Question

What future CSR trends might affect management decisions made in relation to how organizations engage with social media influencers in the future?

Answer 1

CSR trends have evolved in the past few decades. What began as a charitable efforts by many organization now has varieties of initiatives that is often categorized as CSR. One of the major reason for growth of CSR is because of the level information that is available today. This has been driven by social media and as a result the number of social media influencers have increased too.

Nowadays, many of the corporations use the social media influencers to promote their products, services, etc. However, they do consider the reputation of the social media influencer and their public activities.

Companies nowadays want to be identified as socially responsible and as a result any wrong steps that violates CSR ideologies may cause rift in relationship between the influencer and the corporation. An example of this has been seen in 2018 when a Kuwaiti beauty vlogger took to Instagram to express her disappointment with the government’s attempt to make the foreign workers more comfortable. After this incident in July 2018, the social media influencer lost several sponsors who had been working with her. Obviously the corporations did not want to be associated with a person who has questionable views on human rights.

Thus in terms of future trends, we can expect more awareness, more filtered influences and impacts from the social media influencers. CSR trends will likely take to various other avenues such as factuality of information on social media as fake news becoming a major nuisance for many organizations.