More and more companies are reaching out to their suppliers and contractors to work jointly on issues of sustainability, environmental responsibility, ethics, and compliance.

• The social business marketplace is effectively forcing brands to engage with consumers on the basis of something that is meaningful to them. More often than not, this takes the form of some core value that finds expression in a non-profit cause.
• Integrate purpose into your for-profit business model through a long term commitment to a cause that is aligned with your core values and those of your community.
• In today's social business marketplace Facebook is one of the best places for nonprofits to be discovered and connect with a larger audience on the basis of shared values. So to get started, a non-profit should launch a Facebook page and invite your existing real world community to connect your cause and their networks.
• In the social business marketplace, brands that hope to build loyal and growing communities do so most effectively when they demonstrate their core values and allow a community to build and engage around it.
• The new dynamics between brands and consumers, driven by social media, are proving to be a powerful impetus for change.
• Effectively, change is almost impossible without industry-wide collaboration, cooperation and consensus.
• What is sure is that technological change is accelerating in all directions and, like children playing in a fountain, consumers are reveling in the experience.
• The question remains: which brands will commit to creating a private sector pillar of social change, and which will become casualties of their own outdated thinking?
• The creative destruction that social media is currently unleashing will change more than technology or the leader board of the Fortune 100. It is driving a qualitative shift in the nature of relationships between brands and their customers.
• It is time for corporate America to become 'the third pillar' of social change in our society, complementing the first two pillars of government and philanthropy. We need the entire private sector to begin committing itself not just to making profits, but to fulfilling higher and larger purposes by contributing to building a better world.