Sunchips is helping the town of Greensburg to rebuild. Their first initiative was to donate $1 million to help build a solar-powered business incubator. It will eventually house 10 local businesses and help Greensburg residents return to their homes (many of them newly replaced).

Now Sunchips is taking another step to help Greensburg. When the tornado hit, it didn’t just destroy homes. It also destroyed the tree canopy in Greensburg. So a Facebook application was created called SunChips Greensburg widget that will allow Facebook users to add the widget to their profiles. For each widget that is added, SunChips will donate $1 towards replanting the tree canopy in Greensburg. The goal is to raise $50,000.

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The Arnold Palmer is an exceptional beverage. It takes two individual beverages, iced tea and lemonade, each very good in their own right, and creates an even better one. That’s how we feel about social media and green living i.e. sustainability.

There is nothing inherently green about social media. The Web 2.0 revolution is driven by code and the Internet as a platform. According to Wikipedia, it describes this as a trend in “technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.” This is largely a virtual world.

The move toward sustainability, on the other hand, is taking place entirely offline in the actual world. It is about balancing our impact and more wisely managing our natural resources. The United Nations describes it as commitment to “the provision of a secure environmental, social, and economic future.”

As different as they are, these two trends share one key quality: they’re changing the world for the better. They are changing politics, business, culture, and society. In the following we explore 10 ways that the trends of social media and sustainability intersect as well as align.

Special Note: Sustainablog and Max Gladwell are supporting Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C). By clicking this link and signing up for SocialVibe, once featured in our Ten Ways to Change the World Through Social Media, you’ll effectively donate $1 to the cause. We also encourage you to watch the live telecast on ABC, CBS, and NBC, September 5th, at 8:00pm ET/PT.

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Green businesses are particularly well-suited for consumer advocacy. Customers who shop from your company due to a shared concern for the environment and/or a desire to avoid toxins are likely to tell their friends about the benefits of your product or service. The flip-side is that they are also likely to be particularly vocal and angry if they feel you have betrayed your green mission.

Social media, primarily blogs, have greatly lowered the barriers for consumers to voice their opinions. They can easily advocate on behalf of a brand or take a company to task for bad service, misleading advertising, products that do not work, and more. And the title of Blackshaw’s book rings true.

The question for green businesses is are you making it easier for 1000 people to advocate on behalf of your business, and are you reacting quickly and authentically when there is a mis-step and a customer is unhappy?

We marketers used to say that a brand is the sum total of all experiences with a company–not just the product or service but the employees, partners, website, collateral, ads, service centers, etc.

Your Google ranking is part of your brand

Well, now, customer service discussions on blogs are now part of your brand experience. Blackshaw says,

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I’m pretty sure whoever shot this was breaking the law, or, at the very least, House Rules — but I’m quite glad they did. I’m always entertained by politics as theater.

More posts on oil, offshore drilling, and gas prices:

• Obama Campaign Seeks to Make Gas Prices Irrelevant
• Poll: Americans Don’t Think More Drilling Will Lower Gas Prices
• Is McCain Serious About Cap-and-Trade? Economic Adviser Forbes Doesn’t Think So
• New McCain Ad Blames Obama for High Gas Prices
• McCain Credits Bush for Drop in Crude Oil Prices, White House Basically Replies: ‘Wasn’t us’

One of my favorite things about using the internet to promote my business is that it’s green and inexpensive (if not free). So online marketing and social networking is a great way to get your name out there without using any paper or creating any trash. A good way to start your foray into the world of online marketing is to first establish a web site for your business. This will often be your potential customers’ first impression of your company, so it will be an important investment in both time and money. Once you have a web site, networking through social media sites is a great way to promote it and drive traffic to your site. Online marketing is a strategy that’s becoming more and more popular among entrepreneurs, and thankfully it is one with minimal impact on the planet.

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In the wake of yesterdays annual meetings at ExxonMobil and Chevron that saw shareholders vote down several proposals that would have required the two energy giants to give greater consideration to issues of environmental protection and human rights, Chevron and Newsweek are co-hosting a forum called “Energy’s Future is in Technology: Innovation in Energy Supply, Energy Efficiency and Alternative/Renewable Energy” (now that’s a mouthful). The event, hosted at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California has just commenced and I am blogging in a room of about 150 academics, journalists, energy industry representatives, and opinion leaders (they even gave us our own table to sit at). More to come…

(Part II - Politics and Policy)

(Part III - Consumer Behavior)

Photo courtesy of the API

Tim Hurst: What is the Better World Foundation and how did you get involved with the organization?

