Apple's big bet on consumer trust and privacy

The Apple Watch understandably took the limelight at Apple's big launch event today. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that to really understand the company we need to see it as so much more than simply a technology company. And we have to look beyond its products, however alluring they might be.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of corporate responsibility. For much of the past few years, the corporate responsibility community has been focusing hard on Apple's product supply chain. And for good reason, with a spate of labour violations plaguing the company (most recently from the BBC in December last year) despite some impressive commitments to responsible sourcing. But with the launch of the Apple Watch and its extended capabilities for health monitoring, research and diagnosis, along with the rapid growth of its Apple Pay system, it is the company's capabilities in data management and security that will likely define its reputation for corporate responsibility over the next decade.

As Tim Crook noted at the launch, the Apple Watch is "the most personal product we've ever made". It is not only wearable but collects real time data on users' health and fitness, enables them to make contactless payment direct from their financial services provider, and provides the possibility for a host of other applications relying on personal data. Keeping all of this data private and secure is going to be a big test for the company. Their success now will rely just as much on maintaining the trust of their consumers as it will on wowing them with cool new gadgets.

Apple is not alone in this of course. Other technology companies such as Facebook, Sony, Microsoft and Google have already learnt to their cost the necessity for maintaining the confidence of their customers in terms of privacy and security. Apple has had its own scares with breaches of its iCloud service, but its exposure to data security risks are only going to accelerate now that it is going increasingly personal. Apple is now not just in the technology industry but also in financial services and health services where the privacy and security concerns are accentuated even further.

Apple is making a big bet on consumer trust because it has a strong reputation for digital security already (say, compared to Microsoft) and it has less of the challenges in managing privacy compared to some of its others competitors. This is because it does not rely on ad revenue (and therefore intimate knowledge of its consumers) to drive profitability, unlike say, Google and Facebook. So it is already out ahead in many important respects. Whether it can maintain that pole position will remain to be seen. But what is clear is that Apple's reputation for corporate responsibility, and indeed its success in personal devices and services more generally, will increasingly be won and lost in the area of consumer trust and privacy rather than product design and execution alone.

Image copyright Martin Hajek. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence. 

How Apple and Facebook have taken gender discrimination to a new level

Over the last week or so we have seen a vibrant debate unfolding after the announcement of Apple and Facebook’s latest benefit: Female employees can store and freeze their eggs on the company’s dime so that they can postpone pregnancy beyond the phase where they might want to just focus on their careers.

I put the case up for debate in my undergraduate classes on business ethics this week. It was a fascinating experience. To start, we assessed the upshot. There is a surge of female professionals who attempt at pregnancy in their forties and thus a surge in in-vitro fertilization and a host of other avenues to late motherhood luckily provided by progress in obstetrics these days. But there is also a fair number of women who just have to suck it up that by the time they can put their head around having babies, that ship has sailed.

Here, such an offer seems to be a big benefit. You can progress in an environment where your commitment to the job is 24/7 – like your male colleagues – and still enjoy motherhood at a later stage. And your babies will be built out of genetic material that is as good as it would have been had you dared at the impossible of merging both, career and motherhood. This policy indeed provides women with more options, more choice to freely decide what to do with their lives, their careers and their aspirations at the personal level.

But upon further scrutiny, my students unearthed three major problems. The first is fairly obvious: what is offered as an ‘option’ by the company may quickly become the ‘default’. What will happen now at Google if a 32 year old women tells her boss she wants to go on maternity leave? Given the options, she makes a statement clear and loud that she prefers her personal priorities over the company’s. In organizations, rules prescribe roles. This new option potentially excludes motherhood from what a ‘high potential’, future executive at Google should prioritize in her most fertile years.

A second focus of discussion turned out to unveil the unsaid. What about the male role in child bearing and rearing? The tacit assumption of such a policy seems to be that not a single of Apple or Facebook’s male employees will ever need similar help or support in his career because of having children. In some ways then the policy just reflects rather problematic gender stereotypes: mothers get distracted from their careers by having children; fathers just carry on as if nothing has happened. Yes, there are different biological constraints on women; but having and rearing a child also totally involves the father – unless he is a complete moron (or Google and Facebook’s model employee?). Fair enough, Facebook also extends an option to male employees to freeze their sperms: after all, a significant threat to post-40 pregnancy is not the female egg, but increasingly the deterioration of male sperm at that age. But the message is the same: postpone that baby business!

