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New Post 20 hours ago KPMG's Lord Michael Hastings: Business Must Take Note of Occupy Wall Street New Post 23 hours ago Consumers Expect CEOs to Be Held Accountable and Take Action on CSR New Post 1 day ago Why Corporations With a Social Purpose Perform Better New Post 1 week ago American Ingenuity New Post 1 week ago Sustainable Consumption Is a Myth New Post 2 weeks ago Corporate Social Purpose: It's in What You Don't Sell New Post 2 weeks ago Finally, Occupy Wall Street Puts the Blame Where It Belongs: On Us New Post 2 weeks ago Occupy Wall Street: A Powerful Demand for Something New--Like This Comment 2 weeks ago Yet another point of view Paul: http://wp.me/p1IFEp-7h on Pre-Occupied With Corporate Social Responsibility New Post 3 weeks ago Pre-Occupied With Corporate Social Responsibility New Post 3 weeks ago Starbucks' Job Creation Plan New Post 3 weeks ago Stop Being Cynical About Breast Cancer New Post 4 weeks ago How Sameer Hajee Has Shed Real Light in Africa New Post 1 month ago Taking CSR to the Next Level New Post 1 month ago How A Serial Entrepreneur Found Success By Practicing Responsible Capitalism New Post 1 month ago Making Every Dollar Count: Investing for Impact and Return New Post 1 month ago The Next Global Debt Crisis New Post 1 month ago Thriving on the Value of Vice: Stop Making Too Much of CSR Comment 1 month ago Thanks for your comment. I also makes me think of the importance of [...] on A Higher Ambition for CSR: Corporate Social Purpose New Post 1 month ago A Higher Ambition for CSR: Corporate Social Purpose   *****   6   33     45   0   0   The Forbes 400 World's Billionaires Celebrity 100 World's Leading Companies more + The Forbes 400 is the definitive list of wealth in America, profiling and ranking the country's richest citizens by their estimated net worths. View complete list » #1 Bill Gates Latest News » #14 Mark Zuckerberg Latest News » #7 George Soros Latest News » #331 Stewart Rahr Latest News »

If your organization fails to invest in socially responsible measures, or even if anything about your business - such as a faked viral marketing campaign - is perceived to be phony, you will be found out. You will be tweeted about, and a Facebook Causes group will be created against you. As many corporate casualties have discovered, the result of such a campaign can be catastrophic to your firm's reputation and ultimately to its bottom line. Therefore, to avoid a public relations or financial disaster, integrity needs to be part of the DNA of every organization - not just to secure a healthy business environment, but for the organization's own sustainability and competitive advantage. It's worth noting here that I believe the word "integrity" is preferable to the expression "corporate social responsibility," as the latter puts too much emphasis on the notion that corporations should do "good" in the world and be "good" citizens out of some moral or ethical imperative. Of course, that is absolutely true. But what's new - and what organizations need to focus on - is the idea of integrity, as driven by transparency. Without it you cannot build trust, and trust is essential for competitiveness in this new environment. To put it bluntly, regardless of the moral arguments, there are now some hard, bottom-line business reasons for baking integrity into every company.

We've recently conducted surveys of the White House's Facebook fans and Twitter followers asking for their feedback on our online programs. Between the two surveys, we received thousands of responses and thought we'd share some of the results.

ONE HAS LATELY heard much of the hashtag. That is, the Twitter symbol #, used to categorize a tweet. Charlie Sheen's first tweet, for example, was famously: "Winning ..! Choose your Vice... #winning #chooseyourvice." #Winning has gone on to live in irony across the Twitterverse, in mockery of the eternally less-than-winning Sheen. But even President Obama recently urged students to tweet their senators about raising the interest rates on federally subsidized student loans with the hashtag "#DontDoubleMyRate." The new thing, however, is using the word "hashtag" in conversation. Especially if you are under a certain age, you may be catching people saying things like, "I ran into that guy I met-hashtag happy!" or, in response to someone complaining, "My flashlight app isn't working," perhaps you have heard the retort, "Hashtag First World problems!" A college student not long ago reported a favorite witticism to be appending observations with: "Hashtag did that just happen?

