Powering Down

Earth Hour is about turning off the lights for one hour. It may seem like just a little thing, but when everyone does it at once, the results are impressive. Look at a few statistics from 2008’s Earth Hour.

• Chicago kept 840,000 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
• In Toronto, there was an 8.7% reduction in energy.
• A 10.1% energy drop occurred in energy usage.

Those numbers can be even more impressive if we do more than just turn off the lights. Powering down everything non-essential in your home can reduce your energy usage even further.

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I’m actually rather excited today though, since one of the accounts I set up and manage on Twitter, @greenmoms just won the 2008 Shorty awards for green. I’m looking forward to going to New York City to accept the award along with the Greenmoms founder, Lynn, from organicmania.

There, are, of course, more and more green social media success stories and today I’d like to talk about one – Paw luxury – their tagline – eco-living for the everyday dog.

Adam and Wendy, live in Williamsport, PA successfully ran YourAuctionCompany, where they sold on eBay for people locally for over 5 years. Adam describes how they got started with Pawluxury and their vision as follows::

… we meet some wonderful people along our journey. So, then we decided that we needed a change and one day we looked at our little boxer girl Lola (our child) and had a light bulb moment. We answered the age old question “What are we passionate about?” We realized we were passionate about the earth, our dog and making a difference in the world.

Evolving from the overwhelming love of our beautiful, loyal, carefree, lovable and cuddly boxer named Lola, Paw Luxury was born. As proud parents we wanted to give Lola the best nature had to offer but found it difficult to find eco-friendly products under one roof. So we went sniffing with Lola, searched high and low and dug a few holes along the way. Then we thought to ourselves why not create a one-stop online destination that caters to the need for healthy alternatives.

As well established users of online media, they entered the social media space and have built up quite a following using a variety of social media tools, starting with Youtube. Adam says:

We use Youtube to create video & viral content that dog owners and animal lovers will enjoy. By creating a profile and including a link to our blog or website in it, the exposure gained on Youtube we create brand awareness and increase traffic to our blog, our online store, other social media outlets, or any other content that we created. We often do video product giveaways, video of Lola, post product reviews of items sold on pawlux.com, how to video, tips etc. We have in the works a podcast we will also be placed on youtube. Youtube is a great way for people to get to know us and our adorable Lola personally and people can put  a face with the company. We want to always be transparent with the social media communities we are proud & lucky to be a part of.

Youtube is only part of their strategy though. Their twitter profile, @pawluxury has over 11,000 followers. They use their Facebook page to enable fans to get updates on PawLuxury happenings, blog post, view pics of Lola, watch other viral funny viral pet related youtube videos & more.

Adam sent me a list of the various social media and social bookmarking sites they have and I spent some time looking through them. Like most of us in social media, they diligently update some and let others fall by the wayside. They keep their Flickr photostream and Linkedin profile updated and have let some of their social bookmarking profiles fall by the wayside. They are also very active Twitter users.

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“Water is the new carbon,” said Gil Friend, President and CEO of Natural Logic, during his moderation of a session on “The Outlook for Water Supply Shortages.”

The conference, held December 2 and 3 and organized by Green Power Conferences, engaged corporations to discuss how to become more proactively involved in the water management of their facilities. Companies such as The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo International, Nestle Waters, MillerCoors, and Cadbury were represented. Professors, water experts and consultants from a variety of firms, including Business for Social Responsibility and Natural Logic, also participated in panels.

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Companies who miss the importance of the social media ship may actually risk the same fate as companies who thought the Internet was a fad. That sounds extreme, but over half the nation is already on a social network. They upload photos and videos or share shopping reviews. Customers are changing how they want companies to interact with them. The more that happens, the more companies will be left in the dust.

Since many if not most companies only have a hazy idea of how social media works and why in the world they should jump into the fray, some are slow to take the plunge. This is perhaps less true of new and old media companies. You can find Ecopreneurist and Green Options on Twitter, along with the New York Times, CNN and The BBC.

Besides Twitter, there are of course a whole host of ways to reach out to your customers and engage them on a one-to-one basis. There is Facebook and Myspace as well as a fast growing selection of newer sites. There are blogs and blogger networks, as well as, shopping social networking sites. There are community forums for a variety of topics and there are media sharing sites like Flickr and Youtube.

All of these should be considered for a social media campaign, but not all should be used. Why? This depends a lot on the company and product.

For example, as a social media marketing consultant, I focus on green products and on women’s products. I know the Mommy and female blogger and The Mommy and female social media market. I know the green market. What tools they use and where one can find green consumers. I recommend tools that make sense for my clients. Not all of the tools that Liz Strauss or Jeff Pulver suggest do that, though I follow and admire them both, but they often serve different markets.

One thing on which we all agree, though is Twitter. Though less than 2 years old, Twitter is rapidly becoming the go to place for both questions and answers. Have a question on organic food? Direct message @WholeFoods, an early and excellent user of social media. Follow Seventh Generation and find updates answers on a variety of green topics.

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Back in May, we penned the original 10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media. Though most of those first 10 are still relevant, the pace of innovation and advancement on the social web means many more have emerged in the past five months that deserve attention. These are the tools and resources that individuals, corporations, and nonprofits alike can use to communicate, create, and connect on the social web…for social change.

1. Blog It Out: When the die is cast on social media and final judgments are made, blogging will reign supreme as the single greatest force in Web 2.0. Whereas social networking is broad and shallow, blogging is deep and focused. That’s the power behind Blog Action Day, which takes place this Wednesday, October 15th, 2008. It’s a day when bloggers the world over draw attention to a single issue and (hopefully) inspire action. This year’s topic is poverty. And given the current financial crisis, it would seem many bloggers have gotten a head start.

2. Twitter Green Events: In the first 10 Ways, we wrote about the Twitter greenstream, a tagging mechanism that organizes and aggregates Twitter messages (Tweets) about doing green things. What’s evolved since then is the widespread use of unique Twitter tags at events. Most recently, we covered West Coast Green by tagging our Tweets with #wcg08. This helps people at the event to find and meet up with fellow Twitter folk. It also enables those who aren’t attending the event to follow what’s going on and what’s being said in real time. There are a couple ways to do this. One is to follow through Twitter Search (formerly Summize), where you can track keywords and tags. Another is to send a Tweet as follows: “track word: [insert keyword]“. And then you’ll start receiving all Tweets with that tag or keyword directly into your feed.

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You can snap a pic, plug in to your laptop and upload or upload directly to a photo sharing service like Flickr from your mobile.

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