Have you got a sustainability idea or initiative to get off the ground? You might want to take yourself a lot less seriously.
Less than two months ago, the Crazy Sustainable Commute was just a fun office idea in the head of Steve Unger, a Senior Director at SAP. The concept is now gaining momentum throughout Vancouver and may one day go even further. 
The event, to be held on August 27th 2010, is a campaign designed to inspire people for ONE day to rethink how they can commute to work in an eco-friendly way that is sustainable, fun and raises awareness. 
“Each small step you take to reduce carbon emissions is one BIG step closer to a healthier planet and a healthier you.” says Steve.

When the Crazy Sustainable Commute team called me I have to admit the idea was too fun to resist. Especially when Steve told me how he was planning to commute on August 27th. So Green Briefs and Unicycle Creative jumped on board by offering blog coverage, logo design and production of a YouTube video featuring Steve’s alter-ego, Canoe-Man.

The Crazy Sustainable Commute team has since been to the July Critical Mass ride and has started a web page for participants to share their fun commuting ideas at www.crazysustainablecommute.org.
If you have an event or initiative to get off the ground, remember that humour and quirkiness go a long way in today’s cluttered, serious world. A fun idea will attract more sponsors, marketing partners, media coverage and participants. (It may even get you a good deal on some creative!) So turn the wacky side of your brain loose. Joining the Crazy Sustainable Commute on August 27th is a great way to start.

Protesters at the Olympic Village Open House show their disappointment at the reduced amount of social housing in the neighbourhood. The giant bird shows his disappointment at being made of plastic.

The irony was obvious. I was stopping for petrol at the Esso station in Hope BC as I glanced over to the parking area and saw a young couple self-fueling their Toyota Delica with a hose leading from a trailer fill of waste vegetable oil. I soon learned Tyson Jerry and Cloe Whittaker were on a journey called Drive to Sustain – breaking a world record for sustainable vehicle travel. (38,137 km, by Rainer Zietlow, Florian Hilpert, Falk Gunold, Franz Janusiewicz, all Germany, with a Volkswagen Caddy EcoFuel using natural gas – October 2006)

Coordinating their trip with fast-food franchises for fuel (New York Fries was mentioned as a mainline supplier) they have now broken that record and are driving to reach 45,000km. When I returned home, I looked them up on their website, driventosustain.ca. Turns out they are well into their trip, having criss-crossed the continent, from New York to LA to Edmonton to New Mexico. They broke the record in New York, to the cheers of some school kids they were visiting. Congratulations!

It looks like a great time. I am completely jealous of this eco road trip, and impressed with Tyson and Cloe’s drive.

Of course I can’t resist offering just a few ideas. Not that they even need them, having traveled somewhere over 38.000km quite successfully. But if anyone wants to challenge their record, or take a trip like this to the next level, here are a few Green Briefs Marketing Thoughts:

Brand the Vehicle: According to their home page, “The van (is) nicknamed ”The Green Machine” by some and “Veggie Mobile / Veggie Van” by others…” Creating a consistent brand (better yet, a media spectacle) out of the van itself would have made it easier to get more traction with the media. (How about “The Fry Baby” or “Frier Truck”? The “VeggiePod “? )

Bring in Sponsors: Tyson mentioned that New York Fries offered them a lot of support… why not feature the restaurants who contributed fuel? There’s a big white trailer just looking for some more graphics. What about talking to Whole Foods to fuel the people?

Put some more facts on your card: I can understand wanting to minimize waste in handout form, but a few more stats on the trip would have made it easier to get my head around the idea.

Add intro and closing graphics to the YouTube videos - Make them more of a series with a little simple production. Maybe note the approximate mileage at which the video occurred.

As I said though, hats are off. Check out their YouTube videos, blog and website.

Looks like almost enough fun to try it myself…!

