The CEO most mentioned wasn’t there. Unilever CEO, Paul Polman’s very personal commitment to changing the way business is done and his candour about where his company is and isn’t hitting targets in its Sustainable Living Plan, was referred to throughout the conference by speaker after speaker.

Many of the companies represented though (and this was a self-selecting group of companies choosing to take the stand at a conference about sustainability) still seem reticent about communicating their achievements in this space. And that was despite hearing more than once that ‘M&S got all that credit for Plan A, but we’ve done just as much’.

For some it was not wanting to be accused of claiming credit for what they are now required to do by regulation; for others it was not wanting to tempt fate or encourage scrutiny of other parts of their business. Either way, it felt that many businesses doing genuinely good things are missing the opportunity to better engage customers, employees and other stakeholders by communicating what they are doing more broadly, and not just in corporate responsibility reports.

All our experience tells us that communicating in an open way – transparent about commercial motivations, honest about what still needs to be achieved, and in a human tone of voice rather than mangled in corporate-speak – can only benefit corporate reputation and brand affinity.  It’s also ready-made subject matter for those corporates and brands searching for ‘always-on’ content.

Five new things I realise after the last two days:

1. That small-hold farmers in poorer parts of the world can now, thanks to the internet, see the prices being charged by companies in the richer parts of the world for products made using their ingredients. This realisation will help shift the balance of power and force companies sourcing there to factor in fair prices and fair treatment of workers, something companies like Puma and Unilever are already beginning to do. Thank you to Herman Mulder, Chairman of the Global Reporting Initiative
2. Just how much of the Brazilian rainforest (and other carbon sinks) is now available for land use change projects for companies to offset their carbon emissions against.
3. That the travel industry can become more sustainable by encouraging the emerging middle classes in India, China and elsewhere to adopt more responsible travel habits than we’ve got used to (in the same way as they are leap-frogging our use of fixed computers and going straight to mobile).
4. That half of all alcohol consumption in low income countries is informally produced, which can lead to health and social problems.  But also that informal alcohol production is often just the sort of small domestic enterprise that can lift a family out of abject poverty. Just one of the many paradoxes on display at the conference.
5. And I also learned that I can still just about listen and tweet (#rbs12) at the same time.

John Brock, CEO of Coca Cola Enterprises on stage at RBS12. Photo source: Ethical Corporation

Greg Smith wiped $2.15 billion off Goldman Sachs’ market value in one fell swoop. The company’s shares dropped 3.4 per cent as 3 million people read his open letter to the New York Times. Quite an impact for a lone senior manager.

So what was his gripe? What was the final straw for Greg as he faced the reality that the one job he’d had since college wasn’t his dream job after all?

Greg cited a lack of “meaningful work” as one of the reasons for his disillusionment, as well as some fundamental issues such as clients being referred to as “muppets” and colleagues focusing on “ripping them off”. So where did Goldmans go wrong for him? Was Smith simply no longer the right fit? Were his morals finally winning over his Wall Street credentials?

According to Andrew Hill (Financial Times), the answers lie in giving employees the opportunity to do meaningful work:

“Even quite small advances towards a goal energise staff, provided they are granted autonomy and the work itself is rewarding. Meaningful work doesn’t have to be about outlining the meaning of life.”

At salt, we define meaningful work in lots of different ways. Whether it’s working with clients who are helping business attract the right talent under tough market conditions (ManpowerGroup); working to promote flexible, decent work and the freedoms that it brings for individuals (Ciett); promoting transformational employment opportunities for young people in the Middle East and North Africa (EFE); or working with public private partnerships that drive progress towards Millennium Development Goals (Unilever / UNICEF partnership). Working to achieve results for clients against a clear purpose means a lot to us.

While Goldman Sachs does some impressive work in the area of sustainability, positive values need to be embodied throughout the culture of the organisation. If not, the good work lacks authenticity and that’s an increasing risk in business today.

Social media now forces transparency and muddies the water in terms of internal and external communications. The term “living the brand” doesn’t only apply to FMCG marketing strategies, it runs right through the heart of modern business. Organisations must be true to their values in order to be authentic. Behaving and operating in a way that is incongruent with those values is dangerous territory, regardless of how credible CSR and/or internal communications programmes may be.

