Recently in Corporate Social Responsibility Category

Google's YouTube video caption feature was developed in 2008. In November of 2009 Google released auto-captioning for a small, select group of partners. Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google's Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer.

The video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version. Viewers can even choose an option to translate those captions into any one of 50 different languages -- all in just a couple of clicks.

Google is now opening up auto-captions to all YouTube users.

There will even be a "request processing" button for un-captioned videos that any video owner can click on if they want to speed up the availability of auto-captions. It will take some time to process all the available video, so here are some things to keep in mind:

• While Google plans to broaden the feature to include more languages in the months to come, currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken.
• Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can't be auto-captioned. President Obama's speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions.
• Auto-captions aren't perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they're accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions. But please be patient -- our speech recognition technology gets better every day.
• Auto-captions should be available to everyone who's interested in using them. We're also working to provide auto-captions for all past user uploads that fit the above mentioned requirements. If you're having trouble enabling them for your video, please visit Google's Help Center: this article is for uploaders and this article is for viewers.

For content owners, the power of auto-captioning (AND translation) is significant.

With just a few quick clicks your videos can be accessed by a whole new global audience. And captions can make is easier for users to discover content on YouTube.

Twenty hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Making some of these videos more accessible to people who have hearing disabilities or who speak different languages, not only represents a significant advancement in the democratization of information, it can also help foster greater collaboration and understanding.

Consumption is at the heart of the sustainability challenge and many aspects of how we communicate today drive unsustainable consumption.

Marks & Spencer's in London have taken CSR to the next generation... sustainable business model making.  They have created "Plan A" to explain to themselves and their tribe that there is no Plan B... that we have to make considerable changes to the way we live today...if we are to survive on this planet.

"Sustainability will be a key issue over the next decade, shaping government policy, business strategy and how we live our lives," say Lucy Calver and Mike Barry in Marketing Magazine.

As the world's population grows by billions and the Western way of consumption is adopted by hundreds of millions of people in the developing world, we are running out of the basics - trees, clean water, farmland and so on.

Point ONE: Many global businesses, including Nike, Unilever and Google, have recognised that the days of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are over.

TWO: 'Plan A' - because there is no Plan B when it comes to saving the planet.

THREE: 'Doing the right thing'. Our customers could connect with this simple sentiment that sum­med up our reasons for selling only Fairtrade coffee and tea, or using only free-range eggs.

FOUR: Consumers want business to do the 'heavy lifting' on sustainability, but you get more traction when consumers are given the opportunity to make some easy contributions themselves.

FIVE: A sustainable future will be achieved only when people feel they are part of a 'tribe' for change. They must be made aware they are not alone, but one among millions of individuals who are all making small changes that together make a big difference.


The businesses that will be prospering in a decade are those that are radically committed to becom­ing more sustainable. As important, they will also have found a way of communicating that change is necessary, possible and desirable.

Mike Barry is head of sustainable business and Lucy Calver is head of food and Plan A marketing at M&S

A number of orporations are now publicly committed to sustainability. But, beneath the public relations happy face, executives and managers are perplexed.

Many executives have families, and it would appear they have a human interest in a sustainable world for their families -- and that human heart is increasing seen among executives who have a genuine desire to work in an ethical and sustainable manner.  However, when the most conscientious of these executives engage with their stakeholders for that purpose, they sometimes are surprised by a generalized encounter of hardball politics,  hostile activists, self-interested elites, and unpredictable attacks. 

What executives must understand is that their own experience of their company's policies might not be the public's encounter.  However, if corporate executives need a guide for coping with the array of ideas, feelings, and experiences that can be thrown at them, this book can offer some clues.

Stakeholder Politics: Social Capital, Sustainable Development and The Corporation gives companies a "how to" guide for addressing the twin problems of maintaining political legitimacy, and promoting sustainable development.

"The text presents a typology of stakeholder networks that helps managers and community leaders identify and improve the social capital patterns in their own networks."  That's good, because green marketing -- or socially responsible behavior -- must start with internal purging and restoration of a system that deserves respect. 

Once executives know these patterns, they can move their networks towards those that foster sustainable community development.