How the whole event came together reads like an ad for Social Media. I saw a Twitter Tweet from Granville Online, (a Vancouver green living website), promoting a video profile of a local ‘band’ who was making music with instruments constructed from recycled Vantown scrap. It looked like such a fascinating prospect for an Earth Day evening, I decided to buy tickets on the spot for myself and one very discriminating 9-year old companion.

We were blown out of our seats. What I thought would be a somewhat quaint, eclectic local performance turned out to have more in common with the Blue Man Group, or even Cirque du Soleil without high-wires. From their opening piece, a surprisingly soft and musical number played on plastic hoses, to huge, sparkling stainless-steel kettle drums rolling around the stage like careening bumper cars and thundering like 747 engines backfiring, the show had us transfixed. If you are reading this before 8pm (PST) Friday April 23, 2010, get down to the Stanley Theatre (Granville St. & 12th ave) and get a ticket, or check online. If not, well, maybe watch their Facebook video with headphones turned to 11.

The event was sponsored by ABC Recycling. Talk about a brilliant tie-in for a local firm. (I hope they get their share of props for backing this) A the same time, ABC’s partnership with the Kidney Foundation’s Recycle For Life campaign was introduced. Their ‘Kidney Car’ recycle-your-vehicle program has been expanded to include ‘Kidney Metals’, a recycling program covering literally everything (kitchen sinks included). It was a feel-good marketing combination that deserves as much coverage as it can get.

As for my difficult-to-impress companion: He wouldn’t leave until he got his new CD autographed by every member of the ensemble. And their return of his enthusiasm was much appreciated.

The GreenBriefs Green marketing 2-bits: I wouldn’t be doing my blogger-best if I didn’t offer a bit of feedback. The product is top-notch. Loved ScrapArtMusic’s use of Twitter and Facebook (check their page). They could have spread the word a bit more with some postcard media, or other quick pocket-sized take-away at the event itself. As a marketer, I’d love to see their music used on a TV spot for Reynolds Recycled Aluminum, or the Encorp Return-It Program. Or even the new Honda hybrid. (They could send out some PR to the ad agencies in charge of these sorts of accounts) But I get a bit of a head-scratch from the name – ScrapArtsMusic sounds less sophisticated and powerful than the show itself plays. Perhaps as their following (and hopefully success) grows, they may evolve their identity. Or not. Like I said, the product is superb. The world may just beat a path to their door.

Waking up at 5:30, I have to wonder if driving a carbon-spewing vehicle across an international border to sit in a room full of strangers watching someone speak about the power of remote digital connections… isn’t just a little ironic.

Regardless, I’m here at the Social Media Conference Northwest, to navigate the constantly-evolving thicket of Twitters, bloggers and Facebook Friends. Is it a green communications technology? Perhaps, compared to some. But more importantly, its a way of engaging people that no marketer, green or otherwise, can afford to ignore. I’ve had some experience in the field (hey, you’re reading this, aren’t you?) but I wanted a better idea of where it’s all going – to get more sustainable results for myself, my clients and you, dear Green Briefs readers.

As is my way with conference recaps, I’ll do my best to cover the speakers I saw, (apologies for the length, but it was GOOD STUFF!) and offer my own 2-bits at the end.

The Opener: Weak Publishing – by Matthew Dunn, ‘Chief Explainer’ at Say it Visually!

It’s good to start a conference with the Big Picture. Dunn began by describing his roots in a Colorado town so small the local newspaper is still to this day set with hot lead type. He also showed how ’six degrees of separation’ theory collapses large groups down into close and accessible connections – person to person communication that is ‘weak’ in broadcast terms, but wide where it counts – reaching the right people.

So how does this help marketers? Check this stat: By 2011, the data captured and stored in the world will be equivalent to 300 Gigabytes for every human on the planet. And Google can only go so far. So we look at web sites from friends. We ask trusted associates for references on companies, information and resources. Social media provides short-cuts for information (read: your marketing message) to get to people.

Breakout Session 1: Online Video as Part of your Social Media Strategy – Aaron Booker, Varvid Digital Video Production.

