Valuing social, environmental, tax and economic impacts means that business is now able to compare the total impacts of their decisions and manage the trade-offs.
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Businesses face complex decisions everyday. But how do they evaluate the optimal approach? Or understand which of their stakeholders are affected by their choices?What would you do?
Explore the issues around what it means for business to adopt a new way of thinking about and measuring success. Learn more
Access PWC Site here
The In-Your-Face, Results-Focused, No-“Kumbaya” Guide to Social Media for Business!
Stop hiding from social media–or treating it as if it’s a playground. Start using it strategically. Identify specific, actionable goals. Apply business discipline and proven best practices. Stop fearing risks. Start mitigating them. Measure performance. Get results. You can. This book shows you how.
Jason Falls and Erik Deckers serve up practical social media techniques and metrics for building brands, strengthening awareness, improving service, optimizing R&D, driving better leads–and closing more sales.
“Conversations” and “communities” are wonderful, but they’re not enough. Get this book and get what you really want from social media: profits.
Think social media’s a passing fad? Too risky? Just a toy? Too soft and fuzzy? Not for your business? Wake up! It’s where your customers are. And it ain’t going away. Does that suck? No. It doesn’t. Do social media right, and all those great business buzzwords come true.Actionable. Measurable. And…wait for it…here comes the big one. Profitable. Damn profitable.
Want to know how to do it right? We’ll show you. And, yeah, we know how because we’ve doneit. This is the bullshit-free, lie-free, fluff-free, blessedly non-New-Age real deal. You’re going to learn how to use social media to deliver absolutely killer customer service. How to R&D stuff people actually want. Develop scads of seriously qualified leads. You’ll figure out what you want. You know, the little things like profits, market share, loyalty, and brand power. You’ll figure out how to measure it. And then you’ll go get it.
One more thing. We know what scares you about social media. Screwing up (a.k.a., your mug on the front page of The Wall Street Journal). So we’ll tell you what to do so that won’t happen. Ever. No B.S. in this book. Just facts. Metrics. Best practices. Stuff to warm the hearts of your CFO, CEO, all your C-whatevers. And, yeah, you. So get your head out from under the pillow. Get your butt in gear. Let’s go make some money.
This case study is about how Greenpeace used social media to foster change in Nestlé SA (Nestlé). Experts felt that the environmental protection group made clever use of social media and direct action against the European food processing giant. The campaign proved to have high impact, forcing Nestlé to clarify its stance on palm oil and create a timetable for cleaning up its palm oil supply chain. This case is meant for MBA/ MS students as a part of their IT & Systems/ Organizational Behavior curriculum. It can also be used in Marketing Management curriculum.
Traces the history of IKEA’s response to a TV report that its Indian carpet suppliers were using child labor. Describes IKEA’s growth, including the importance of a sourcing strategy based on its close relationships with suppliers in developing countries. Details the development of IKEA’s strong culture and values that include a commitment “to create a better everyday life for many people.” Describes how, in response to regulatory and public pressure, IKEA developed a set of environmental policies that grew to encompass a relationship with Greenpeace and WWF on forest management and conservation. Then, in 1994, Marianne Barner, a newly appointed IKEA product manager, is surprised by a Swedish television documentary on the use of child labor by Indian carpet suppliers, including some that supply IKEA’s rugs. She immediately implements a strict policy that provides for contract cancellation if any IKEA supplier uses child labor. Then Barner is confronted by a German TV producer who advises her that he is about to broadcast an investigative program documenting the use of child labor in one of the company’s major suppliers. How should she react to the crisis? How should the company deal with the ongoing issue of child labor in the supply chain?
Access from HBS here
Virtually every action, message, and decision of a military force shapes the opinions of an indigenous population: strategic communication, treatment of civilians at vehicle checkpoints, and the accuracy or inaccuracy of aerial bombardment. Themes of U.S. goodwill mean little if its actions convey otherwise. Consequently, a unified message in both word and deed is fundamental to success. Business marketing practices provide a useful framework for improving U.S. military efforts to shape the attitudes and behaviors of local populations in a theater of operations as well as those of a broader, international audience. Enlisting Madison Avenue extracts lessons from these business practices and adapts them to U.S. military efforts, developing a unique approach to shaping that has the potential to improve military-civilian relations, the accuracy of media coverage of operations, communication of U.S. and coalition objectives, and the reputation of U.S. forces in theater and internationally. Foremost among these lessons are the concepts of branding, customer satisfaction, and segmentation of the target audience, all of which serve to maximize the impact and improve the outcome of U.S. shaping efforts.
Access RAND press release, research brief, or full report
Playmaker Systems, based in Bethesda, MD, is an innovator in the industries of communications, social media, marketing, sales, politics and military information operations. With our patented decision systems and applications, we help professionals analyze and anticipate the moves of their marketplaces for increased command-and-control and faster time-to-influence.
Our standard-setting Playcaller™ Influence Decision App,Social Play Tracker™, Play Action Map™, Playmaker Academy™, Playmaker Wargame™ and other services are based on The Standard Table of Influence™. First described in 2006 by CEO and Founder Alan Kelly in his landmark book, The Elements of Influence (Dutton/Plume), it is the centerpiece of the first, definitive ontology of strategies in business, government and society.
Adopted by Fortune 500 companies, including Abbott, Bayer, Dell, HP, Intel, Royal Dutch Shell, SAP and VMware, and taught at The George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management and USC Annenberg School for Communication, this breakthrough decision-making system helps professionals analyze, anticipate and prevail in the games and gamesmanship of their marketplace.
For more information contact us at Playmaker Systems, LLC.
The Father of Spin is the first full-length biography of the legendary Edward L. Bernays, who, beginning in the 1920s, was one of the first and most successful practioners of the art of public relations. In this engrossing biography, Larry Tye uses Bernays’s life as a prism to understand the evolution of the craft of public relations and how it came to play such a critical-and sometimes insidious-role in American life.
Drawing on interviews with primary sources and voluminous private papers, Tye presents a fascinating and revealing portrait of the man who, more than any other, defined and personified public relations, a profession that today helps shape our political discourse and define our commercial choices.
BBC Documentary “The Century of Self”
How Stuff Works: “Cigarettes & Sufragettes” and “How to Sell a War” (with ads)
Free downloads of Edward Bernays “Propaganda” “Engineering of Consent”
Museum of Public Relations Online Exhibit
Amazon pages for “Public Relations“
Access Shell’s internal review of the case here
This report sets out key lessons learned from a pilot project conducted in 2009-2010 to test
the practical applicability of a set of principles for effective non-judicial grievance
mechanisms that address complaints or disputes involving businesses and their stakeholders.
The principles were developed by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the
issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises and set out in his
reports to the Human Rights Council in 2008 (A/HRC/8/5) and 2009 (A/HRC/11/13).