Mark Leon Goldberg: I should say at the outset that I am not a spokesperson for the Better World Campaign (BWC). I am a consultant to the BWC, which is a sister organization to the United Nations Foundation. But a good description of UNF can be found here. And BWC here.

I am well qualified to speak about how I got involved with them. From 2004 to 2006 I was a writer for the American Prospect magazine, a political monthly here in DC. At the prospect, I wrote about international affairs, specifically the United Nations and other institutions like the International Criminal Court. I’ve been fascinated with these subjects and have followed these issues closely for a long time. As my stint at the prospect was coming to a close, the United Nations Foundation contacted me and asked if I would help them write UN Dispatch, their new blog about the United Nations and international affairs. I readily accepted.

TH: Perhaps you could explain more about what your mission is at On Day One and the UN Dispatch blog. Who is your target audience?

The target audiences of UN Dispatch and On Day One are slightly different, though there is probably much overlap. UN Dispatch was started to fill what was a void in commentary about the United Nations. In general, when blogs mentioned the UN, the commentary tended to be fairly misinformed. UN Dispatch was founded to try and correct some of the misinformation out there about the UN. Our audience tends to be drawn from the advocacy, think tank, international organization and philanthropic communities.

We are very much part of the on-going foreign policy debate that is forever raging in the political blogosphere. We tend to be slightly wonky, but strive to be accessible to a wider audience. We also aggregate global news in a daily round-up we call “Morning Coffee.”

On Day One is slightly different. For a good description of On Day One’s history, goals and audience I will turn this over to On Day One’s leader, Travis Moore of the Better World Campaign.

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The Green My Ride Facebook App

Huddler.com, the new green community of crowd-powered product reviews (and other good stuff), just released a new Facebook app that gives you yet another excuse to avoid what you really should be doing.

Green My Ride has a simple premise: start out as a gas guzzling, flower crushing monster vehicle, and by earning credits through various actions (below), you can earn more efficient cars (up to a solar-powered electric car) to display on your Facebook profile.

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Editor’s note: We’re pleased to welcome Max Gladwell, of MaxGladwell.com, as a regular guest writer on sustainablog. Max Gladwell covers the nexus of social media and green living. We feel that these two trends and technological developments hold tremendous promise for improving quality of life for everyone on the planet.

If you’re reading this blog, then you’re on board with social media. There’s a good chance you belong to social networks like Facebook or MySpace. It’s likely that you Digg stories and even possible that you Twitter. These technologies and services, together with a growing number of others, make up the social web. It’s much like the regular web, but more interactive. More…social. It invites and even demands active participation from everyone. It has a global reach with viral capacity, and yet it’s bringing local communities closer together. It enables people to connect, organize, and make a difference as never before. Indeed, social media is a powerful force, one that the world’s CEOs are starting to acknowledge and take seriously.

Many entrepreneurs, activists, and marketers are leveraging the social web for positive change. In the process and by its very nature, they are giving each of us the tools to change the world and make it a better place. There are thousands of examples, which is precisely why Max Gladwell exists. Here are 10 worth exploring.

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Silicon Valley Watcher, Tom Foremski puts it nicely:

Press releases are nearly useless. They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes…

Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Businesswire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists.

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First, credit where credit’s due: GM is one of the few major public corporations (and the first I’ve seen in the auto industry) to realize that social media, and the blogosphere in particular, doesn’t take kindly to being treated like any old marketing mechanism. On-message spin doesn’t work online because bloggers are people who take pride in peering through the fog, and distilling information for their readers. Conversations on the web are not one-way, and information can’t be controlled in the ways executives are used to. They are learning that the blogosphere is never afraid to call “bullshit” when it sees it, and the possibility of instant feedback ensures that all viewpoints can be heard, immediately.

Okay, I’m being too kind. I’d guess that the vast majority of the company’s top executives still don’t understand exactly why they approved the creation of their social media unit, but at least they know they needed one. They managed to hire people who realize that success in the blogosphere is about having an honest conversation, good or bad, and that admitting mistakes builds trust with consumers. But a disconnect remains. Bob Lutz, GM’s main internal blogger, has advocated for a gas tax to help create consumer demand to force the industry to invest aggressively in breakthrough transportation technologies. That’s great, but if he can’t speak for the company, is it doing any good?

GM’s social media people hope that it will. I honestly got the sense that they really do want to help change the company’s culture from the inside. Obviously, that’s a long road. In this environment, only an honest, respectful dialogue is ever going to overcome the decades of inertia of a behemoth like GM.

