Green Marketing

At home? Got a minute? Try a green, social browser.

If you are an environmental marketer who would like to see how social networking channels can help you get your green story out, try a new browser that combines social networking features with environmental news feeds. I suggest you do it at home or on a standby computer first, before you get serious about it.

The browser is Flock. In time for the recent Earth Day, it was released in a so-called Eco-Edition that arrives preset with news feeds from online environmental resources, including Treehugger and the Environmental News Network. The current iteration of Flock, green or beige, seems to be all consumer directed, nothing much of interest for B2B marketing or networking. But maybe that will come at some point. After all, version 1.1 of the Flock browser is still quite new and there are bound to be plans for many more. If Eco-Flock would help glean information from interesting sites and resources outside of the usual suspects that everybody either looks at regularly or has written off, the green browser could be very valuable.

Services supported by or at least connected to Flock include blog editors that directly connect to your blog, sharing of photos and videos, and webmail. I'd love to see them include LinkedIn and reach a wide audience of professionals. That would give a lot more exposure to the green content, and feedback from the expanded audience would contribute to make the content provided by green bloggers and sites more interesting and worthwhile.

So, try it out, let me know what you think, if you like, and get in touch with the Flock people to urge them to make their product more relevant to those of us who think business and marketing can benefit the environment and our societies. (Hey, Flock: Why is there no e-mail link from the site? I know it's old fashioned, but a lot of us still use it.)

Software tools help meet business objectives and environmental goals

As noted in business news and many of the green blogs, business intelligence software maker SAS (traditionally pronounced "sass") is stepping out with SAS for Sustainability Management, a "first decision-support software platform for proactively identifying innovative strategies that effectively address complex environmental, social, and economic situations while achieving stakeholder objectives," as we read in a press release. The SAS software targets the increasingly prominent "triple bottom line" of environmental, economic, and social metrics presented by many recent writers, including Andrew Winston, author of Green to Gold: Eco Strategies to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage. A webcast by Winston is conveniently linked to from the SAS pages. As SAS materials describe, Cisco Systems already uses the SAS solution to support its sustainability efforts. View a video with Cisco Senior VP Laura Ipsen to get her take on the story.

If interested, you can download a brochure on SAS for Sustainability Management and a SAS white paper based on research by ComputerWorld called Expanding Eco-Practices Benefits the Bottom Line and the Brand. Once you've waded through all available evidence, you'll see that the potential audience for environmentally sound technology expanded quite a bit: If business value by itself can make a compelling case for green practices, you can win the attention and participation of the people and companies that can't simply translate conscience into strategy.

SAS for Sustainability Management is based on other SAS technologies and also incorporates the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework. If you're interested in growing a software solution of your own to support your company's or clients' environmental initiatives, the tools and ideas available at the GRI Web site might be a good place to start. But don't take too long. We can expect more announcements shortly, when other software companies launch products and services that help businesses implement green business practices, and then measure, document, and publish their results. If you don't get to market within about a year or so, you'll likely be serving more and more specialized, circumscribed needs.