It may seem like just buzzwords right now, but soon “social responsibility” is going to change the way your company does business. Why? In the next few years, if your company isn’t socially responsible, you’re going to be left in the dust.

“If you aren’t a socially responsible business now,” says Shel Horowitz, green/ethical marketing consultant and co-author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, “your market is going to leave you behind within the next few years. It’s going to become a rule of doing business.”

“When you have a socially responsible business plan, it’s putting you in line with the trajectory of how business is being thought about now,” says Summer Rayne Oakes, co-founder of Source4Style, an online marketplace that connects the fashion industry with sustainable materials from around the world. “Having a socially responsible business plan and being able to communicate that internally to your employees and being able to communicate it externally to your consumers, as well as your shareholders, is going to reduce risk.”

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Michelle Court is the associate editor at The New York Enterprise Report. She can be reached at mcourt@nyreport.com.