So while you can’t please all the people, all of the time, it’s worth pausing for thought and considering what your employees would say about you.  If they had nothing to lose (and I’m assuming Greg Smith has a healthy savings account and the hint of a book deal in the bag), how would they describe their time with your company? What are you doing to enhance their experience? Does your workforce really believe in the organisation? Are they on side with your business strategy?  What do they say about work to friends/ family/ colleagues?

Engaging employees means aligning your workforce behind a common set of values and an agreed purpose and, most importantly, taking them on the journey with you. It’s not as straightforward as providing a healthy wellbeing programme (although that helps), or simply doing good in the community (a positive too). Business strategy must be aligned with employee engagement. If not, beware the next Greg Smith…

We’ve just come back from a family holiday in America.  One of the highlights was a visit to Monument Valley in Utah.  It is one of the most striking places on Earth, yet  It feels extremely familiar because it’s been the backdrop for so many Hollywood films.   And while I was doing very well at my promise not to check emails, I couldn’t help taking some more lessons from nearly 80 years ago.

The Museum at Goulding’s Trading Post in Monument Valley tells the story of Harry and Leone (‘Mike’) Goulding who left Durango, Colorado in the 1920s to build a new life among the Navajo people in southern Utah.  They helped rebuild the region – after it had been hard hit by drought and the Great Depression – thanks to some techniques we would recognise today:

• Present the product well. The Gouldings had settled in the middle of one of the most stunning landscapes imaginable.   But they sold it well too.  They encouraged a photographer, Josef Muench, to capture the unique environment in a series of sweeping panoramic photographs.
• Persuade key opinion formers. Armed with these photographs, Harry and Mike set off for Hollywood and made John Ford (a well-known director of action westerns) their number one target. They couldn’t get a meeting,  but plastered the photographs outside his office.  He was sold on the idea and visited their home.
• Be a good partner. The Gouldings went out of their way to make life easy on set for Ford and his stars, notably John Wayne.  A string of movies followed, including Stagecoach and The Searchers.
• Look after your stakeholders. The Gouldings were good neighbours to the Navajo people.  They learnt their language and brought employment through the film industry, with Navajos earning money as, amongst other things, extras in the westerns.  Later they introduced a health clinic to the area.

The area isn’t without its problems today, but it draws in income from tourists and film and TV (two episodes of Doctor Who were shot there in 2011).  It’s also served as a backdrop for entertainment as diverse as a Metallica video and the Red Bull Air Race.

A few years ago, we wrote a history of the 130 year old Lifebuoy brand.  It was notable then how many great ideas were buried in the brand’s past, and how much we could learn from them.  So while we’re obsessed with modern technologies and forms of communication, it’s good to remember that the past contains an awful lot of good ideas. It’s worth a visit, just like Monument Valley is.

And exciting to see those road signs you’ve known all your life – Beverley Hills, Sunset Boulevard, Rodeo Drive, Hollywood.

The tour guide who showed us all these places (yes, we’re being touristy) explained that agents and managers in the film industry were having a difficult time at the moment.  Their clients – the actors – can’t command the fees they used to because it’s not them who are really selling the movies today; it’s the owners and authors of the concepts. “Content providers are king”, he monotoned over the bus intercom (really touristy).

The big movie opening this weekend is Hunger Games. Queues round the block, takings forecasts on the news, book tie-ins piled high in the Barnes and Noble windows.  And the biggest player in all this doesn’t appear on the screen. Suzanne Collins, the author of the trilogy (Catching Fire and Mockingjay coming soon to a movie theatre near you) has co-written and co- produced the film. She’s the content provider, she’s got the power.

This is, of course, what made JK Rowling so wealthy – as content provider, she held all the cards (until the previously unknown stars became essential to the films, later on in the Harry Potter franchise).

And this move to content as king is happening in brand-world too. You still can’t turn on the TV over here without being bombarded by ads promising this life change or that amazing discount RIGHT NOW.  But so much of it feels like the desperate shouting of an increasingly ignored door-to-door salesman.

Which is why brands, even here, are turning to content provision. Because if they can own the story, rather than interrupt it, they have the power.

It’s creating job opportunities for another group of writers, the journalists whose opportunities had seemed more limited with the struggles of print media.  J Crew and Sephora are just two examples of brands hiring journalists to inject editorial expertise into their marketing.