Stakeholder Politics: Social Capital, Sustainable Development and The Corporation  describes vivid cases in which managers and community stakeholders have used the authors' approach successfully, and in addition provides managers with handy tools for predicting and avoiding community-level socio-political risk around stakeholder issues. With its proven and practical approach, Stakeholder Politics promises to be a valuable guide for managers and academics who are invested in sustainable development worldwide and stakeholder issues alike.

Greenleaf Publishing

	Stakeholder Politics Social Capital, Sustainable Development, and the Corporation Robert Boutilier 2009, Available Now Buy this book

Think Green Alliance offers the following services to help businesses outline a sustainability strategy with the goals of establishing a step-by-step plan with carbon reduction targets, using tools for sustainability and carbon measurement/management, as well as ensuring the sustainability plan meets business and ROI goals.

• Strategic Sustainability Blueprint Development
• Carbon Measurement, Reporting and Benchmarking
• Sustainability Audits and Reviews
• Sustainability Best Practices
• Sustainability Whitepapers and Research
• Custom Sustainability Consulting
• Sustainability Project Consulting
• Project Management

The Think Green Alliance is a community of businesses and organizations that are committed to providing environmentally and economically sustainable services, products and goods. As of February 2009, the Alliance membership represents a total of 159.7 billion dollars of annual global revenues and over 250,000 full-time employees.

The Alliance was founded in March 2008 by Jean Jerome Baudry of Baudry Cybernomics Corporation.

For more information, please contact Kim:
projects@thinkgreenalliance.com
416-915-4048 ext. 304

This site deserves its "7" page rank! Check out the clear design, comprehensive information and quality links. Who says that Internet data has to be less reliable than print?

The Art's Butterfly World website describes over 34 years of data collected by Dr. Arthur Shapiro, professor of Evolution and Ecology at the University of California, Davis, in his continuing effort to regularly monitor butterfly population trends on a transect across central California. Ranging from the Sacramento River delta, through the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada mountains, to the high desert of the western Great Basin, fixed routes at ten sites have been surveyed at approximately two-week intervals since as early as 1972.

The sites represent the great biological, geological, and climatological diversity of central California. As of the end of 2006, Dr. Shapiro has logged 5476 site-visits and tallied approximately 83,000 individual records of 159 butterfly species and subspecies.

This major effort is continuing and represents the world's largest dataset of intensive site-specific data on butterfly populations collected by one person under a strict protocol. We have also collated monthly climate records for the entire study period from weather stations along the transect.

This website was built as a portal for Dr. Shapiro's data and observations, supported by National Science Foundation.

It helps to have significant funding and partnering arrangements!

This site deserves its "7" page rank! Check out the clear design, comprehensive information and quality links. Who says that Internet data has to be less reliable than print?

The Art's Butterfly World website describes over 34 years of data collected by Dr. Arthur Shapiro, professor of Evolution and Ecology at the University of California, Davis, in his continuing effort to regularly monitor butterfly population trends on a transect across central California. Ranging from the Sacramento River delta, through the Sacramento Valley and Sierra Nevada mountains, to the high desert of the western Great Basin, fixed routes at ten sites have been surveyed at approximately two-week intervals since as early as 1972.

The sites represent the great biological, geological, and climatological diversity of central California. As of the end of 2006, Dr. Shapiro has logged 5476 site-visits and tallied approximately 83,000 individual records of 159 butterfly species and subspecies.

This major effort is continuing and represents the world's largest dataset of intensive site-specific data on butterfly populations collected by one person under a strict protocol. We have also collated monthly climate records for the entire study period from weather stations along the transect.

This website was built as a portal for Dr. Shapiro's data and observations, supported by National Science Foundation.

It helps to have significant funding and partnering arrangements!

Do you have (or know of someone who has) a company producing green, sustainable, or high performance solutions?

We are launching a "green directory with a difference" -- you get a real opportunity to tell your green solutions story in the listing!  Up to 600 WORDS...and your listing can be included in FIVE categories. 

We also include BOTH Business-to-Business and Business-to-Consumer categories.  IF we don't have the right category for your solution -- let us know and we'll seriously consider adding it.

The SolutionsforGreen.com site is highly "search engine optimized" and the listings will probably appear higher on Google searches than your own company's listings for key word phrases.  We work hard at building a robust platform of sites to help drive traffic to the directory.  We're serious about greening our world...and want to help others who are also serious about the challenge facing us.  And who have solutions!