Finally, with the advent of our medium, that dialogue is becoming possible in ways it never has been. One thing’s for sure: the louder and more aggressive the environmental community is in calling GM a bunch of fascists who pushed the Hummer on unsuspecting Americans, the less they’re helping their (and our) cause. They only provoke a more defensive reaction from the people at the top of the company. Despite my distaste for Hummer owners, no sane person can fault a company that answers to shareholders for responding to demand in a high-margin niche. A part of me can’t help but think that activists who try to pressure corporations into putting the planet above profit are missing the forest for the trees.

Obviously, something is seriously wrong with a system in which well-meaning people continue to create products that ignore the environmental, resource, and economic crises that lie ahead. But it’s not as if they’re acting irrationally, given the information available to them. We all work in a system that is fundamentally flawed, and if activists want things to get better, they might be better off banding together to address root causes rather than the symptoms. If every person with a “downstream” (i.e. GM- or DuPont-specific) complaint joined a national movement to advocate for public financing of elections, or changing the way corporate rights are considered under the law, we might finally be able to start addressing the fundamental tensions between activists and the business world.

As an activist who runs a business, I can say with confidence that both sides are well-meaning. No one wants a world in which our grandkids look back and scream “What were you thinking?!” So let’s start working together to create a future we can be proud of. None of us can succeed without the rest of us.

Note: GM paid for my airfare and accommodations in connection with my coverage of the event. Finally, in the spirit of honest, open dialogue, I’d like to issue a formal invitation for someone from GM to discuss with an electric vehicle activist the issue of the EV1 electric car, including the “hows” and “whys” of its history. The movie Who Killed the Electric Car? was a great way to start the conversation, but film remains a one-way medium, and I am personally interested to see a real conversation about the issue develop. Email me, and I’ll make sure it gets set up.

Electronic waste is a big environmental issue, and we’ve covered numerous ways that both electronics companies and consumers can reduce the amount of e-waste headed for landfills. While most recent efforts focus on reuse and/or recycling (which are both important), Israeli site FixYa harnesses "crowd power" (ie, social media) to help people fix their electronics rather than disposing of them. The main motivation behind FixYa was the increasing lack of technical support provided for consumer electronics, but Yaniv Ben Saadon told us that there’s a green element to the site’s mission:

By allowing more and more consumers to successfully operate and mend their products, FixYa decreases the number of products that are discarded and eventually pollute our environment. Although globalization and competition drive the average consumption of consumer products to increase over time, the usability of these products decreases as they become more technologically advanced and challenging to operate. Moreover, since manufacturers are under growing pressure to release their products to their markets, often these products are mass produced before they are properly designed. The result is that the products we buy are cheaper than they were before, yet more challenging to operate.

From gaming systems to washing machines, FixYa’s user have already provided a wide range of "fix-it" advice. Ben Saadon shared with us some of the most popular problems, and the highest-ranked solutions, addressed on the site.

1. A Clacking Xbox with Three Flashing Red Lights

User Carl26 walks a panicked gamer through the process of fixing this problem with the GPU memory.

2. Another Flashing Light… on a Kenmore Dish Washer

Expert qqwweer shows how to reset the light.

3. Ipod Keeps Displaying "Do Not Disconnect"

User Yung offers four different approaches to this problem.

4. Sansa MP3 Player Won’t Turn On

User chrism provides a really simple solution to this really aggravating problem.

5. DVD Player’s P-SCAN Split-Screen Keeps Coming On

User spyder99 shows that sometimes a solution is as easy as flipping a switch… if you know where that switch is located.

These are just a few examples of how FixYa’s brand of social media provides solutions for users’ pocketbooks and the envionment. Ben Saadon notes

Through the collaboration of a community of consumers, FixYa encourages its users to learn from the experience of others on how to properly use and fix their products. The result is that more and more consumers are able to successfully operate their existing products rather than replace them with newer ones, and thus help to reduce the number of products that ended up polluting our environment.

And, if throwing your problem out to the community isn’t your style, FixYa also features a massive collection of manuals and troubleshooting guides.

We’ve been working hard lately to reach out through some of the web’s most popular social media sites, but, until now, we were MIA from 800 lb. gorrilla in this space: Myspace. We’ve fixed that, though, and are pleased to unveil the GO Myspace page.

If you’re a member at Myspace, please add us as a friend, and ask your other friends to do so. We’ll be highlighting chosen content there, as well as keeping users in the loop about devlopments at GO.

As always, let us know if you have suggestions. We’ll see you there!