Which leads to a third objection which cuts to a deeper level. The age between 25 and 35 for a woman is the phase where biologically motherhood is the most likely. It is also the phase where most women are at the prime of their adulthood: mature enough to make tough life choices on partners and lifestyles, but also vibrant and physically energetic enough to dedicate full energy to their pursuits. By offering this option, aren’t Apple and Facebook just saying: ‘Give us the best years of your life, your kids can put up with whatever is left of you at a later stage’?

One of my students put it more bluntly: ‘If you translated this policy to other forms of discrimination in the workplace, such as racial discrimination, this would amount to saying to black people: “Look, you are very welcome here, but just to make it easier, we offer you this cream that will make your skin as white as everybody else’s here.”’ This new benefit essentially offers to a woman to be just like her male colleagues, happily stripped of all her female ‘impediments’. In some ways, that is gender discrimination at its worst.

Apple and Facebook deserve praise to recognize a common and pressing problem. Admittedly, they have policies regarding maternity benefits and childcare that are better than most other American companies. But the moral imagination they applied to this particular solution falls short of the creativity that made them billion dollar companies. If they are willing to throw $20,000 at the problem, why not offer more choice to both female and male employees? The women  (and men) contributing to the company are not just ‘human resources’ ready for maximum exploitation.

DM

Artwork by Keoni Kabral, reproduced under the Creative Commons License.

The “IT-Industrial Complex”

A while ago we commented on whistleblowing in the context of Edward Snowdon’s revelation of the current practices of the NSA. The entire story though is much bigger and has been ongoing for a while now. Just Monday this week, Glenn Greenwald’s partner got detained at London’s Heathrow Airport in a rather unusual manner. Greenwald, as most of us will know, is the journalist who was contacted by Snowdon and has been publishing the crucial pieces of Snowdon’s material in The Guardian.

While in essence the ongoing revelations have the political sphere as the key target, it now more and more emerges that the role of private businesses is far bigger than so far known. From the perspective of scholars interested in business ethics then this case, as it unfolds, raises some rather daunting questions, which – besides being troubling from a normal citizen’s point of view – offer some challenging questions for further research.

1. A new industry

Ever since the Washington Post published Top Secret America we are aware of the fast growing security industry which was created by the US Government in the aftermath of the terror attacks of 2001. What was not that clear is however how far the reach of this industry has gone.

The fact that phone companies provide their records to the NSA, that in principle all our email traffic is public and stored somewhere - just to name a few aspects - takes the entire debate to a new level. It now emerged that in fact most wireless phone providers, many internet service providers (including Google and Facebook) share data with the NSA, as do many classic IT hard- and software producer such as Apple and Microsoft.

When these revelations were made it was conspicuous to see the rather muted reaction of these companies. For long we thought that Google, certainly in their varied approaches to Chinese censorship struggled for an ethical approach here; with regard to their own government though very little of these, in essence similar, concerns obviously played a role. The main defense of these companies overly seems to be the need of compliance. While that argument might carry some way, it is not understandable how for instance Apple, who as a ‘footloose’ company manages to deal with ‘compliance’ to tax legislation in very creative ways just caves in with regard to the privacy of their ‘users’ when the NSA asks for access to their accounts.

So what we see here is not only the emergence of a new industrial sector, which combines rather diverse set of companies (see the list of companies in Top Secret America); it is also not clear anymore where the lines between private business and public administration/government lie. After all Snowdon himself was employed by a private company many of us would primarily remember as a strategy consulting firm (Booz Allen Hamilton). While the blurring of lines between sectors is nothing new, the level and dimensions of the 'securocracy' currently dismantling in front of our eyes in the context of the NSA takes it clearly to a new level.

2. The business model and its ethical implications

Ethical issues in the IT industry have garnered attention for a while in business ethics. Given the numerous court cases, for instance Google and Facebook had to weather recently in the US and Europe it is clear though, that with the growth of the internet and the degree, to which the internet is morphing into a social space, many more questions will arise.

Given that we now know that Google, Facebook, Apple and others are not only basically supplying the government with information but have been monitoring, searching, and organizing our data all long it raises some new questions. In particular it raises the question about the very essence of their business model from an ethical perspective.

Lets stick to the Facebook example. We are told that basically the company will make its money through advertising. Looking at the pathetically annoying adds on our Facebook feeds, for instance, the question really is whether this is the whole story? $800bn for some potentially ingenious advertising platform?