We would  love to have your company, nonprofit organization...or even public agency list your green products, green services...and green programs.  You don't have to be in the commercial market.  You just need SOLUTIONS!  Employee programs.  Festivals. Innovator groups. The broader the variety of solutions, the better! 

"Necessity is the mother of invention"...my mother taught me.  And we have necessity.  Now it's time to implement some great, innovative solutions.

And then get the word out for replicating good results.  So add your listing, already :-)

SolutionsforGreen.com

Excerpts from an article in McKinseyQuarterly.com:

It might not be "socialism", but what we are seeing not only in the US, but across the globe could be somewhat similar in concept:

State capitalism is an economic system in which governments manipulate market outcomes for political purposes. Governments embrace state capitalism because it serves political as well as economic purposes--not because it's the most efficient means of generating prosperity. It puts vast financial resources within the control of state officials, allowing them access to cash that helps safeguard their domestic political capital and, in many cases, increases their leverage on the international stage. But state capitalism also stems the rise of globalization, because to varying degrees it hampers the flow of ideas, information, people, money, goods, and services within countries and across international borders.

The rise of state capitalism

As the Cold War stumbled to a close, the belief that governments could micromanage national economies and generate prosperity seemed dead. The dynamism and market power of Japan, the United States, and Western Europe--fueled by private wealth, private investment, and private enterprise--appeared to have fully and finally established the dominance of the liberal economic model. As these countries' governments privatized businesses and pensions, companies such as Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, Toyota Motor, and Wal-Mart Stores feverishly sketched out global expansion plans. Globalization became a household word.

But even before the still-developing global financial crisis had shaken the foundations of faith in free markets, the determination of a new generation of emerging-market heavyweights (many of them politically authoritarian) to chart their own courses toward prosperity and power ensured that public wealth, public investment, and public enterprise would make a stunning comeback.

The engines of state capitalism

Yet, despite the massive state interventions in economies across both the developed and developing worlds, many corporate leaders and investors act as though globalization remains the dominant paradigm. That is a mistake. In fact, the new importance of the state had become obvious well before the onset of the current crisis. Energy markets provide a good example.

The story extends well beyond energy. Across a broad range of economic sectors, China and Russia are leading the way in the strategic deployment of state-owned enterprises, and other governments have begun to follow their lead. In defense, a growing number of emerging-market governments--power generation, telecom, metals, minerals, and aviation--not content with simply regulating markets, are moving to dominate them.

Such state-corporate activity is fueled in part by the emergence of a new class of sovereign wealth funds. States with large holdings in the currencies of other countries are establishing ever larger risk-taking funds meant to maximize their return on investment--and their political influence. With the global credit squeeze making funds harder to come by, sovereign wealth funds have become even more important for the financing of state capitalism.

The global recession has accelerated the trend of state involvement in markets as governments around the world spend billions to stimulate growth and bail out vulnerable domestic industries and companies.

Winners and losers As the landscape shifts around them, international companies and investors will discover that the large-scale injection of politics into market processes will produce its own set of winners and losers. Because political factors unique to each state will determine the response to each domestic economic slowdown, countries with relatively strong political fundamentals will have a better shot at a quick recovery.

Given the vast sums its government can spend on fiscal stimulus, China will likely emerge from the global recession before most of the developed world.

In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has over the past several years forged a durable consensus in favor of disciplined macroeconomic policy.

Second-order effects

There are other implications of these trends worth considering.

We're likely to see new restrictions on the access to certain foreign markets for some companies.

• Tit-for-tat protectionism will remain a serious threat until the global recession comes to an end.
• Social upheaval will pressure politicians to turn increasingly toward a familiar and reliable tool: subsidies.
  
• Some of the regulatory changes will favor domestic firms... and SOME domestic firms.

Read more at McKinseyQuarterly.com

I was working with my marketing advisor this morning about refining our green marketing strategy and the term "gap analysis" came up as a description of what I wanted to work on.  I did what most people these do in the information gathering phase...I visited Google.

Resource one that caught my eye:

The GAP Analysis Program
"Keeping Common Species Common"

The goal of the GAP Analysis Program is to keep common species common by identifying those species and plant communities that are not adequately represented in existing conservation lands. Common species are those not currently threatened with extinction. By identifying their habitats, GAP Analysis gives land managers and policy makers the information they need to make better-informed decisions when identifying priority areas for conservation.

