Blog

Videos can be a great way to get a point across, and are often more efficient and engaging than plain text. However, if done poorly, they can also backfire, doing more harm than good to a company or industry’s credibility.
Annie Leonard, a US-based activist, narrates The Story of Bottled Water, an animated look at the [...]

Social media, when applied thoughtfully for communications purposes, can be a very useful way of putting a point across or disseminating information. However, it is important to realise that its application for these reasons is still in its infancy and, if not thought through correctly, can have some interesting, colourful, unintended and unpredictable results.
Over the [...]

‘Best practice’ is a much-used term, that in many instances is pretty hard to define. However, we think that Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles might just deserve this label, as it sets a very high standard in terms of transparency and creativity in web communications.
The Footprint Chronicles minisite explores the company’s products, their journeys from design to [...]

A brief segment on BBC radio this morning brought an imminent piece of UK legislation to our attention. The planned UK Bribery Bill, which has cross-party support, will attempt to bring UK legislation in line with OECD commitments that the country made some time ago. One effect will be to make companies criminally liable for [...]

The sheer enormity of what Google has achieved over the last few years is there for all to see. The company and its brand have now become so omnipresent that it’s become quite hard to define what it does and why. Google is here, there and everywhere and it’s not going away.
Google’s activities were, until [...]

Back in January, we blogged about the annual Greenpeace survey into the green credentials of the consumer electronics industry and noted that the big players in this area are largely silent (or at least very quiet) regarding discussion of the environmental impacts of their activities. According to The Guardian, a UN study published on Monday [...]

UK charity CAFOD, a relief and development agency, recently released a report on AngloGold Ashanti’s proposed gold mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In our opinion, it’s one of the better examples of NGO commentary/pressure on the corporate world, a real improvement, in terms of clarity and quality, over some of the similar documents [...]

Recent news around Canada’s tar sands, which are being used as a source of crude oil and have attracted a great deal of attention, made us consider the ways in which companies respond to the pressure put on them by NGOs.
Coalitions of institutional investors, including Co-operative Asset Management, have raised concerns with both Shell and [...]

A few weeks ago I was rather surprised to come across a project called Accounting for Sustainability which is associated with the Prince of Wales. Further investigation revealed it to be supported by the great and the good drawn from the UK’s accountancy world. It aims, apparently, to supply companies with a uniform set of [...]

UK politicians have had a sharp reminder this week, in case they weren’t already aware, of why it is important to take social media into account when designing a communications strategy. A campaign poster, featuring the Leader of the Opposition, has become the focus of a satirical website and online chatter which is lampooning it [...]