As Facebook ‘users’ we know that we are not their customers. We are their suppliers. What they ultimately want to ‘sell’ is information. This, rather than advertising, is ultimately the business case. This similarly applies to Google, Yahoo, Apple and other who store and ‘use’ many of the data we create through our various internet usages. Most of it is ‘free’ so far, yet still these companies are worth billions of dollars.

This raises some questions, which admittedly can easily be confounded with conspiracy theories. The most important of which is that under the post 9/11 legislation the ‘harvesting’ of our data which for long had been prohibited, is now in full swing. These companies are not primarily in the business of social media, web search or email hosting – they are sources of data about the most intimate details of our lives. While this was always clear to those who bothered to read the small print of the ‘Terms and Conditions’ of these companies, it emerges more and more that this is not just material of value for marketing purposes.

Just today we read in The Guardian that in fact many IT companies such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft made millions out of providing the NSA with our data. The euphemistic term for this is to see it as a reimbursement for ‘compliance costs’ – but from the perspective of those companies’ CFOs, what else is this other than ‘revenue’? This is certainly the first hard proof that there are clear financial ties between the US government and these companies. But could this also be another hint at what the real business model of these companies is about?

3. The Political role of business

That corporations are political actors in societal governance beyond their direct economic role is by now well established. Looking at the IT-industrial complex though adds some aspects. First, and very much on the surface, it strikes one to see the close ties between senior executives in the industry and the current US government. Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) had and still has key roles in the Obama administration to the degree Google has been called the 'Halliburton of the Obama Administration'; Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook CFO) worked for years in Washington, most notably with Larry Summers.

These are just two examples. Looking at the ferocious reaction to whistleblowers recently, one cannot overlook the commonality of interests between the US ‘government’ and the IT industry. Obama winning a second election was seen by many as a proof that maybe – despite of new campaign financing laws for corporations – business influence on politics is limited and that money alone cant buy campaigns and determine election outcomes. But maybe Obama’s re-election is just THE showcase of what ‘Citizens United’ has done: it got the very president elected whose campaign was crucially supported by Silicon Valley, but whose government now appears to be all long deeply engaged and intermingled with this new industrial network.

As business ethics scholars we see here a new opportunity for research. It is foremost about understanding the structure and value creation models of this industry. But it is also about evaluating the implications of these changes for our democracy, for how society is governed and what the rights and status of citizens in this context morphs into. In short, it is a research field rife with ethical question and issues.

Artwork by Susanne Waldau-te Brake, reproduced under the Creative Commons License

Top 10 Corporate Responsibility Stories of 2011

It's that time of year again when we consider the big news events around corporate responsibility during the past twelve months. It has undoubtedly been a significant year, with some stories potentially having a huge impact on future corporate responsibility practice or government policy. Nuclear accidents, protests galore, high level corruption - there's been a lot of ugliness again this year. But sometimes you've got to go down before you can go up. Let's hope 2011 will be looked back on as the year that business finally woke up to the new realities of corporate responsibility.

1. Fukushima nuclear disaster
As with the BP oil leak in 2010, no corporate responsibility story dominated the media in the same way that Fukushima did. And for good reason. The world's second worst nuclear disaster (after Chernobyl) slammed home just how risky the nuclear industry could be. Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), the company operating the plant, has had to shoulder a lot of the blame for its shoddy risk management, poor planning and siting, falsified safety records, governance procedures, and lots more besides. Its now mired in debt, awaiting either nationalization or a government bail-out. Japanese regulators meanwhile failed in providing adequate oversight, in large part due to overly cosy relations with the energy industry. Not surprising then that Fukushima also had huge impacts more broadly, most notably in a massive swing away from nuclear in the clean energy debate. Germany for one has made a 180 degree switch away from nuclear. Really this was the mother of all corporate responsibility disasters in 2011.

2. The 'Occupy' movement
Starting with Los Indignados in Spain, gradually hitting the headlines with Occupy Wall Street, and then turning into a global phenomenon, the Occupy Movement thrust social equity and democracy into the corporate responsibility debate like never before. We've had anti-capitalism protests before, but the Occupy Movement took a much more focused aim at the titans of the financial sector, and kept an unlikely conversation going for months. The challenges the unruly movement posed for business may not always have been crystal clear, but they've struck such a chord with the general public, and even among senior business leaders, that they can't just be ignored. Demands for tax justice, banking regulation, and more controls on corporate political influence have all received a fillip by the movement. Who know's? Maybe in time, the legacy of Occupy for corporate responsibilty may even surpass that of Fukushima.

