By Beth Holzman - CSR Strategy and Reporting Manager at Timberland

Earlier this month, I participated in a webinar hosted by the Boston College Center on the power of social media. (Center members can view the webcast here.) I was asked to share Timberland’s experience using web 2.0 tools, including our recently launched Voices of Challenge online dialogue. We’re taking a multi-platform approach to secure a strong presence on the web.

But we’re not creating this presence just for the sake of showing up; rather, we see the newest online tools as an opportunity to engage with different types of stakeholders – consumers, citizens, activists, and others – to solicit their ideas, many of whom we may not have engaged before. And with or without this stated goal, these stakeholders are showing up and lending their voices to current issues and discussions of corporate responsibility among themselves.

As a consumer, NGO, CSR practitioner or shareholder, you can find Timberland online at Earthkeeper.com, Facebook, You Tube, Twitter, Changents and Just Means. Each one of these platforms serves a different purpose. For example, we’ve learned that stakeholders go to You Tube to watch videos – they won’t likely play a game or post a comment there. On Facebook, we have been impressed by the possibility of viral communication – as evidenced by our virtual tree-planting application. We committed planting real trees for every virtual tree that grew from seed to adulthood – and the success has contributed to our goal to plant 1 million trees by 2010 (already part of our community engagement goals within Timberland’s CSR agenda). Earthkeeper.com is Timberland’s very own consumer engagement portal. Here, you can find our blog, as well as countless opportunities to learn about Timberland’s own CSR efforts as well as tips and pledges that regular citizens can take to reduce their footprint too. It’s just our way of ensuring we live our values – and connect with others who want to do the same.

On Earthkeeper.com, we launched Voices of Challenge as an opportunity for stakeholders to weigh in on tough challenges that responsible businesses face. We purposefully picked topics that matched our material issues such as climate change, product sustainability, global human rights, and community service. And we also posed questions that we don’t necessarily have answers to. Our goal is to have earnest conversation that can be incorporated into strategy refinement and collaborative problem-solving.

We were fortunate to have partners and critics help us frame the discussion – people like Bill McKibben of 350.org, Joel Makower of GreenBiz, Li Qiang of China Labor Watch, and Mayor Bloomberg of New York. This was our effort to make this dialogue useful to our peers – that is, folks like the readers of the Center’s blog who are likely working in and/or have an interest in the corporate responsibility field. We welcome all members to go online and join the discussion!

Because we’re still very new to engaging online, we’re definitely still learning. Here’s a few take-aways that we have experienced so far:

• We’re using multiple platforms because we’re not sure one site can be all things to all stakeholders. Stakeholder groups are as different as individuals. They have different needs, interests and information requests. Much like the challenge of using your company’s printed CSR report to communicate to every audience, I’m not sure one web site can do it all.
• While it’s been fun and exciting to be online in so many forms, it’s also been a lot of work. We’re a small company with limited staff. However, we’re also a consumer-facing company that has high visibility in the marketplace, which definitely includes the world wide web. So, we feel the need to dive in, and to be as transparent and accountable in this venue as we are in others. But we also need to manage our time.
• Online engagement should support, not replace, other engagement opportunities. We see our online tools as an opportunity to enhance and broaden our more traditional forms of engagement and the folks we’re interacting with. The feedback we’re getting proves the point – new and diverse perspectives are showing up. But this doesn’t replace our continued work with environmental and social partners or our face-to-face engagements that focus on problem solving. I see the key as balancing all of these tools so they support our company’s overall CSR strategy.

Regardless of what lies ahead in the ever-changing web 2.0 world, we’re learning from our current experiences and open to engaging many voices so that we can most effectively contribute to sustainable change.

Editor’s note: Learn more about how companies like Timberland, Intel and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters are using social networking in our webinar archive. Center members are invited to continue this conversation in our online Member Community.

Tags: Beth Holzman, Earthkeeper, social networking, Timberland, Voices of Challenge, web 2.0, webinar
This entry was posted by Beth Holzman - CSR Strategy and Reporting Manager at Timberland on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 12:50 PM, and is filed under Center News & Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.