Over the last few years two relatively new business philosophies have become the trendy buzzwords in the corporate space – social media and sustainability. The rise of social media has provoked a complex cultural and communications shift in the way people share information and participate in conversations, resulting in the empowerment of the individual to demand change as well as to expect responsibility and social consciousness from brands to strike the triple bottom line balance.

This new social economy is based on engagement, relationships and mutual trust where relevance to the individual is a main currency for meaningful communications. Thus, innovation has become crucial for companies to reach, educate and inspire this new consumer about sustainability, but there is still both a need and a demand to raise sustainability awareness, break down silos and improve communications practices and knowledge management.

To analyse and explain social media’s impact on sustainability communications and offer practical guidance for companies interested in exploring these new opportunities I chose to examine the power of social media as a communications channel for creating business sustainability value for my second BA dissertation.

The main research objective was to discover whether social media can be a support tool or a menace for corporate sustainability.

I examined the importance and the current state of social media for sustainability communications and the opportunities and the risks of social media comms for creating business sustainability value.

As a result, I developed a best practice guide for utilising the power of social media and avoiding potential pitfalls, which you can see in the infographic at the end of this post.

Lately I’ve come across quite a few clever and interactive campaigns. The one that I am going to show you today is yet another example of how brands are increasingly trying to engage their audiences not only in the communications process, but also to involve them in other business operations - remember Nordstrom’s merchandising strategy to drive sales through showcasing the most popular Pinterest items in their physical stores and so to bring the online experience offline? In terms of engaging the online community Tesco have recently done something similar. However, this time it touches on another popular subject - not fashion, but alcohol.

The UK supermarket chain is going to launch in October the so called social wine that was created and designed entirely by the supermarket’s social media community. As Ad Age notes, wine’s reputation as a social drink has been taken literally by Tesco.

What I particularly like about Tesco’s project

A while ago I blogged about how we, women, have a long way to go before reaching the top of the career ladder to the same extent as men. That blog post was inspired by a talk Sheryl Sandberg gave at TED (if you haven’t seen it yet, please do it now!), which really moved me and I immediately purchased Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead on my Kindle. Now that I have read it I want to show you what I found most interesting.

Let’s give you some facts first as presented in the book:

• Only 17 of the 195 independent countries in the world are led by women.
• Women hold only 20% of seats in parliaments globally.
• A meager 4% of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
• In the US women hold ca. 14% of executive officer positions and 17% of board seats; in the UK – 7% of executive directorships and 15% of board seats among the FTSE 100 companies, but only 5% of executive directorships and 9% of board seats among the FTSE 250.
• In the UK women working full-time are still paid an average 15% less per hour than men.
• According to a 2011 McKinsey report men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments.

I’m sure you already know what a big fan of Pinterest I am – I pin like crazy; it’s such an addiction, once I start pinning, I can’t stop! I guess this is the case with a lot of Pinterest users, which is in my opinion the main reason for the extremely rapid growth of the platform - it is still the fastest growing social network ever and has currently 70 million users around the globe. The platform's visual appeal has also proved quite the effective marketing and promotion tool for brands.

As my colleague Patrik from Brandzeichen and I explored recently in a new blog post, the majority of Pinterest users are women. Therefore it’s no surprise that some of the most popular boards and pins are focused around the topics of fashion and beauty. Many major brands from these industries quickly recognised the potentials of Pinterest to engage with their audiences and have jumped on pinning. And they have seen some remarkable results, even such that this online activity has helped them improve their offline efforts.

A great example here that inspired this blog post is Nordstrom.

It’s no surprise how strongly the Internet has invaded our daily lives – personal and professional. I, for one, am extremely active on multiple platforms at the same time and constantly available online thanks to my Samsung Galaxy S4. But, as it turns out, I am not alone with such an always-on addiction. Qmee and mycleveragency have found exactly what happens online in an average minute – you might be shocked!

Did you know that every 60 seconds there are:

• 1.8 million likes and 41 thousand posts on Facebook;
• 204 million emails;
• 278 thousands tweets;
• 72 hours of YouTube videos uploaded;
• 20 thousand new Tumblr photos;
• 3600 new Instagram photos;
• 347 new blog posts?

What does this all mean?