3. News International phone hacking scandal
Few corporate responsibility stories can claim the scalp of an entire business, but the closing of the UK newspaper the News of the World, and the arrest of its editor, Rebekah Brooks, in July of 2011 showed just how significant the phone hacking story surrounding News International had become. When the story also took the scalp of the UK's most senior police officer, and landed veteran media mogul Rupert Murdoch in a Parliamentary inquiry, the reverberations were felt near and far. We like our journalists to pursue truth. But when they cross the line and illegally tap the private phones of bereaved families, it's clearly time for a clean up in the media. On the bright side, the story was broken, and vigorously investigated over several years, by the Guardian newspaper. So while we may not trust journalists all that much any more (if we ever did), the story also demonstrated the importance of a strong and independent media as a corporate responsibility watchdog.

4. FIFA's corruption own-goal
2011 was a bad year for integrity in sport. The Pakistani cricket betting scandal, the Sumo wrestling bout-fixing revelations, the Penn State University football coaching sex abuse case, the continued flow of scandals convulsing the Chinese Football Association and the Turkish Football Federation - few sports or countries have managed to come out looking clean. But rising above them all has been the FIFA corruption story, which more than any other sporting corruption story of 2011, demonstrated not just how deeply ingrained corruption is in sport but even how much it is embedded in sporting management and administration. The scandal has been rumbling on at least since 2010 when allegations about bought votes in the 2018 and 2022 World Cup hosting competition started pouring in. After bribery allegations, resignations, and an unopposed re-election of beleaguered FIFA chair Sepp Blatter, the organization finally looked to be getting itself back on track with an internal inquiry and a life-ban for the President of the Asian Football Confederation. But FIFA's proposed roadmap for tackling its integrity problems fell far short of the root and branch surgery that was necessary, and the recent withdrawal of Transparency International from the reform process demonstrates that the FIFA leadership still don't understand the basic principles of ethics management. Students of corporate responsibility need no better case study of how to get it all so wrong.

5. Raj Rajaratnam's insider trading trial
No list of corporate responsibility stories is complete without a big fish being caught. In 2010 we saw the sacking of HP CEO Mark Hurd for expense claims fraud. This year, we had a two-for-price-of-one bonanza with the trial of former hedge fund boss Raj Rajaratnam giving us a guilty verdict, 11 years in jail and a $10m fine for insider trading .... plus the charging of his friend and former McKinsey head Rajat Gupta with securities fraud for passing on insider information to Rajaratnam. As the New York Times said: "it was the longest-ever prison sentence for insider trading, [and] a watershed moment in the government’s aggressive two-year campaign to root out the illegal exchange of confidential information on Wall Street."

6. UBS and the not so 'rogue' trader
Another big story of personal ethical failure was the revelation back in September that UBS trader Kweku Adoboli had managed to lose the company a staggering $2.3bn in authorized trading. With a loss that big, this one makes the list on scale alone. But the real story here was not so much the ethical failings of Adoboli himself (though that clearly was one of the issues at play here), but the failure of UBS to manage the problem before it got out of hand, and the inherent risk-taking at the heart of the financial services industry. In desperate need to repair its flagging reputation, UBS subsequently accepted the resignation of its CEO and installed a new leader with a mandate to move into less risky and less complex investment banking.

7. Twitter revolutions and Blackberry riots
You know when your reputation is in good shape when you get associated with progressive political revolutions like the Arab Spring. After a government telecom crackdown in Egypt, companies like Twitter and Google found themselves center stage in the flourishing revolution. Switch to the ever declining fortunes of Canadian tech pioneers RIM and their Blackberry device, and all you get is an association with mindless looting in London. But whichever way you cut it, 2011 will indelibly be marked as the year that tech companies realized that for better or worse, social protest - and government response to protest - was an inevitable part of their business. Message to CR department: write a policy.

8. Michael Porter's popularization of 'Creating Shared Value'
It was certainly not the most popular article among CSR commentators, but Porter and Kramer's piece in the January issue of the Harvard Business Review on 'Creating Shared Value' has probably done more to get corporate responsibility issues into the boardroom than anything else written this year. Sure, it's simplistic, derivative, and takes cheap shots at a version of CSR that most us don't even recognize. But it's also compelling, endearingly positive, and says a lot of things that most of us have been trying to say for years without anyone taking much notice. Plus it couldn't be more prescient with its "capitalism is under siege" motif. Oh, and Michael Porter said it. So it must be true. Take it from us, CSV is here to stay.

