Some initial questions:
- Would you change your car for one that pollutes more?
- Do you prefer fair trade ecological food or products collected mechanically and grown with pesticides?
- Would you buy clothes made by child slaves?
In our plurilingual, intercultural, multimodal and virtualized society, some universal ethical values are projected onto products, processes and resources by consumers all over the world. How can organizations learn to understand and respond to this collective perception of reality?
When buying a product, today customers actively demand information on-line, in an open communications environment. It is likely that they will find other users’ opinions about its usability, fabrication, environmental impact or health implications. These collective perceptions can affect the social value of a company, and destroy any organization’s effort for creating a friendly image. In a digital society where users are empowered by social media networks, audiences are demanding more ethical behavior from companies that have to operate in a highly competitive, globalized economic environment. Are we taking this into account, when designing a site?
When creating a corporate site, making explicit references to values has become as important as good design and well-organized content. The necessary complementary information to “Who we are” is not only detailed information about “What we do,” but also transmitting essential transparency and authenticity around “How we do it.”
Most modern companies have explicit vision or mission statements related to their actions for common wealth, ecology, solidarity or fair trade. It might seem that their social goals should add value to their brand and their public image, but the Ethos of the enterprise is generally seen through facts and actions more than through statements of intention. How can we, web designers, structure a coherent discourse made from those fragmented actions and facts to communicate efficiency, transparency, and customer care?
The collective perception of every community, organization or enterprise is built on the net: it can be reflected in customers’ success stories, in clients’ use cases, and even in users’ experiences, and it must be part of the communications management strategy in any organization. Is there any behavioral theory to help us develop communicative strategies for understanding, organizing and planning some possible actions to improve the social Ethos of our enterprise?
Some clues and suggestions:
- Social considerations need more than intentions: value statements must be complemented with facts and demonstrable results.
- The Greek word “Ethos” initially referred to the “character” that identifies a community, enterprise, or ideology. It usually described the “guiding beliefs or values” of the group. Aristotle, however, also included “expertise” and “knowledge” in this concept, both of which are expressed in the discourse or messages to the audience ([1]). When trying to transmit the Ethos of an organization, content developers should consider including not only intentions and values, but also evidence of expertise and success. Otherwise, the single declaration of intention might sound vain, utopist or plainly meaningless. How many of these visions and missions sound credible?
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- Image 2: Different statement for corporate Vision and Mission, by Alar Kolk. Source: http://www.slideshare.net/openinnovation/visions-missions-of-fortune-global-100
- Collective acceptance can be built from exogenous or endogenous forces: Ethos provides more added value if it evolves from the companies’ inner goals, expertise and practical results, than if it comes from customer pressure.
In an ideal world, organizations and enterprises would desire common benefit and long-term, sustainable social equity as a path toward its own success and sustainability. In the real world, these endogenous forces can provide social acceptance and added value if they are coherent, shared and transversal, when social Ethos:
- forms an important part of the explicit goals of the company.
- is embedded in organizational processes to increase openness and efficiency (transparency and best practices).
- is consciously encouraged and integrated into management, as a practical tool to save costs and reduce risks (a planned strategy that shows clear economic wisdom).
Sometimes, social consciousness is lead by customers and external audiences. They might force a specific company to adopt different and fairer production policies, or to change their raw materials in order to fit the values expected from a particular brand. These exogenous forces can push companies to “go green” not from conviction, but for marketing reasons, looking for mass appreciation. The consultant Chris Joseph is very clear in his statements[2]:
“Companies that emphasize the fact that they are attempting to be environmentally friendly can gain the favor of like-minded consumers. Make your business’s efforts to go green a part of your marketing campaign by mentioning the green changes you have made, such as using recycled products or changing your manufacturing processes to ones that are safer for the environment. Additionally, you can also donate money to causes that benefit the environment.”
In our globalized and virtualized society, consumers’ opinions can directly affect an enterprise’s revenue and its market value: because of the amplified scale that bad opinions can achieve on the internet, the risk of bad press is more than a possibility. Bad publicity might be overwhelming in a specific moment, but it becomes a permanently visible nightmare when potential clients look for information from search engines. A consistent negative MEME can destroy a corporate project almost at birth, if customers don’t like it, don’t understand it or don’t appreciate its added value. Remember Google Wave? It was shut down in April 2012, after two years of struggling![3]
Companies and organizations cannot passively stand by, hoping to collect customers’ positive opinions. They need to contract professionals to analyze their communicational needs and their social policy; to define profiles to embody the company image on social networks and promote their corporate Ethos; to develop transparent governance and to bridge the endogenous and exogenous forces that build positive social appreciation; to collaborate in making visible the collective consciousness that is being developed.
In such a complex and demanding situation, those representative professionals should be clearly identified, both to establish their expertise and to facilitate user contact. Hiding this information might be seen as corporate opacity or sloughing of responsibility. Which of these two official Avatars in Twitter provides better evidence of transparency in communicative processes?