I always learn from natural systems...so this was interesting.  Community matters! Survival matters!

Resource two:

gap analysis definition  -  from BusinessDictionary.com
Technique for determining the steps to be taken in moving from a current state to a desired future-state. It begins with (1) listing of characteristic factors (such as attributes, competencies, performance levels) of the present situation ("what is"), (2) cross-lists factors required to achieve the future objectives ("what should be"), and then (3) highlights the 'gaps' that exist and need to be 'filled.' Also called need-gap analysis, needs analysis, and needs assessment. www.businessdictionary.com/definition/gap-analysis.html

Change...yes!  List factors.  Cross factors, and objectives.  Highlight gaps.  Fill them!  An updated needs assessment.  That makes sense.

Resource three: ... this was a synthesis of what I was looking for!

Image results for gap analysis

 Report the following images as offensive. Confirm CancelThank you for the feedback.

Gap analysis is a very useful tool for helping marketing managers to decide upon marketing strategies and tactics. Again, the simple tools are the most effective. There's a straightforward structure to follow. The first step is to decide upon how you are going to judge the gap over time. For example, by market share, by profit, by sales and so on.

This will help you to write SMART objectives. Then you simply ask two questions - where are we now? and where do we want to be?

What is Gap Analysis?

Your next step is to close the gap. Firstly decide whether you view from a strategic or an operational/tactical perspective. If you are writing strategy, you will go on to write tactics - see the lesson on marketing plans. The diagram below uses Ansoff's matrix to bridge the gap using strategies:

Strategic Gap Analysis.

You can close the gap by using tactical approaches. The marketing mix is ideal for this. So effectively, you modify the mix so that you get to where you want to be. That is to say you change price, or promotion to move from where you are today (or in fact any or all of the elements of the marketing mix).

Tactical Gap Analysis.

This is how you close the gap by deciding upon strategies and tactics - and that's gap analysis.

Thank you Marketing Teacher!

... the only problem is... these are not traditional times!  Traditional marketing methods don't necessarily apply. Do they?

With social media, and YouTube and Google and Ebay and the Obama Stimulus Plan... do the old rules apply?

Having been around for a few decades, my husband and I have been through this recessionary cycle before.  And we've seen long recoveries and deep drops...like this one.  And the latest fads in marketing all came tumbling down.  Just like now. 

I hope Google survives.  I hope YouTube survives.  I hope...well, I'm not so sure about Twitter.

But good companies need to survive.  Good products are needed to put food on the table and connect us to our loved ones and get us to our jobs ... if we still have them.   What we've observed is that during down times, fluffy marketing strategies fall away and we get back to basics.  Product, price, promotion and place. 

PRODUCT: Product adjustments are in order:  people and companies are buying ESSENTIALS. Things to fill definite NEEDS.  As in "find a need and fill it," kind of business.

PRICE: Prices are adjusting.  Banks are once again trying to gouge their best customers to bail out their mistakes,... but for the rest of us, we are adjusting our prices to balance between what we need to survive and what our customers can afford to pay during these stressful times.  We respect our customers' needs as much as our own.

PROMOTION:  It still starts with the people we already know.  I know...the giant blogosphere is tempting...but strangers use us and throw us away because their best bud or their cousin drops by and offers them a deal they can't refuse!  Internal promotion to your own customers and the folks who know you will work best during these lean times.

PLACE:  Distribution is still rather local, rather bricks and mortar.  We know that shop owner down the street.  Local is back.  When times get tough we band together and distribution becomes a matter of supporting one another because we care as much as because it's the best price.  That is, IF we have any of those relationships! 

So the four P's of marketing still matter.  They still can shore up a business during tough times.  They still make sense, even in the era of YouTube and Twitter.

People are asking themselves the ageold question...who will take care of me when I'm down and out?  That's who will get their business after they come to their senses.  And if we're smart, we'll come to our senses before we burn all our bridges -- our relationships with the people who make our food, make our cars run, educate our children, manufacture our clothes and pass the word along to readers like you :-)

That's gap analysis and gap solutions! 

Carolyn, your steadfast friend, right?