The transfer of power to the content providers is visible in actors’ off-screen lives too.  When Greta Garbo used to stay at the Chateau Marmot (we’re back on the tour bus now), she enjoyed relative privacy.  When Lindsay Lohan stayed there, every detail of her life became valuable content for hotel staff to sell to hungry media.  Like the man says, content providers are king.

I’m a stickler for words. The easiest way to get on the wrong side of me is to misuse them. So the other day when I heard a group of teenagers excitedly talking about something “sick”, it got me thinking about cross-generational meanings.  Whilst I’m pretty sure the teenagers I overheard used “sick” to mean “cool”; for me, “sick” is something gross or unpleasant; and for my parents or my grandparents, “sick” literally means being unwell.

So this one word can unintentionally convey a whole different meaning to different groups.  Or can it? For this group, talking to their friends, their meaning is perfectly clear; but in all likelihood if they were talking to their parents or grandparents, they would adjust their choice of language accordingly to ensure they were understood.

We all talk to different people in different ways. Teenagers don’t want their dad to speak to them in language they consider exclusive to their peers – they want him to talk as ‘dad’. And the same goes for brands. If they talked to their consumers about “strategy” and “alignment”, as they do internally, it would be meaningless.

But it can be all too easy to forget this and hide behind corporate speak, particularly when something goes wrong. Toyota’s response to the crisis they faced in early 2010, which saw them recall 9 million vehicles worldwide over two separate safety concerns, is a case in point. Already facing global media scrutiny, a further situation erupted in the UK when the braking system in the Prius model was found to be failing on bumpy roads in cold conditions – a not uncommon problem in a British winter. During media appearances at the time, Miguel Fonesca, Toyota UK’s MD, famously failed to communicate effectively – and meaningfully – with audiences about the situation. Under pressure, he offered heavily technical explanations in response to simple questions and hid behind jargon that did not resonate with the audience:  ‘a software re-programming can be done to change the mapping of the ABS’; a simple ‘We’ll fix it’ would have had the right impact.

Brands have to respond appropriately and authentically, even when things go wrong. But this in turn can create opportunities. This is the difference between brands that build relationships, loyalty and respect, and those that don’t. Remember the Red Cross Twitter incident? A hootsuite mix-up resulted in a rogue tweet being posted from the Red Cross account:

But instead of just removing the evidence, the Red Cross acknowledged the mistake, showing their human side – and sense of humour – in the process.

Far from damaging their brand, the Red Cross reaped the benefits of their response and posted this blog talking about how it spurred people to donate.

Brands need to convey their message in a way that is relevant to the people they’re trying to reach, but without straying into the dangerous territory of being over-familiar – a fine balance to achieve. In the same way that those teenagers wouldn’t want their parents to talk to them as they talk to each other, neither would they want their favourite brands to either; it would feel false. They know brands are selling to them, so brands need to find a way to communicate that doesn’t pretend it’s doing something it’s not. They must be authentic.

So what can we learn from this? In the words of Shakespeare, “to thine own self be true” – so brands must remember to be authentic, even if this means adjusting their language and approach for different audiences so that they’re communicating meaningfully. This is the key to building long-lasting relationships with consumers.

This question of relevance is really interesting, and one it’s dangerous to forget when we’re ‘consulting’. I think it’s what people mean when they say they’re doing ‘strategic’ (at least he didn’t say I could do some ‘strategic consultancy’) communications. Strategic in as much as it’s following a plan, but relevant is often the better word.

I read a great quote by Alain de Botton the other day: ‘To the boring person, the question that never occurs is: how might this piece of information ever fit into anyone else’s life?’ We’ve all been on the receiving end, cornered in the pub, sat next to someone at a dinner party, pinned back by a laminated badge bore at some ‘networking event’, when the person we’re stuck with has switched off their relevance radar. Do they really think that fascinating story about themself is relevant to me?

We need to apply the same filter when we’re communicating at work. ‘Is it relevant?’ is a great question to ask if you want to communicate better. What’s relevant about this brand to this audience?  What story can we find in it to make it relevant to this blogger or that journalist? What could it do to be relevant to this group of consumers? And critically, how is this story relevant to the brand itself?