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

We chose to highlight six drivers-big, disruptive shifts that are likely to reshape the landscape for organizations and workers. Although each driver is in itself important when thinking about the future, it is the confluence of several drivers working together that produces true disruptions. We then identified ten skills that we believe will be vital for success in the workforce: Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based Cross -cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

The White House began their "office hours" today at 2 p.m. EST. They asked Twitter followers to submit questions about the debt debate using the hashtag #WHChat. As their last response, they took the opportunity to play the internet's oldest practical joke on a user (and catching the rest of us in the wake).

Social media provides companies with new opportunities for customer service, research and marketing (within reason of course), but most respondents to a survey of C-level executive conducted by Harris Interactive for Capgemini aren't yet sure how to harness social media. The results are part of Capgemini's Executive Outsourcing Survey, and follows the firm's launch of its social media management service. Harris surveyed 302 senior executives at Fortune 1000 companies. More than half say that social media is a part of their company's customer care operations, but 64% of those said that the marketing department is solely responsible for social media marketing. Most (74%) executives in the study were simply unsure how many employees are dedicated to customer care via the social Web.

In 2006, sociologists from the University of Arizona and Duke University sent out another distress signal-a study titled "Social Isolation in America." In comparing the 1985 and 2004 responses to the General Social Survey, used to assess attitudes in the United States, they found that the average American's support system-or the people he or she discussed important matters with-had shrunk by one-third and consisted primarily of family. This time, the Internet and cellphones were allegedly to blame. Keith Hampton, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is starting to poke holes in this theory that technology has weakened our relationships. Partnered with the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, he turned his gaze, most recently, to users of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. "There has been a great deal of speculation about the impact of social networking site use on people's social lives, and much of it has centered on the possibility that these sites are hurting users' relationships and pushing them away from participating in the world," Hampton said in a recent press release. He surveyed 2,255 American adults this past fall and published his results in a study last month. "We've found the exact opposite-that people who use sites like Facebook actually have more close relationships and are more likely to be involved in civic and political activities."

When bad news needs to be shared, management scholars have shown that the response is influenced by how bad the news is, what is said, and who says it. New research by Terry Cobb, management associate professor in the Pamplin College of Business, focuses on what makes such communications effective or successful.

Mobile quiz startup Qrank will announce next week that it has raised a seed round of funding, including an investment from early Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman. Qrank is building out a platform that will let any organization with a backlog of content use it to create smart, fast-paced mobile trivia games. The games incorporate social networks, location, chat and other social features. It sounds awesome. Goldman is one of five investors in a convertible note of $350,000, ReadWriteWeb has learned and the company has confirmed. The company will use the funding to build a self-service platform, acquire more high-profile customers and complete an analytics dashboard. The existing consumer app gets high marks for responsiveness and user engagement.

"GIVEN the widespread adoption of smartphones, text messaging, video calling and social media, today's professionals mean it when they brag about staying connected to work 24/7." Too much connectivity can damage the quality of one's work, says Robert Sutton, author of "Good Boss, Bad Boss" and a professor at Stanford. Because of devices, he says, 'nobody seems to actually pay full attention; everybody is doing a worse job because they are doing more things." Mobile devices and social media, he says, "make us a little more oblivious, a little more incompetent." Just recall those pilots who overshot their destination two years ago because they were using computers, he adds.

What all this means is that "public or private" is more complicated than it seems. Twitter and its ilk aren't going away, and the answer to responsible use isn't to shut teens out of public life. Many teens are indeed more visible today than ever before, but, through experience, they're also developing skills to manage privacy in public.

Parents fearing the public nature of Twitter must understand teenagers have become adept at managing their privacy online