Green Options » social networks

Sierra Club Launches Social Network and Hiking Wiki

Timothy B. Hurst — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:39:14 +0000

US’ oldest environmental group launches social network for hikers

You’ve heard of trail networks, well how about the network, Trails? Sierra Club Trails, that is. Don’t feel bad if you haven’t because it’s brand new. On Thursday, The Sierra Club launched what is being billed as the world’s first-ever comprehensive hiking wiki. Like other wikis, the meat behind Trails (or the GORP, as the case may be) is crowd-sourced, user-created and user-edited content.

In terms of the new Sierra Club project, anyone can post their favorite hikes, trails, routes, etc., and anyone else can come in and edit the descriptions so that the trails are constantly up-to-date. Users could potentially update entries with current trail conditions (i.e mud, snow, etc.) or, perhaps, with seasonal viewing tips (fall foliage, wildlife, etc.,).

In addition to hiking and paddling trails, the site also features tips for hikers, a birding blog, photo contests, and Nature Notes, a series of audio features based on interviews with naturalists and Sierra Club Outings leaders.

Are You In ‘The Gort Cloud’? A Book Review

Timothy B. Hurst — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:10:52 +0000

(click to expand)

The Gort Cloud:
The Invisible Force Powering Today’s Most Visible Green Brands
by Richard Seireeni with Scott Fields
240 pp. Chelsea Green

It is like what Van Jones called the “invisible network of networks.” Everyone who is in it (and some who stand outside it) know it is there, but they just aren’t sure how to define it, or what shape it takes.

In a new book called The Gort Cloud, branding expert Richard Seireeni takes a stab at capturing the moving target of social networks, sustainability, and green business and captures it with the perfect metaphor — a cloud. But Seireeni doesn’t use any old cloud for his metaphor, the book gets its name from an amorphous field of stellar debris called the Oort Cloud. Seireeni writes:

“I began to think of this particular green network as something tangible with a mission and with a collective membership of like-mined people. It wasn’t a single community. It wasn’t a movement, It defied easy definition.”
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Top 10 in Green You Should Follow on Twitter

mcmilker — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:08:48 +0000

The idea for this story actually came to me from our writer, Jennifer Kaplan, but since I’ve written on this topic before, she asked if I might want to tackle it – Sure. A few months back, Darren Rowse challenged his readers to create a top ten to follow list to Twitip. As you can see, 192 of us responded with out top ten list folks who Twitter on a wide variety of topics. My list was green.

But, I’ve had a chance to think about it some more.

Trying to determine how to best build your list of followers can be a challenge and a raging argument is going on right now with the Twitterati on quality versus quantity. Is it better to follow lots of people and have lots of followers or does the quality of the follower matter?

As a marketing guru, I lean toward quality. I tweet almost everyday and I’ve set up Twitter accounts for several clients and have carefully managed which people we follow; at what rate we gain followers and how closely they match the target market we are attempting to reach.

Why?

The reason quality matters is your ability to reach out to your target audience is limited by how many of their tweets you see. If you follow random people, those tweets to which you might want to respond get lost in the masses of tweets you receive. (In some ways the 2000 followers limit on Twitter is a good thing.)

So, if you’re looking for green folks to follow on Twitter, take a minute and consider, what sort of green people should I be following?

Using The Web to Build Your Green Business.

mcmilker — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:23:34 +0000

Benjamin Brown, the CEO of Web start-up MakeMeSustainable.com feels that tapping social networking on the Web is the best way to build a business with an environmental slant.

I’d have to say that we at Ecopreneurist agree. While most businesses focus on attracting mainstream media visibility, as we said here, often the best way for eco-entrepreneurs to grow their businesses is to build grassroots support. In the world of Web 2.0, that means going online.

At my first college entrepreneurial venture in the ’80s, we slowly built our business by knocking on doors. Now, we’d probably make “friends” through Facebook. A start-up I worked for in the ’90s built their business by selling at swap meets. Now entrepreneurs build an e-Bay store.

Growing by word of mouth is a time honored tactic of entrepreneurs. In an earlier time, that meant going door to door or spreading the word through family and friends. Now it means engaging in social media.

“There’s a lot of noise and a lot of great clean technologies are going to be created,” Brown says. “The reason I wanted to go towards the Web is because, in the end, it’s the individual consumer who will be driving those concepts and ideas.”