Varvid started by doing videos for the ‘Value-Added Reseller’ community and has been live webcasting since 2002. So they’ve been there. They now also offer event-based social media solutions, corporate video projects and custom Internet video portals. Booker chose to use the classic YouTube video Welcome to the Revolution to introduce his presentation. Not a hangin’ crime, but I was surprised Varvid did not have their own version of a stats-based sales piece. The best quote from this stat-vid: Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web. More relevantly, under reasons to use video on your site, YouTube is now the #2 search engine behind Google, so video boosts your search engine rankings. But not all video is created equal. What NOT to post, according to Booker: boring corporate profiles, messages from the CEO, commercials, or ‘viral video’ – (These, according to Booker, are a stroke of lightning, not a strategy) What does work: How-to video. Case studies. Video press releases. Client testimonials. Event video. (Cameras, lights, interviewers make events look exciting, and everyone wants to get their mug on film – as you see above)

Business Strategy for the Interconnected Age – James Burnes, Project Brilliant

This dude was psyched, waking up the crowd like the coffee we couldn’t have. And in no quiet terms, he told us he would be talking business strategy, not tactics. In a 20-minute presentation that stoked my marketing strategic fires, Burnes gave a branding 101 class that made it obvious Social Media deserves as much attention in the boardroom as any other communications channel:

• What are your goals?
• Who are your targets?
• How will you deal with angry customers and support your loyal fans? (The two most important groups in social media)
• What do your customers want?
• Where do they go online?
• Who is our talent? (Hint: it starts with the executive team)
• What are our core milestones and events (trade shows, sales push, etc – plan around these events)
• How will mobile accessibility to social media affect you? And finally:
• Do you need your own social platform/community? (group on facebook, etc)

Burnes then offered some real-world examples of strategies, each condensed into a tight sentence. I challenge you to get yours this tight:

• “Give prospective customers more exposure to what it’s like to do business with us.”
• “Move excess inventory through special offers and deals”
• “How do we drive referrals by making it easier to spread the word on the web?”
• “Recruit the best talent by showcasing our staff’s work and the lifestyle we live.”
• “Deliver easy ways for customers and prospects to share their product ideas.”

Burnes also drove home the need for a budget. His solution for where to get that money? Eliminate print brochures. Classic web-guy statement, but nobody in this crowd was disagreeing.

“Social Media Monitoring as a “Free” Focus Group – Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Buzz” Clay McDaniel, Spring Creek Group

Many decision-makers ignore Social Media as a “Land of the Malcontents”, populated only by whiners and geeks. But if you know where to look, there is all sorts of research information online, for free or close to it. All companies with a website are ‘Global’ – and you have access to information like never before.  Including, the entire deck for this presentation, offered online by the Spring Creek Group right here.

Begin by listening to what’s being said about you. Google Alerts is a good place to start. This service sends you an email every time Google finds a page containing keywords that you specify (like your company name). You can also place alerts for peoples’ names, your competition’s company, key issues etc etc. Other tools like Technorati help filter some of the billions of sites for you, and Twitter has its own set of tools (Twittersearch, Twendz) to monitor trends and keywords. For more robust, customizable solutions, check out Scoutlabs or Radian6. If you just want to jump right in yourself, here’s your 1-2-3:

1. Set up your Google Alerts
2. Spend 1 month determining where your customers, competitors others are posting most about you, themselves, their market
3. Pick top 2 key social media channels for you: Monthly deep-dives using one or more of the right tools.

Then look for those “a-ha” moments regarding your brand. That may be a trend in discussions, a surprise customer service issue or an opportunity to fill a need you never knew existed. But if you never listen, you’ll never know.

Blogging, Tweeting & Revenues. But really, who has the time? by Anne-Marie Faiola – CEO Brambleberry – AKA The Soap Queen

This was one presentation I had to see. How one small retailer grew her business with grass-roots social media and still mans the Twitter, blog and Facebook helm every day. Anne-Marie Faiola sells materials for handmade craft soaps, (molds, colorants, soap) online through a company she started when she was 20. In her words, “People bought my products just because I was helpful and friendly. People buy from people they like.”

