Today people increasingly demand corporate responsibility and social consciousness from brands to strike the triple bottom line balance: 69% of respondents in a research by Havas say they expect enterprises to make the world a better place. For the first time ever though, these expectations are becoming a “license to lead” with businesses now being more trusted than governments to make a real positive change towards a sustainable future. Such is the major finding of this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer.

In its 14th annual survey in 27 countries among 33,000 respondents, Edelman found that there is a global gap of 14% between trust in business and trust in government. This number has never been so high before. Business has been consistently trusted more than government over the past years: People now expect businesses to lead on social change, not governments.

Nevertheless, half of respondents believe that the most important role of government in business is to protect consumers from irresponsible businesses as well as regulate those. On the other hand, over 70% of people agree that policymakers should be consulting with multiple stakeholders when developing regulations on business and industries. Businesses should therefore “foster an informed conversation that provides the context necessary to create regulation that is relevant and as effective in its ability to protect as it is in its ability to move society and business forward.”

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 the main currency for meaningful communications. Thus, innovation has become crucial for companies to reach, educate and inspire this new consumer about sustainability.

However, educating and inspiring this connected generation to embrace sustainability has proven to be a major challenge for brands. To a large extent this challenge is due to the fact that companies have difficulty making use of the right avenues to communicate their efforts and why they are of such importance for each stakeholder.

To truly reach people in the social economy brands are now required to heavily rely on those new tools and channels that the community has embraced so quickly – social media.

You already know about my recent research into sustainability and my passion for fashion, so today I am going to introduce to you an impressive initiative by Greenpeace that aims to tackle one of the most pressing challenges the Earth is facing – water pollution. And because I am a shopping maniac (a pretty bad one as a matter of fact…) I thought this post will make other “shopping queens” think where exactly they spend their money during their next shopping spree because fashion is not just about glamour.

What’s the issue?

Toxic water pollution is extremely harmful to our planet and us as species. No surprise there. But where does that pollution come from? Obviously from the manufacturing of various products, but it is especially the booming fashion industry that has a stake in it.

The following video

I am a big fan of H&M. It’s not just because I like the fresh design, but to a large extent because I had researched the company’s sustainability goals and activities and I was impressed with its efforts. (I have detailed them pretty extensively in this blog post here.) Now proving their drive for sustainability once again, the global fashion brand has launched a new initiative called H&M Conscious Foundation. In this post I would like to introduce it to you and urge you to join the sustainability movement together with H&M.

The H&M Conscious Foundation is a global non-profit foundation with the mission to “reach beyond H&M´s value chain, and contribute to positive long-term change for people and communities where H&M operates.” After consulting global experts in the field, including for example Sir Richard Branson (whom I am a big fan of too), H&M developed a list of five most immediate global challenges: safeguarding natural resources, strengthening women, reduction of poverty through self-employment, clean water and education.

Of those five,

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: