company is missing a trick or three in how it is communicating and facilitating the insulation campaign. This is 2012 after all. British Gas has proven perfectly adept at using online and social media to send out its press release; it doesn’t take a massive leap of tech faith to see how social media technologies could also be used to build awareness and interest in what is obviously a laudable but also a challenging goal.

At the time of writing, British Gas hadn’t taken any major sustainability marketing steps for the insulation incentive apart from issuing the release. There may be a microsite in the offing (the company seems to have prepared the domain name www.sharethewarmth.co.uk), but it isn’t active at the moment. By the time you read this, British Gas may well have surprised me with a really smart social media strategy for this project … but just in case they haven’t, here’s a few thoughts on how a good scheme like this could be “sold” to the public in a way that is authentic, interesting and useful – the keys to successful social media communication.

Explain and motivate using YouTube and Facebook It’s not like British Gas doesn’t understand the potential of video. Its corporate YouTube channel is packed with brand and instruction videos – there’s even one about home insulation installation (although it’s not exactly a viral hit), and another showing how one pensioner saves energy with a smart meter (ditto on the viral). Smart video storytelling can help illustrate an idea better than any press release and also motivate social media communities to share the information. Facebook, after all, is the biggest video-sharing site in the world.

Harness the connectivity of Twitter Back in 2011, Thames Water came up with a simple but ingenious way to prevent water leaks that were draining resources during the winter. Using the hashtag #tweetaleak, Thames encouraged customers to report leaks. The company then dispatched repair teams to fix them. The leaks British Gas is trying to plug aren’t so obvious, but tapping into the power of Twitter could help mobilise its referral campaign.

Map the crowd OK, this one is a bit trickier given the need to protect the privacy of potential claimants. However, as the crisis mapping organisation Ushahidi has demonstrated with its Crowdmap open source technology, the ability to geolocate and map a social cause or sustainability issue offers great benefits for both understanding the scale of the problem and provides a guide for where best to divert resources to tackle it. London’s pilot crime prevention mapping service streetviolence.org is just one example of how mapping is being used to identify social problems and empower vulnerable people (in this case, victims of crime).

Social games Imagine if just some of the energy you devoted to playing Farmville and Angry Birds could be shifted into an opinion-shifting and motivating game for better home insulation.

Sounds ridiculous? Hardly. Today “gamification”, the application of game theory into work processes and marketing is a hot topic for all brands. Volkswagens’ Speed Camera Lottery – an experiment to make motorists drive slower by rewarding them via a lottery for staying below the speed limit – is just one quirky example of gamification being applied to social good and sustainability projects.

It’s not too much of a stretch to see how British Gas could create an energy-saving home insulation game for distribution on Facebook that could boost awareness for its scheme.

Admittedly, all these strategies cost a bit more in marketing terms than a press release. But sometimes investing a little more upfront pays dividends in raising awareness for your social initiative … especially one that could help British Gas win over new customers in the long run. Whether the vulnerable referral scheme is a true sustainability statement or just a piece of corporate social responsibility window dressing may yet depend on how well British Gas explains and tells this particular story.

In 2010, Pepsi created a lot of fizz in the advertising world by choosing to bypass the Super Bowl — the biggest event in the brand-marketing calendar. Instead it created an ongoing corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme, The Pepsi Refresh Project. This gained huge traction through social media and set a benchmark for how companies would communicate CSR and sustainability online.

Two years later, arch-rival Coca-Cola also has set down a marker for CSR and sustainability communications through its Arctic Home collaboration with WWF. For the past three months, Coke has been running multiplatform awareness programmes to raise money for a new wildlife sanctuary in the northernmost Arctic region that will help ensure the survival of the polar bears. Coke has pledged to donate up to $3m (£1.8m) to the cause. The centrepiece, up until last weekend, was an interactive online site where fans of Coke who made a donation to Arctic Home were able to enter a virtual Arctic environment and track polar bear sightings while corresponding with field scientists.

So what to make of this weekend’s Super Bowl “The Polar Bowl” campaign, which fused the ethos of Arctic Home with Coke’s iconic polar bear characters – brand ambassadors since 1922?

Using the same sort of real-time video response technique employed by Old Spice on YouTube, Coke and its creative agency Wieden+Kennedy (who also produced the Old Spice social media campaigns) created an online experience. In it, two polar bears – one a New York Giants fan, the other rooting for the New England Patriots – reacted almost instantly to the highs and lows of the game, as well as the half-time show and some of the ads. In one cheeky segment the bears can be seen dozing off during an ad for Doritos – owned by, you guessed it, PepsiCo.

The Polar Bowl generated a good deal of online interest: more than 600,000 people watched the animated bears’ live stream while the game was on. The @CocaCola Twitter handle, which was run by the bears during the game (engage your suspension of disbelief here) gained a 12.5% increase in American followers before kickoff. Yet how many of those viewers and followers understood that those cool animated bears were meant to be raising awareness for creating an Arctic polar bear sanctuary?

It’s not that Coca-Cola tried to bury the polar bear cause: its official Twitter feed and pre-game social media promotion promised people that each RSVP to join the Polar Bowl site would prompt a $1 donation from Coke to the WWF Arctic Home cause. And yet, while Arctic Home is a fully interactive experience around an environmental cause, the Polar Bowl was unabashedly about drinking Coke while watching the NFL.