Faiola budgets her social media time thus: Twitter: 30min/day Composing 15-20 tweets a day, jumping into conversations etc.  Facebook – 10 min a day. Blogs, one every single day – 60min. YouTube – (4 episodes of Soap Queen TV) 8hrs to film once a month on a weekend – (60hr project for the entire team)

Faiola then went beyond strategy to specifics. She uses Tweetdeck – to create lists of her followers so she can track them by category. Hootsuite helps her schedule her twitter updates so they appear regularly throughout the day. For blog writing, she recommends creating an editorial calendar and keeping a buffer of completed blogs.

Her YouTube Channel, SoapQueen TV has its own interesting story – the tale of another nail in the print advertising coffin. In 2006, Faiola had a $48,000 print advertising budget. With one stroke of the pen, she decided to use that money to set up her own in-shop mini TV studio. Including a local camera crew and editing services, each episode now only costs an average of $1000.

At first, her board rejected the idea of a Social Media plan. Now, using Google Analytics, Faiola tracks tangible sales directly from her online social media activities. In one example, she tracked $16,000 to a Twitter sales campaign. At the same time, year over year sales are up 29%. Cleaning up, one might say.

How to use social media to promote your brand – Brad Nelson, Starbucks

Seeing Brad, It’s like the ‘I’m a Mac’ guy got up on stage to present. His comfortable, casual delivery is perfect for Social Media. This is the guy you want talking to millions of customers every day. He began with some caveats. If your product sucks, social media is not going to fix it. If you are not willing to be transparent and open, social media is not for you. If there was one main message he preached it was to LISTEN. All media is social. All companies are media companies. Goodbye Ad Wars. Hello Conversation.  Add value to the conversation, and if there’s a fire, respond to where the fire is.

Nelson had an interesting comparison to the social media world of just a few years ago. If 2009 was the year of status updates, 2010 is the year of the check-in. When you check in with Twitter, YouTube, your Facebook page, that’s where your real world and your digital world connect. So what’s next for Starbucks?

• Location – smartphones, Foursquare, and other technology that knows where you are adds layers to social media experience
• What’s a 1-800 number? Anyone under 25 will probably not call it.
• Social media is how you discover content. Facebook helps people discover content, through links from trusted friends.
• Social Media will help us even more to decide what to buy.
• Organizing – Elections, Tweetups

Nelson’s parting (espresso) shot: Start now to build credibility in the Social Media world. One day you’ll need it.

The Green Briefs 2-Bits: More than ever I believe Social Media will be a relevant channel going forward. Social Media NW is affordable, accessible and has something for small or large businesses. Will people tire of Tweeting? Undoubtedly. Will some defriend Facebook and revert to growing organic carrots and playing guitar all day long? I hope so. But more conversations and better content will make our new connections with each other more and more important to business. Heck, I remember a time when business cards didn’t have a web site address. So leave a comment. Tell me what you think – after all, that’s what this social media thing is all about, right?

Whoops, gotta go. It’s time to feed my Tweeter.

Saul Good Gift Company – Saul Brown, a long-time Green Briefs associate, (he helped my consulting company, Unicycle Creative, source some very unique pens), introduced the crowd to his particular warm fuzzy brand of corporate recognition. It’s not all small cookies, however. Saul also showed off some sweet recycled packaging he helped develop for the distribution of Olympic bibs. Nice to see a genuine local spin-off from that multi-billion dollar shindig.

Pulse Energy – David Helliwell did a good job of condensing a large corporate mission in his 3 minutes of fame. Otherwise I would have had no idea from their name that they actually specialize in developing software for tracking and optimizing energy efficiency in buildings. Pulse also boasted an Olympic connection, as they developed on-line tracking for the energy use of all the venues for 2010.
At VenueEnergyTracker.com you can see the energy performance of each of the 2010 buildings, expressed as charts that let you see how the power consumption varies over time. They also show you what the usage would have been without involving ’sustainable practices’, (though it isn’t really clear what those are) What is clear are the advantages of the Pulse system for customers that operate building(s), and the clear potential for this company to grow. The Pulse Energy business card has an interesting positioning line that asks ‘Does your building have a Pulse?’ David could have worked that branding into his presentation to better explain the name, but it was obvious from the reaction of the room that the Pulse concept is alive and well.

Resilient Consulting – Mary Sturgeon introduced her company with a reminder that collaboration leads to better results. She then challenged everyone in the crowd to ditch their regular event dependents and connect with new people. Which it appears everyone did. Mary could have used a mnemonic of some kind for her company, though. I would have liked to come away with a better idea of their actual business model.

James Hoggan – Vancouver’s premier eco-PR guy took the anchor spot, closing the show with some statistics that came too fast for my beer-addled fingers to record, but nonetheless left everyone in the crowd with a sense of the growing gap between public awareness and appreciation for our current climate crisis and the woeful inadequacy of our institutions to address it. His basic premise was a quote: “If you don’t tell your story, someone else will. And it will be bad.” The DeSmogBlogger and author’s most inspiring words for us beleaguered sustainability types: “You are not alone..”

The rest of the evening was spent chatting with companies like Climate Smart – a group that helps small business track and improve their carbon emissions, URDevelopment – who wants to bring a Euro-style zero-emission go-kart racing circuit to the Lower Mainland, and GoodEnergy – a software-based research company that lets individuals track their behaviour for ‘lasting positive change’.

Stay tuned for possible follow-ups on these sustainability up-and-comers. In the meantime, if you’re interested in meeting a bunch of inspiring and energetic green types, Power Plant is worth getting out to. If only to show you how effective a 3-minute business presentation can be.

Sustainable Product Index: This will be a system designed to “… help customers across Canada evaluate the sustainability of the products they purchase, from raw materials to disposal.” It is to be implemented in 3 phases:

- Phase 1 – Supplier assessment
- Phase 2 – Creation of database
- Phase 3 – Development and launch of customer tool

This could one day prove to be as powerful a tool as the ‘Nutritional Information’ labeling we all rely on for our food shopping. The trick will be establishing criteria that consistently work across geography and product types.

Green Briefs POV: IMHO,  it wouldn’t hurt to come up with a different name. “Sustainable Product Index” makes it sound like a review of goods that are already sustainable. “Product Sustainability Index” would be closer to the mark.

For more info, here’s Walmarts corporate release.

Welcome to ShareGreen.ca – A new business sustainability resource: This is meant to be the start of a virtual ‘centre of excellence’ for Canadian businesses going green. Among other things, itt features sustainability case studies from Canada’s top brands.

“We have a great opportunity to usher in a new era of collaboration and sharing when it comes to green business practices,” said David Cheesewright, President and CEO of Walmart Canada. “While much work still needs to be done, there is already some strong sustainability work happening across Canadian organizations. Our hope is that the launch of ShareGreen will be a first step to help capture green practices and drive collaboration.”

Green Briefs POV: Looks like a good idea. Though as media colleague Colin Isaacs (Canadian Institute for Business and the Environment) pointed out in the media scrum, a case study by Nestle Water Canada on bottled water, seems to fly a bit in the face of many people who believe the category itself is eco-evil. So it could to be hard to regulate.

You can’t win ‘em all.

For more, here’s the official release.

This holiday season, Vancouverites may have noticed a trashy little ad campaign from Metro Vancouver encouraging them to re-think their holiday waste. These are transit ads at my local Canada Line station spied on my way to Oakridge Mall (OK, I’m busted – not all of my shopping takes place at the local handmade craft fair) The city also assembled an over-sized garbage-bag tree on a busy corner downtown. Here’s a link to a nice YouTube video they produced on that bit of street theatre.

In all, it’s a simple message, and one that resonates with me every year I see store shelves groaning under greater loads of tacky stuff I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Yet, it appears not all Vancouver shoppers agree. More on that presently.

First, a few Green Briefs Thoughts on the ads themselves.

The image of the Christmas-bow-clad garbage bag is a decent idea. It’s very direct and easy to see. It’s a bit stark on the white background though, and a cheerier font for the headline would have created even more contrast between the charm of the holidays and the reality of our garbage situation. I’m not sure the multiple bags execution works. It certainly looks a bit weird side-by-side as posted above. The real garbage tree downtown was a nice touch – assuming they didn’t use real bags fresh from the back of a truck.

On the whole, though, they could have made the campaign much more powerful by adding a human element. Imagine a small, cute child posing with the ‘trash present’. This would not only make the image more of a stopper, it would allude to the fact that waste is a long-term problem we’re literally giving our children every year.

Then again, not everyone seems to be on board with this message of waste reduction at all. The ‘garbage tree’ was picked up in an online news story by the Vancouver Province, and several reader comments gave it a Grinchy thumbs-down.

“Hey METRO VANCOUVER – hows about keeping your nose out of my business?” quipped one, (presumably unaware of the fact that garbage is everyone’s business)

Another reader went further afield. “Spent weekend Christmas Shopping in Seattle… no City Hall Humbugs…they closed main streets to have a parade and … handed out mulled wine in plastic glasses,  right on the sidewalk…” (Add carbon emissions to that person’s Christmas list)

If anyone from City Hall is reading this, please let me know what the response was to the campaign from your point of view. I’ll follow up with a few calls in the new year to see if there were any measurable results in garbage volume.

In the meantime, desr green Briefs Readers, have a very Merry Christmas, recycle what you can, drink the rest and remember that even the Grinch finally figured it out:

“And he puzzled three hours, `till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before!
“Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store.
“Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!”

As I kneeled in the sand, picking up lipstick-stained cigarette butts, bottle tops and unidentified styrofoam bits, I mused on how this event could be amped up from a branding perspective.

I found this event only after speaking with a colleague and telling him I was having trouble tracking down a volunteer ‘eco’ event to do with my son, Jaxon. I’ve been to the beaches several times over the summer, ride my bike around Vancouver, and frequent several of the usual local hippie haunts, but had not heard of this event until it’s final weekend. Where were the billboards? The beach teams of green-bikini-clad eco-babes (and buff dudes) building up excitement for the event? Perhaps they were there and I missed them. If so, I apologize. Especially to the babes. Maybe next year.

Imagery-wise, the peering frog on the banner was pretty cheerful.  But the whole event is begging for an icon. Something to add some FUN to the whole thing. After all, it’s basically spending a few hours picking garbage. It could use some smile. So I propose taking the frog idea and giving it a little attitude:

Second, was my experience with the online sign-in process. I think my last passport application had less fields to fill in. And once at the event, I had to put my name and email address down again as part of the waiver process.

That all said, I thought the organizing team did a very good job, briefing the teams and getting us organized. They were also very appreciative, which helped with my main objective, which was to start to get eco-volunteering into my son’s sphere of awareness. (How about an ‘I kicked butts today’ reward sticker!)

Stay tuned for more event reports as I continue the eco-education process. If you have any ideas fo other family-friendly volunteer events, please let me know.

UPDATE: I got a message from the cleanup coordinator listing the stats and unique finds from our particular group. I thought this was an excellent way to make the event personal, and instill a sense of pride. Here are the stats:

# of volunteers- approx 73
total distance cleaned – 0.5 km
amount of trash collected in lbs – 162.25
# of cigarette butts removed – 14,975!!!!
2nd most frequent item found – 545 caps/lids
3rd most frequent item found – 527 food wrappers/containers

odd items of interest found on our cleanup:
55 bandaids
12 sparklers/fireworks
1 hockey stick
5 pairs of 3d glasses 1 jug of red dye(???)
and…

2 baggies of marijuana!