It’s a question we ask ourselves a lot, and if you ask the relevance question, you can get to some great ideas, like Wickes Tradebuilder. If we want to be relevant to an audience of trade builders, then we should be addressing something that matters to them – the more it matters to them and the more we do to address the issue, the more relevant our communications can be.

Relevance is what moves audiences from transaction to relationship with brands. And the more relevant you are, the more school trips you get to go on.

Coincidentally, we’re in Washington this week working with our client, Education for Employment, that tackles youth unemployment in another part of the world, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), where the issue has been a major factor in the Arab Spring. Youth unemployment was also a busy area of discussion in Davos last month.

While youth unemployment has different causes and implications in different parts of the world, there are some notable similarities between the solutions this new report proposes for the UK, and the way EFE works and has achieved success in MENA.

The Miliband report calls for localised education-to-career support for the non-university bound.  EFE works through local affiliates (in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen) to provide young people there with the skills (often soft skills) they need to bridge the gap between education and employment.

The UK report calls for a part-time job guarantee for young people who have been on the work programme for a year without finding a job. EFE seeks guaranteed jobs for its young people, but does so by working with private sector businesses to identify the skills they are looking for, developing training programmes matched to these, and securing pre-committed jobs for those who go through the training.

The report calls for a new mentoring scheme for young people, by young people: where under-25s who have been in work for a year mentor others on their path to employment.  EFE promotes an active alumni network, through which its graduates stay involved to help their successors.

EFE has achieved a good deal of success to date with this approach, as recognised by the Economist, Time magazine, CNN and others.

Communication is critical to EFE’s success: communicating with employers to explain the business benefit of this approach to overcoming skills shortages, which can make it difficult to recruit despite high unemployment; communicating with young people to help them see a way over the barriers to employment that can appear insurmountable; and communicating with donors and other stakeholders to sell the benefits of what EFE does.  Importantly, communications is also central to aligning the network of affiliate organisations behind a common vision and values. It’s a privilege to work with them on such an important issue.

Finally, we had some good news this week when the Holmes Report named us their Corporate Consultancy of the Year.  They were kind enough to say that we have ‘consistently been on the cutting edge of corporate reputation management, creating campaigns that blur the lines between the converging corporate and consumer realms, focusing on storytelling, conversation, and thought leadership.’

Measurement has long been the holy grail of the PR industry.  For many years, PR practitioners measured the value of their PR through Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE), which calculates what the cost of the equivalent column inches would have been if you had purchased the same advertising space.

AVE has never, and could never be, a measure of Return on Investment (ROI).  ROI measures two things: money generated or money saved. Furthermore, it’s spurious to measure the cost of something that you weren’t going to buy anyway (advertising), and it’s meaningless for clients whose media buying agencies negotiate huge discounts for ad space anyway.  So why has it persisted for so long?  The honest answer is that PR practitioners were at a loss to know what to replace it with; many clients continued to ask for it and there is something compelling in a single, impressive figure showing the success of a campaign.

In the meantime, ad agencies have been busy laying claim to uplifts in sales that are most likely to have come through multiple channels.  It’s true that ads are more traceable, but agencies conveniently ignore that as well as seeing the ad on TV, a consumer may well have been driven to purchase by a sterling review on a blog or an editorially-generated piece in the Metro.

Now that the core role of PR is to create and sustain conversations, analysing the impact and influence of these conversations is a more meaningful measure of performance – but it still’s hard to prove ROI.

At salt, we measure across a spectrum of engagement, from awareness, attitude and action right through to advocacy.  It demands a bespoke approach to every client and campaign, but in these tough financial times it’s a necessity.  But the real value isn’t just about justifying PR budget, it’s because when you factor in measurement up-front in a campaign at brainstorm stage, invariably the ideas are much more robust.  All creative ideas are sifted through a critical filter to see where they will really deliver results across that spectrum.  Perhaps the holy grail isn’t so far off after all.

These chief executives and chairmen will undoubtedly agree that they, as responsible capitalists, are committed to making the world a better place, and will stand side-by-side in photocalls with politicians, NGO heads, celebrities and religious leaders, who will say they believe them.   And people will look on from the side, questioning their intentions, having ulterior motives, and arguing that nothing will change.  And they may be right in some cases.

However, the reality is that these business men (and they are still overwhelmingly male; although it’s growing, the proportion of female delegates at Davos will be under 20%) may be the best chance we have of tackling the seemingly intractable social, environmental and economic issues facing us as a planet and a human race.

We want a co-ordinated, international approach to big global issues?  Who is better placed to address these, multinational businesses or national governments?

We want the world’s consumers (and the number of ‘relevant’ consumers is likely to rise from 500 million today to two and a half billion in the next decade) to adopt greener consumption habits?  Big businesses are the only ones who have a track record of being able to change consumer behaviour, so they’ve got the tools to change our habits for the better.

We want the media to pay attention to increased flooding in Asia or famine in Africa or forced labour in Latin America?  Governmental organisations and NGOs have been talking about these issues for years without any real media cut-through in Europe and North America.  Big companies can take these issues and make them a cause that matters for their staff, their customers, their investors.

Who is more likely to invest in long-term solutions?  Businesses that have been around for decades if not centuries, or governments caught up in the near constant electioneering of four or five year terms?

The big multinationals are the gateway to millions of smaller supplier businesses, tens of millions of employees, billions of consumers. They reach and influence our media and politicians. Even the bankers listen to them.  And they are a manageable group.  They can all get together in one place, as they are this week.

We have to give them a chance. So what if some of it is ego-driven?  It’s not as if those other gatherings – European Union summits, World Trade Organisation negotiations or Climate Change summits – have covered themselves in glory.  It’s time to give the business leaders a chance.

The most effective pressure groups – who above all want change – recognised this some time ago, as Chris Rose, the former programme director for Greenpeace UK, points out in his excellent book, ‘What Makes People Tick?’: ‘..governments were no longer leading, they were starting to follow business.  Our old strategies of hitting governments through media were paying diminishing returns. We were good at spotting these things – Greenpeace started shifting its campaigns to focus on corporate power long before it became standard practice among other NGOs.’

Businesses need regulating – by governments, by media, by investors, by pressure groups, by us as consumers – and there are too many examples of short-termism, selfishness and greed in the business world to suggest they be given a free run at it.  But they do occupy (yes, Occupy) a unique position in the world to effect real change for good.

But is it really going to be that different to 2011?  2011 was the first full year of the coalition government in the UK, and many of us got into the habit of blaming them for everything that was wrong in the world. And for ‘them’ you can read any number of ‘big’ authority stand-ins.  We blamed councils for cutting services, but no-one was volunteering to pay higher council taxes. We blamed the banks for bringing the western economies crashing down, but we all tucked into easy credit when it was offered.  We howled at the newspapers caught prying into people’s personal lives, but we all bought the newspapers to read those same stories.  We complained about supermarkets destroying the high street, yet we all shopped in them.

Of course, none of these institutions are blameless, but we’re not being entirely honest with ourselves if we believe we don’t have some personal responsibility too.

This is one of the big issues in the fight for greater sustainability.  We talk about the growing consumption by ‘the Chinese’ or ‘India’ and our Western governments call on them to reduce their large and growing environmental impacts.  Yet can we honestly look them in the eye and ask them to slow down in their charge towards our standard of living and levels of consumption, when so many of us find it difficult to use less energy?  How many of us are prepared to travel less, shop less or take colder, shorter showers?

Is that the difference between those who are going to be competing in London 2012 and the rest of us?  We’re going to hear a lot from them over the next seven months, about their hopes, their dedication, their personal stories. But I bet we don’t hear any athletes whingeing about ‘them’.  They’ve got where they are by taking personal responsibility, and then making the most of facilities and resources provided by ‘them’.   Usain Bolt doesn’t blame the Jamaican Olympic Committee or Nike or event organisers when things go wrong. He takes personal responsibility.

Maybe that’s what we’ll take from 2012: a greater sense of personal responsibility.  It’s what the athletes in London will demonstrate, and it’s what the most positive moves in 2011 were built on.  Individuals from Tunis to Tripoli, Cairo to Kuwait took it upon themselves to create and build on the Arab Spring.  Less dramatically, the UK government’s trialling of personal budgets for health, education and social services points towards citizens taking more personal responsibility for choosing services traditionally selected by ‘them’.

Who knows what’s going to happen.  But 2012 promises to be an interesting ride.