The transformation from Arctic Home to Polar Bowl neatly sums up the quandary marketing executives face as sustainability communications goes mainstream. Social media has increased the opportunities to create compelling brand experiences around sustainability – our recent Social Media Sustainability Index catalogued how companies as diverse as Aviva, Sony, Philips, Levi’s PepsiCo and Coca-Cola were creating ambitious sustainability and CSR social media marketing campaigns. Yet, at the same time, marketers feel the pressure to tell authentic and transparent brand stories in a way that still reaches the right amount of “audience” numbers to constitute an ROI success.

To achieve this, companies have to craft a story that is embraced by the masses and that often runs contrary to the educational role sustainability communications still needs to play. Arctic Home and The Polar Bowl illustrate this perfectly.

When Arctic Home was first launched, Coke trumpeted how it was going to rebrand its iconic red can “snow white” for a limited period. Those new cans had a barcode that increased Coke’s polar bear donation when the code was entered into the Arctic Home site. Just one month into the campaign, Coke announced it was returning to its original red can (although still with the barcode) after receiving flak on Facebook and Twitter over the temporary change in branding. Some users complained that Coke was supporting a cause too closely tied to climate change – a combustible issue in the a country where Democrats and Republicans have fought openly about whether US environmental laws should extend to protecting the Arctic home of the polar bears.

The Super Bowl could have been the media event where Coca-Cola really nailed its flag to the mast of supporting the WWF sanctuary. Instead, it created a feelgood social media and TV campaign that quietly helped the polar bear cause while not really stressing it. From a brand and experiential marketing point of view, Coke scored a touchdown. From a sustainability and CSR point of view it the Polar Bowl probably felt more like a safety (first). That’s the disconnect communicators are going to wrestle with as sustainability storytelling becomes a larger part of the marketing mix.

Just ask Chrysler. Its bold Super Bowl advert, “Halftime in America”, featuring Clint Eastwood rallying Americans to come together to rediscover their sustainable national identity has been slammed by Republicans as a clandestine advert for Barack Obama.

This column first ran in Guardian Sustainable Business.

One year ago, we published the inaugural Social Media Sustainability Index, a trawl through 287 major companies in North America and Europe to identify who was using social media tools and thinking to communicate sustainability. At the time we found just 60 companies that were devoting any real time or dedicated resources to that mission.

Fast-forward to the end of 2011 and a new landscape of social media sustainability has emerged. In researching our new report, The SMI-Wizness Social Media Sustainability Index, we identified at least 250 major corporates that are engaged in some form of social media sustainability comms and more than 100 have a blog, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter channel dedicated to talking about sustainability.  Those dedicated 100 form the basis of our new Index.

Even as the volume of social media sustainability content has increased the standout leaders of our Index – GE, IBM, Ford, PepsiCo, BBVA and Allianz – are the same as last year. This we believe is a testament to good social media practice in that none of these leaders consider social media sustainability through the prism of a campaign mentality. Indeed the top companies in our Index all have built upon the editorial platforms and community engagement they had established in 2010.

It also shows demonstrates that companies who are committed to making their business more sustainable – be it through improved energy efficiency, lowering emissions, policing their supply chains, pioneering ethical sourcing and promoting equitable working environments – have a distinct advantage in social media communications. That’s because they have a good and believable story to tell and, good storytelling remains the most valuable currency in social media.

Here are some of the ways the smartest companies are using social media, not just to communicate their sustainability stance, but also to involve the public in building a better world:

• Homage to compelling reportage: Hiring experienced filmmakers, writers and reporters to tell a complicated story well like IBM and Allianz
• Crowdsourcing: Tapping the public for big innovative ideas like General Electric
• Crowdfunding: Enabling collaborative fundraising and donations like BBVA and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank
• Bold alliances: Teaming with established NGOs, charities and conserva- tion watchdogs to support common goals and raise awareness like Levi’s
• Leveraging community: Tasking your massive online following to build a better future through campaigns, contests like PepsiCo
• Platforms not campaigns: Building an ongoing social media sustain- ability communications vehicle like Danone
• Making technology accessible and digestible: Creating content that shows how sustainability technology and initiatives matter to the general public like Philips and Sony
• The wisdom of your crowd: Collaborating with fans to break taboos and challenge the status quo like Kimberly-Clark

These stand out leaders in this year’s Social Media Sustainability Index all have a few things in common. They fully embrace their newfound power to publish and provide useful, regular, transparent and creative content for their social media communities.

It just so happens that we think those qualities are exactly what companies need if they are to succeed in social media communications. And so they form the bedrock of how we have ranked and rated the 100 companies that make the Index.

You can download the entire Index at: http://socialmediainfluence.com/SMI-report/

Do you feel stressed, overworked, unable to manage your time and priorities amid a daily deluge of messages, tweets, updates and Inmails?

No, this isn’t some corny infomercial for a new gadget solution. Instead I’d argue it’s  just a pretty accurate guess of how nearly everyone feels about the social media information overload they battle on any given day.

“Social is running out of hours. Social is also running out of people,” is how Forrester Research CEO George Colony described things this week at LeWeb, and it’s this sense of social media saturation that could yet bring about a  shakeout in existing social networking services, as well as a new chapter of social media innovation to cut through the information chatter and clutter that we’ve all created over the last 10 years.

Cue Twitter’s new redesign, which adds a new level of relevance, navigation and usefulness to its steady stream of oh-so-addictive and oh-so-distracting tweets. Taking a bit from Facebook and a bit from Stumbleupon the new Twitter wants to curate the content clutter that it has helped create.

It’s exactly this goal of decluttering our social online lives that another fledgling social network, Unthink, is promising to achieve….if only it can first convince us to join yet another social network.