9. Facebook's privacy adventures
There was little doubt back in January that Facebook would probably be hitting a whole bunch of corporate responsibility snags during the year. Once you get so big and popular, it is inevitable that the critics will start sharpening their knives. Greenpeace pushed hard on the coal powered energy issue and eventually scored a well-earned success. But the big issue dogging Facebook in 2011 was privacy. The tech giant wasn't alone since privacy and security continued to afflict a number of companies especially with the shift to cloud computing. But Facebook's privacy battles stand out simply because they affect so many of us and therefore mark the front line of the personal privacy battles with tech companies and regulators. Remarkably, despite a surge of criticism the company initially managed to stave off too big a hit on its business during the year. But last month's settlement with US regulators saw Facebook accused of "unfair and deceptive practices" and resulted in the company facing an extraordinary obligation to submit to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years. And late in December the Irish data protection commissioner gave Facebook 6 months to comply with a raft of new privacy measures for all of its non US and Canadian users. As a result the company has started adopting a far more conciliatory tone with its critics but the road ahead will be marked by yet more battles as we gradually move to some kind of a post-privacy future.

10. The tar sands failed ethical makeover
The year started with the Canadian Environment Minister seeking to make the seemingly indefensible case that the tar sands were an ethical source of oil because they came from a democratic country that respected human rights. The argument was designed to influence US and European policy makers in the run up to critical energy decisions during 2011 such as the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline plan which was designed to bring oil sands crude directly into the US, and the European Commission's deliberations over whether to label tar sands oil as a "dirty fuel" due to its higher carbon intensity. So far the Canadian government and the oil sands producers have failed to win the argument with the Keystone decision being postponed by President Obama and the EC approving the dirty fuel label, which also then attracted further backing from a similar initiative in the State of California. Recently the story has spiraled into the more absurd territory of a banana boycott. The announcement by fruit company Chiquita to reduce their use of tar sands oil in its fleet sparked a concerted campaign by Ethicaloil.org to boycott Chiquita for discriminating against Canada's "ethical oil". You couldn't make this stuff up.

Looking at the two stories book-ending our top ten - the seriousness of a world of nuclear disaster and increasingly dirty sources of conventional energy (such as the tar sands and gas fracking) - not to mention the erosion of privacy, a crisis in capitalism and the never ending scourge of corruption that populate the middle order, it is clear that the corporate responsibility stakes have never been higher. Next year promises to be more of the same.

Photo by IAEA Imagebank. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence

Will privacy and security be critical differentiators in cloud computing?

The debut this week of Google's new web-only Chromebook laptop, coming hot on the heels of Sony's massive data security breach just a few weeks ago suggests that data security is becoming increasingly critical for the success of technology companies. Google, no stranger to accusations over infringements of privacy, is upping the ante with the release of a computer that, rather than running software and storing files on its own hard drive, will instead rely predominantly on cloud computing. Yes, that means everything that you'd usually keep stored on your laptop will actually be held somewhere in a vast data center run by Google ... and of course, everything that you do can be tracked and recorded because you're signed-in and doing it online.

Although the Chromebook itself may not become quite the challenger to Microsoft and their Windows operating system that Google hopes it will be, the shift to cloud computing (which anyone using Picasa, Google Docs, Dropbox or numerous other applications is already very much part of) is sure to continue apace. But cloud computing raises a number of troubling ethical issues. On the one hand there are the environmental problems associated with running servers capable of storing such huge amounts of data. And then, of course, there are the privacy and data security issues that are faced by any company storing so much personal data online.

In recent weeks, consumers have been made all too aware of these privacy and security issues because of several high profile data disasters. Last month, for example, Amazon, which has been a leader in cloud computing, was forced to shut down its service for several days. A number of companies using its services were paralyzed and some even lost potentially valuable data. Then Sony's travails with hackers reached a new zenith when the company was forced to concede that more than 20,000 of users of its online gaming system had their financial details stolen. Osama bin Laden even got in on the action when a swath of spam Facebook messages purporting to be photos and videos recording the death of the former Al Qaeda leader turned out, according to the Financial Times, to be malicious malware designed to phish for passwords and financial data from infected computers. Ironically, even as we tried to publish this post, Blogger experienced a service disruption that meant that we were unable to publish for more than 24 hours. So much for the instantaneity of social media! All of this added up to bad news for technology companies looking to convince customers of the safety and security of their products and services.

This then raises the question of whether data security and privacy protection will increasingly become critical areas of competition between leading technology companies, especially those relying on cloud computing, rather than just being a kind of necessary evil for everyone concerned. Microsoft, whose operating systems and internet software had long been plagued with security problems, certainly seemed to be thinking this way when it launched its Windows 7 operating system. The company has long been compared unfavourably in terms of security to Apple's Mac OS - but appears to have regained some ground with its latest version. But as more and more personal data moves to the cloud, and companies like Facebook and Google become increasingly involved in recording, using and selling data related to our usage stats and preferences, this is likely to affect a wider range of companies ... and potentially in an even more significant way. Yesterday's revelations that Facebook employed a leading PR company to plant negative stories in the media about Google's privacy policies gives some indication of just how high the stakes are becoming. And nothing focuses corporate attention more than the threat of multiple lawsuits, which is the latest ignominy faced by Sony in the fall-out from its hacking attack.

Despite all this, there are still reasons to doubt whether security and privacy will ever become major differentiators in the battle for technology market share. Unlike speed, performance and design, security is a tricky intangible that is difficult to evaluate up front. And besides, despite their criticisms of technology companies, most end users in practice tend to display a fairly carefree disregard for security issues, and even for their own privacy protection. After all, how many people actually read all of those terms and conditions when they download another Facebook app or install a new piece of software? With commercial users the equation is different, of course, but for the average Joe, security is a concern but not one that yet impacts significantly on their technology choices.

In the end, a better way of looking at this might be for technology companies to start looking at privacy and security as pre-competitive issues. That is, rather than competing on the quality of their privacy protections, why not collaborate with one another to improve standards across the industry. After all, a major hack at Sony, an outage at Amazon, or a spate of malware at Facebook threaten the reputation for security across the board not just for the individual company that is targeted. Problems at one company can spell reputational damage for the industry as a whole. Sure, healthy competition can drive innovation in new security systems. But so too can healthy cooperation. And in the long run it might just be more effective, and provide a better service for skeptical consumers unsure of how far they want to put their trust in tech companies.

Picture by samplereality. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence.

Anti-corporate activism through social media: how Greenpeace is leading the way

As events in the Middle East have shown, social media can play a critical role in connecting up protesters around a common cause. Whilst in this context the aims are political and the targets are state leaders, over in the world of business, companies are also finding themselves the unwitting subjects of campaigns fueled by social media.   And leading the way in exploiting new technology to confront companies is Greenpeace. After having claimed the scalp of Nestle last year with its viral Kit-Kat ad that prompted the company to change its sourcing of palm oil, Greenpeace has also recently rolled out its "Polluter Harmony" campaign in Canada to confront government support of oil sands companies. Last week, it claimed another victory with the US retailer Costco announcing a major sustainable seafood initiative after a Greenpeace campaign featured the company in a series of videos going through an "Ocean destroyers anonymous' program. And now, it has set its sights on the social media giant itself, Facebook.

Greenpeace is no stranger to the use of new technology in anti-corporate activism. As Ethical Corporation reports, the organization was propelled onto the world stage by its use of live video footage from its campaign ship in the mid 1990s. The organization also led the way in using YouTube videos to target companies, such as its Kimberly Clark campaign back in 2004. Since then Greenpeace has continued to exploit developments in new media to get its message across and engage people in its campaigns against big companies. For example, a 2009 campaign against an extension to Heathrow airport involved setting up a 'Join the Plot' website that enabled some 90,000 people around the world to become "beneficial owners" of land earmarked for the new runway, thereby giving them the right to be represented at any future inquiries about the extension. Plans to extend the airport were subsequently shelved by the UK Government.

The Kit-Kat YouTube spoof, which was part of a concerted campaign to stop companies sourcing from the Indonesian palm oil supplier Sinar Mas, was so successful that it made it into our top 10 stories of last year. As Greenpeace put it, “With nearly 1.5 million views of our Kit Kat advert, over 200,000 e-mails sent, hundreds of phone calls and countless Facebook comments, you made it clear to Nestle that it had to address the problems with the palm oil and paper products it buys.”  And, lo and behold, it did.

The latest campaigns have so far garnered attention, and no doubt ruffled a few feathers, but it remains to be seen what kind of success they've actually achieved. The Polluter Harmony campaign was started in the US in time for Valentine's Day 2010. This February, attention switched to Canada after the Environment Minister Peter Kent started extolling the virtues of the 'ethical' oil sands. It's a well executed campaign featuring toe curling spoof videos of big company bosses and politicians (or 'tar-crossed lovers' as the Canadian declaring their love for each other in the form of those nauseating love match clips used by online dating sites such as e-harmony. Similar in style are the Costco videos portraying the company as an initially in-denial 'ocean destroyer' who eventually completes the 6-step program on sustainable fishing and graduates from rehab. They've generated thousands rather than 10s or 100s of thousands of views, so in social media terms have not exactly taken off, but all the same have clearly been a nagging irritant for the company.

And then there's Facebook. Here the tool isn't just social media, so is the target. It's a smart piece of media planning for Greenpeace to be attacking Facebook through, well ... Facebook. The main focus is a Facebook page urging the company to 'Unfriend Coal' as a power source for its new data centre. Featuring a cute logo that uses the iconic Facebook thumbs up (and thumbs down), as well as a cheeky (or maybe just annoying) video that apes the "Story of Stuff" technique to remix the Social Network the campaign is gradually going viral. The page now has some 60,000 friends and the video has been played almost half a million times on YouTube.

But its not just the numbers we should be looking at here. The interesting things about the Greenpeace social media campaigns is the way they manage to harness the power of new technology to get people to do more than just click 'like' or watch a 2 minute video. Here's a few of the things we think they're doing right:

Using social media to get people on the ladder of participation. Joining a Facebook group doesn't represent much in terms of participation, but issues like coal, seafood, runways or toilet paper aren't all that interesting. So it's critical to make it easy for people to get involved, to get their foot on the first rung of the ladder of participation, before engaging them further. Greenpeace has been adroit at engaging .. and then educating ... through providing extensive resources, constant updating of new material, and encouraging people to go go higher up the ladder. Once people know more, there's a better chance they'll participate more and write an email, join a protest, or create their own activist videos or photos.

Mixing earnestness with wit and irony. Activist groups believe passionately in what they do. and the issues they deal with are often ugly and unpleasant. So it's no surprise that their way of communicating is  a preachy form of earnestness. But that often doesn't work with social media where attention spans are small and content is typically "lite". Greenpeace has been effective in using wit and irony in its "lower rung" communications coupled with a more earnest voice once people's interest has been pricked. That combination is something other organizations, including companies, have struggled with.

Creative imitation. Like it or not, but in terms of getting a message across about big brands, parody works. Spoof ads, Facebook icons, dating websites - Greenpeace knows how to leverage the tools and brands of big business to communicate to the public. But it does so in a creative way that helps them stand out from a busy field. As academics, we'd be tempted to call this intertextuality - where the codes or meaning of one text are transferred or re-produced in another.

Fitting social media into a broader strategy.With all the hype around social media it's easy to forget that it's just one tool among many, and just one part of a broader strategy to achieve an organization's aims. Greenpeace appears to have been successful in deploying social media as part of a social change strategy that also involves direct dialogue with companies, developing new solutions, and tackling issues at a policy level.

And a couple of things they could still do better:

End of life 'take-back'. OK, it's not the same as letting your e-waste end up poisoning someone in Africa, but the artifacts of social media also tend to stay around a long time, especially online videos and webpages. Once a company like Nestle or Costco has changed its policy, Greenpeace might want to think about what it should do with all the critical content it has left out there that is no longer an accurate picture of reality. Taking videos down from your own website is one thing, but a successful "push strategy" can leave content lurking all over the web. We like the latest Greenpeace video 'Changes' celebrating Costco's success following the 5-step program - it's a real step in the right direction - but do they have a policy on what should be done about all the rest of the stuff they've produced and disseminated?


Further integration. So far, Greenpeace has been better at creating new content than linking it all up, especially between its different campaigns and across countries. It's a difficult challenge, especially in a network form of organization like Greenpeace International, and where you're trying to talk in (at least) two different voices. But greater integration can pay-off in terms of clarifying the message and capitalizing on successes. Given how far they have come already, it doesn't look to be beyond them. Though maybe that's just another of the secrets of success in social media - the courage to give up control.

