Fabian Pattberg

Tag Archives - 3blmedia

Consolidation in the CSR Social Media field

July 16, 20119:04 am

1 Comment

This week saw an interesting development in the CSR / Sustainability field. JustMeans was acquired by 3blMedia. This is the link to the press release. I have had several emails and messages on Twitter and Google+ asking me what I thought about this new development. Here is what I make of it.

3blmedia Consolidation in the CSR Social Media fieldMy View

I think this development is a sign of the current difficult economic times as well as normal consolidation in any kind of business sector. In my view JustMeans was going in no particular direction over the past months and seemed to slowly go away as a player in the CSR / Sustainability Social Media world. Toby Webb wrote about this several months ago and made some very good points.

This new development might kickstart another phase of interesting development for the site. I also hope that this acquisition does not mean that JustMeans will simply be another news outlet for 3blMedia. I am a strong believer in the fact that good content is the key to any websites success. If 3blMedia will focus on this strong content creation and engagement in a “non-marketing” and “honest” way I would expect the site to be a growing community for professionals in the field. This is what JustMeans wanted to be from the start after all. I hope they will succede with this new leadership. Best of luck from my side.

This is my take on the acquisition. What is yours?

BP – a disaster for the Sustainability / CSR sector in general?

June 17, 201012:01 pm

6 Comments

Everything in the CSR / Sustainability world at the moment seems to evolve around BP and its action/inactions to fix the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. I am not doing any BP bashing here today. I am only using the current BP oil spill disaster in todays post as an example that CSR needs to evolve beyond its environmental aspects and the attention for detail by its practitioners.

This is my main argument in this post: Best practice such as the latest trend of integrated report, use of social media, etc. are steps in the right direction in my opinion but we need to increase the speed of the adoption of a more responsible business practice across the board within business in your local area and region.

The BP example has shown that big business will not act responsibly if it can get away with it. We therefore need to start at the local level to convince businesses to demand a more responsible business practice from all their businesses they are involved with. Customers and suppliers. Sustainability / CSR starts at the micro level and with clear guidance and support from a governmental level as I argued in my previous post.

This might sound very general and broad but it seems to me that we as Sustainability / CSR professionals are being caught up in the nitty gritty details of working with CSR / Sustainability far to easily and are somehow loosing the view of the big picture and the main purpose of this practice: To champion Sustainability / CSR and to help organizations in the transition to adopt a more responsible business practice.

This is the short video I recently did in partnership with 3blmedia on exactly this topic. Please let me know what you think about my argumentation and whether you agree or disagree.