The other day I came across a blog post by a fellow Bulgarian blogger delving into a pretty crazy idea – a magazine without advertisements. Sounds rather unrealistic, right? Well, you’d be a surprised! Such a magazine does exists, and it’s even on sale on Craigslist for the price of $4,447,847.53! Read on while I explain why such a dizzying number.

Designer Joseph G. Davies started a personal project he named Ad-Blocked Vogue, where he literally “blocked” all ads in the September issue of the US Vogue. He cut out all the pages with advertisements in the magazine and those he couldn’t cut, he blanked over with a fat marker. The result: out of the 902 total pages, 280 were full-pages ads and 45 double-page spreads. The image below says it all…

A new study by Fishburn Hedges and Jigsaw Research reveals that almost two-thirds of the public believes brands say one thing through their marketing and communications, but in reality do another. Quoting PR Week, “64% of the public did not believe that companies' marketing and comms were backed up by the way they behaved and interacted with customers.” Interestingly, only 15% of people would trust a company again after a crisis if a senior executive had offered an apology or an explanation. What’s more, 52% do not believe corporate stories if they are only transmitted via advertising or communications; 20% even said they didn’t believe brand stories at all. Ouch!

Surprised? I am not.

As I highlighted in my recent blog post with 44 social media and sustainability facts and figures, ordinary people simply don’t trust traditional company communications and messages and have a lot less faith in corporate figures, even CEOs.

But what can brands do to change this?

I haven’t shared a creative campaign with you in a while, so I thought that after all the stress around my new place and my internet saga, it’s the perfect time for some inspiration. What you are about to see is indeed a very clever and engaging stunt, coming from a company in an industry you wouldn’t necessarily associate with much room for creativity or fun. I am talking about Adobe, the computer software company, which is very different from familiar sexy brands like RedBull or Coca Cola known for their brilliant stunts.

So, what did Adobe do? Well, they offered commuters in Stockholm a live photoshopping surprise - they called it the Street Retouch Prank.

While waiting for the bus, people were secretly photographed and then photoshopped into amusing positions, scenarios and implied relationships. Funny, right? Imagine the shocked faces of the commuters seeing themselves transformed.

Many companies, especially multinational organisations, have been putting some serious efforts to adopt sustainability into their operations and supply chains. As my dissertation has shown, this move towards sustainable development has largely been due to increased stakeholder expectations and the need to secure a safe future for the next generations by tackling the major planetary issues we are facing today. Admittedly however, the challenge in the 21st century sustainability is not the lack of technology, but the need to transform consumer behaviour, which can only be overcome by educating society and facilitating knowledge. This means that businesses today are not only required to effectively communicate their efforts, but to also make them relevant to the community and to involve and engage people to take action.

This is indeed easier said than done. But, a relatively new avenue for communications in the realm of corporate sustainability provides social media – not just technology, but a significant shift in the way we communicate, interact and build relationships.

At the beginning of the emergence of social media companies were rather sceptical and it took a while before social media was properly adopted into marketing communications and PR (although this is still not the case in each and every organisation). We can observe a similar thing when it comes to using social media for sustainability – leaders find it difficult to see the potentials and to really make it work.

As I am very passionate about this topic and I firmly believe that social media is going to play a significant role in building a sustainable future, I would like to share 44 facts and figures from various studies that are included in my dissertation and that back up my beliefs. This way, I am hoping to progress the conversation about social media’s power for sustainability. I would love to hear what you think.

So, here are the 44 facts and figures businesses cannot ignore in their sustainability efforts and comms:

Due to my internet saga with o2 I haven’t been able to write and publish much content lately. (By the way I am supposed to get everything installed on 23 September, so fingers crossed!)

There have been a few new things in the social media area that I’ve wanted to talk about, so today I am going to focus on the ‘biggest’ news of all - the new Facebook guidelines and rules for running promotions and contests. You could say that it’s not really news anymore, as it happened a few weeks ago, but it’s still worth discussing and providing some useful information to those of you who haven’t yet had the chance to familiarise themselves with the subject.

From now on Facebook pages are not required to use third-party applications to run competitions, promotions, draws or giveaways, but can simply do so on their Timeline, i.e. Wall.

Basically fans can now enter a contest or promotion by: