Most companies today are aware that a substantial share of their profits and market value will ultimately depend on the affective relations that they are able to construct among their stakeholders and the public at large. This is true also for non-profit organizations who will find that their ability to attract funding to a large extent depends on their capacity to accumulate such goodwill. Their common problem is to find a viable method of measuring this social impact.
At the same time consumers and other members of the public often perceive that they have few ways of channelling their objections to the bad behaviour of companies and other actors beyond the level of individual frustration and malcontent. What is needed is some form of aggregator that can translate such individual frustrations into a social value that can potentially have an economic relevance for the companies concerned.
The actics system is an attempt in this direction. (See the plug –in here on the right). Instead of trying to measure the ethical performance of companies according to certain pre-established standards, actics aggregates the judgements of individual users into a common index. It is an attempt to develop a folksonomy of ethics, where the values of the social impact of a company or organization results from aggregating the opinions of the net-worked multitude of users. Is this a viable way of giving a new, tangible value to ethics?
more on actics:
www.actics.com
It’s a great start. My question is related to the old company PR problem. You are company X and add your values to an Actics tool that records peoples feedback to your company. So what happens when i find that i want to rate your company on a value not included in the 3 you have earmarked for publishing. Old school advertising is about shouting at consumers and branding, trying to present an image that the company internally conjures up itself, and not the true perceived image by an aggregate of consumers/users/citizens of that company. How do you expect to expand your tool to take this into account? Other comments i have mentioned earlier are merely interaction design issues. Noone understand what Actice means or the numbers written with a plus or minus sign. You need to make some changes here so people “get” your tool immmediately. The pop-up is also not such a great idea…although i can see the screen real estate issues and why you chose a popup.