‘Baron zu Googleberg’

Our last blog looked at the role social media and other internet or mobile based communications technologies and their role in shaping a somewhat new, ideology-free form of revolution in Egypt. One of our readers hinted to Malcolm Gladwell’s comment on the web edition of the New Yorker which poured some water into the wine of excitement about the potential of new technology. And what we saw from Yemen, Bahrain and other Arab countries this week seems to add to the perspective: it is not just new media which makes revolutions inevitable. There are still a number of other factors which mediate the eruption and impact of widespread discontent in the Middle East.

On a different note though, last week has shown the power of the internet for holding politicians accountable in a somewhat new and quaint context. Since a couple of years, Germany has a new rising star in politics, the current Secretary of Defence Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (his real name runs over half a page of nobility titles and stuff – we spare you this). He is young (39), smart and eloquent, good looking, filthy (old money-) rich as a Baron with a long ancestry of Franconian nobility, boasts a beautiful wife and cute kids and so far has done quite a good job as a federal top politician in Berlin. He is well connected, also beyond Germany and one of the few German politicians who can actually talk coherently in English (then Industry Secretary). Many touted him for future Chancellor (German for Prime Minister).

Earlier last week though events took an ugly turn. Andreas Fischer-Lescano, a law professor from Bremen University, published a book review of Guttenberg’s recently published PhD thesis in some law review. Initially drawn to the work by scholarly interest – the book is a comparative study of constitutional law in the US and Europe – he had some strange déjà-vu’s while reading Guttenberg’s 435-page tome. He googled a few paragraphs which appeared familiar and as a result, he published in the appendix to his review dozens of passages, where Guttenberg had just copied and pasted newspaper articles, speech manuscripts and journal papers. Of course without any citation, any reference and without even mentioning most of them in his 50-page reference list. Immediately, an online community of bloggers and researchers zoomed in on the case. The immediately set up website ‘GuttenPlag Wiki’ so far has digged up around 120 alleged incidents of plagiarism in Guttenberg’s PhD.

Now one has to consider that in Germany carrying a ‘Dr.’ in front of your name - rather than indicating academic ambitions – is, however, by now almost a requisite to enter the higher echelons of politics and business. So getting the title by what now appears to be a thesis rampant with plagiarized parts is no small feat. No wonder this lead to widespread debate about whether such a cheating and disingenuous individual could still be in such senior political role. Especially as his brand was very much predicated on being ‘authentic’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘genuine’ – unlike all those clichés the public normally harbours about the political class. The glee about ‘zu Copyberg’, ‘Baron Cut-and-Paste’ or ‘zu Googleberg’ is limitless in European media.

Now the interesting thing about this is not necessarily the fact that we come across yet another sleazy politician. Fair enough, if the allegations are true, zu Guttenberg has cheated and there is no way he could keep his degree. More serious, it now came out that he also used the Parliamentary Research department and pasted their reports into his PhD - without any reference. In fact, suspicions that the whole tome was written by a Ghostwriter are now popping up all over the web. The Minister has announced on Friday: "I will temporarily, I repeat temporarily, give up my doctoral title." Crisis management German style.

The really interesting story in our view though is the pivotal role the internet has played in this case. The initial review in the law journal was only possible because some young guy in a provincial university was able to use Google and other software to detect plagiarism comprehensively. And the subsequent frenzy of research online which discovered even more incidents of plagiarism just put up the heat on Guttenberg. Politicians – like most of us these days – are so much more transparent and thus also accountable for their legacy and actions – just because technology empowers ‘normal’ citizens to access so much more information. One of the funnier incidents in cypberspace is the facebook page on this (‘If Guttenberg has a Doctor, I want one too!’) or the new keyboard designed for PhDs a la Guttenberg - with all keys removed except the 'c'ut and 'v'-paste ones...

The lessons from this are clear. Yes, it still matters how people think, what ethical convictions drive them and what values are held in high regard. For many other places in the world, this scandal just sounds a little quaint, German, parochial. In the Anglo-Saxon World, politicians are more prone to fall over irregularities in their love life. But the dynamics and the mechanics of political processes – be it the fairly prosaic plagiarism in the PhD thesis of a German politician or the far more substantial way of organising a revolution in Egypt – are fundamentally altered by the way we can access, process, analyse and distribute information these days. Kadhafi’s shoutdown of social media in Libya today just seems to underline this point.

Needless to say, that those cases also raises some challenging implications for private corporations, whose ethical behaviour now - just by dint of the technical means - faces a new wave of transparency. But that's a topic for a whole now blog, we guess.

Photo by isafmedia. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence.