I attended a pretty exciting workshop on CSR and Web 2.0 during SAP´s Sapphire event at the end of May in Berlin. Even if the CSR community and especially companies are only just beginning to make active use of social media, there are great opportunities ahead.

Especially for a more regular stakeholder dialogue Web 2.0 offers strong advantages to help to increase transparency into a company’s CSR strategy and related programmes. James Governor from open-source analyst firm Redmonk has an interesting view on this.  Redmonk decided to go green a while ago by setting up a “green” arm to their open source analyst business. According to James, “With the help of Web 2.0, CSR is becoming a window itself - an important gateway between the business and us: individuals, customers and stakeholders." Wow, what a statement! 

Another very true comment was made by Dennis Howlett from ZDNet, encouraging companies to include social media more actively into their communication strategy  "There is nothing to fear except you have something to hide".  Yes, how true even if it is of course important to have tools to measure the success of communication campaigns in place. And this is currently obviously still an area to be further explored in the Web 2.0 space. 

James Farrar, VP for CSR at SAP who hosted the workshop even believes that web 2.0 could redefine CSR reporting making it much more dynamic considering stakeholder views from online communities etc. The more you think about the great potential which lies behind the better usage of web 2.0 in the CSR space the more exciting it gets.

 And here is another piece of advice from Dennis Howlett  "You are not going to get it right. You are going to make mistakes. But there is only one way - go for it!"

Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Corporate Affairs, HP EMEA