BRAND STRATEGY: Building the Credible Sustainable Brand

COMMUNICATIONS: Designing Communications that Resonate

PRODUCT DESIGN: Sustainable Product Design: an LCA Approach

SUPPLY CHAIN: Making Supply Chains More Sustainable

DATA & METRICS: Managing Your Sustainable Brand Plan: Management Systems & Metrics for Driving Ideas to Reality

If you are not in NY or NJ you can catch the series in Austin, TX on January 24th-28^th next year.

Use the code yellsbs to get 20% off at registration.

Here’s some more detail from Sustainable Brands

Monday: Building the Credible Sustainable Brand
Learn to build a strong, credible brand, starting with the foundation: how customers experience your brand, and what they believe to be true about you. In this course, Jennifer Rice, from Fruitful Strategy, will walk students step-by-step through building a sustainable brand for B2B, B2C and retailers.

Tuesday: Designing Communications that Resonate
In this course, author and communications expert John Marshall Roberts will walk attendees step-by-step through the essentials of an empathy-based communication framework, first popularized in his bestselling book “Igniting Inspiration: A Persuasion Manual for Visionaries.”

Wednesday: Sustainable Product Design: an LCA Approach
Jeremy Faludi, Associate Professor of Design at Stanford University, illuminates Life Cycle Assessment, a popular yet complex subject, while providing participants with the key facts, processes, and LCA tools needed to intelligently design new products while taking life cycle measurement into account and ultimately applying the best solutions for a company’s needs.

Thursday: Making Supply Chains More Sustainable
Phil Berry of Sustainable Product Works explains best practices for building sustainable supply chains, lifecycle thinking, covering 13 areas to address, 11 ways sustainability creates value, case studies, addressing climate change, waste, lean manufacturing, and relationship tips.

Friday: Managing Your Sustainable Brand Plan: Management Systems & Metrics for Driving Ideas to Reality
This course will help companies establish metrics, and collect and manage data to meet the needs of all stakeholders, including management, customers, international regulators, and NGO’s who scrutinize offerings.  This session provides methods for keeping a cross functional team focused, aligned and incented around interdependent activities and priorities.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to help you find more information about the seminars to see if they are right for you and, whether you attend in NY/NJ or one of the other cities, use the code yellsbs to get 20% off at registration.

The leading brands of the future will be sustainable brands.

SB Seminars: Executive Education in Sustainable Business Practice is in San Francisco on Oct 4-8, Twin Cities on Nov 29-Dec 3, New Brunswick, NJ on Dec 6-10, and Austin on Jan 24-28, and is hosted by top sustainably-focused corporations Williams-Sonoma, 3M, Johnson & Johnson and AMD respectively.

This set of five 1-day executive level courses is taught by leading lecturers, educators, and authors with over 100 collective years of sustainable brand building experience.  Students can attend any or all of the five classes offered Mon-Fri on individual topics including Brand Strategy, Communications, Product Design, Supply Chain or Data & Metrics.

Limited to 30 students per classroom, students receive a level-the-playing-field business knowledge in all key areas of sustainable brand strategy. Students from brand management and corporate sustainability suites as well as marketing/PR, engineering, R&D, and facilities will benefit.

More Information: SBseminars.com

Location technologies are transforming how we experience, navigate, and ultimately better our world. From the global to the local, here are #10Ways geolocation is a positive force for good.

Social media has changed the world. It has revolutionized communications on a global scale, and the transformation continues with every status update, blog post, and video stream. The global citizenry has become a global network.

Since becoming widely adopted just a couple years ago, social media has supercharged social action, cause marketing, and social entrepreneurship. Indeed, the true value hasn’t been the technology itself but how we’ve used it. Today, a second wave of innovation is defining a new era and setting the stage for change over the coming decade.

Mobile technologies will extend the global online network to anyone with a mobile device while enabling countless local networks to form in the real world. We’ve decentralized media production and distribution. We’re doing the same for energy. And we’ll continue this trend for social networking, social action, and commerce.

The combined forces of smartphones, mobile broadband, and location-aware applications will connect us in more meaningful ways to the people, organizations, events, information, and companies that matter most to us—namely, those within a physical proximity of where we live and where we are. Can location-based services (LBS) change the world? Here are #10Ways:

1. Checking in for Good: If Gowalla and Foursquare have taught us anything, it’s that people respond to simple incentives. By offering badges, mayorships, and other intangible rewards, millions of people are checking in to the places they go. Apps like Whrrl take this a step further and enable like-minded “societies” to form on a local basis. The next step is for these apps to add greater purpose by encouraging more meaningful checkins and offering corresponding badges and stamps, thus mapping the cause universe. Or for a dedicated app to be developed that rewards conscious consumption, social responsibility, and civic engagement. Yes, the CauseWorld app features a cause element, but it’s not about cause-worthy places.

2. Eating Locally: Sustainability demands that we source our food as close to its point of production as possible. Many so-called locavores subscribe to the 100-mile diet, which requires that one “eat nothing—or almost nothing—but sustenance drawn from within 100 miles of their home.” Given the difficulty of accessing and verifying this information in order to live by this standard, there’s a geo-powered Locavore app. It gives you info on in-season foods, those coming in-season, farmer’s markets, and links to recipes. This rather simple app is clearly just the start. In time, location-aware apps will guide us not only to the grocery store or farmer’s market but through them. All the while identifying foods based on our particular diet or sensibility.

3. Political Organizing: In the next presidential election, politics will not only be local but location-enabled. We saw the power of social media in Obama’s 2008 landslide victory. In 2012, location-based apps and technologies will play a central role in how campaigns are organized, managed, and ultimately won. Much of this will be visible through mobile apps and location-aware browsers. Activists and volunteers will be more empowered. Voters will be more engaged in the moment, right down to casting their votes. Behind the scenes, though, we’ll see massive new sets of data available to campaigns for targeting, empowerment, and optimization. The party, candidate, and/or cause that has the best handle on geolocation will have a measurable advantage. (The Elections app will soon be updated for 2010.)

4. Finding Green Businesses: The web has effectively replaced the paper Yellow Pages as a way to find local businesses and services. However, this “stationary web” experience is quickly being supplanted by the mobile web and mobile applications, which give us access to this information when we most need it. The Yelp and Around Me apps are popular ways to find restaurants, coffee shops, or hotels wherever you are, but what about green-rated businesses? Greenopia has transformed its printed, local guides into a dynamic, nationwide mobile application that lets you find local, green-rated businesses in any category. No more paper and a much better experience. The Green Map app is another that facilitates discovery and connects us to local green environments.

5. Traveling More Efficiently: We’ve had access to GPS navigation systems and static traffic information for some time, but only now are we seeing the full potential of these technologies. With access to more detailed traffic information that is specific to your route and updated in real time, we can minimize congestion and maximize traffic flow (as much as physically possible). The new turn-by-turn MapQuest 4 Mobile app is a good start, as you can get traffic alerts specific to the route you program. However, user-generated information from apps like Trapster and Waze can crowdsource more specific details, such as whether to avoid an intersection due to a toxic chemical spill. Or, if you want to avoid automobiles altogether, Google Maps makes it easy to use public transportation and take a bike.

6. Scanning for Ethical Products: With online shopping, we’ve become accustomed to reading reviews and making comparisons before we buy. This can now be done in the physical world through games like MyTown and services like Stikybits. By scanning a product barcode using a smartphone camera, you can unlock a treasure of additional information (not to mention deals) that can help with your purchase. This might include where it was produced, how far it traveled, the reputation of the manufacturer, chemical contents, carbon footprint, or the full lifecycle analysis. Location-aware applications can also transform commerce itself by giving us better access to local inventories and locally-produced goods. Whether it’s fruits and vegetables or books and electronics, if something can be found within blocks of your current location, it makes no sense to ship it from afar.

7. Networking Neighborhoods: One of the hottest categories in geolocation is neighborhood networking. The vision for many of these apps is to strengthen the very fabric of our communities. With DeHood, you can keep track of what’s happening in your neighborhood, share your favorite places, and grease the wheels for actually meeting people. After all, if you’ve made contact through the app, it’s a lot easier to say “Hello” in the real world. Blasterous is another that lets you share information locally, whereas BlockChalk does this on an anonymous basis. Finally, NeighborGoods uses your street address to facilitate one-to-one borrowing and trading of useful stuff. In the end, making connections with your neighbors can lead to safer, more productive, and more sustainable communities.

8. Tracking Environmental Disasters: The size and scope of environmental disasters appears to be growing. In 2008, we had the Tennessee coal ash spill, which was billed as “the largest environmental disaster of its kind in the United States.” And that was before we realized it was three times bigger than originally estimated. More recently, the BP oil spill set daily records for “largest environmental disaster in the U.S. ever.” In each case, geolocation technologies can be used by engaged citizens to monitor and track the effects. They can be used by response teams to coordinate containment and cleanup efforts. Ultimately, these technologies can be used to accurately measure the size and impact of a disaster in order to better understand its damages and costs.

9. Viewing the World Through an Eco Lens: Augmented reality (AR) follows geolocation as one of the hot trends in mobile technology. It enables you to view the world through a smartphone camera (or similar device) and see layers of geo-specific content or information. One of the most popular apps is Layar, an augmented reality browser/platform that lets you choose specific data layers or experiences. The potential for green- and cause-related content is tremendous. You might view green-rated businesses, LEED-certified buildings, or virtual GHG emissions as they enter the atmosphere. Combined with smart meter technology, you could see the most efficient and inefficient homes around you in real time. And for the cynics among us, you could view our mountains, forests, rivers, and oceans as they once were…before the effects of climate change and so many environmental disasters.

10. Capturing the Moment: Better access to information about what’s happening around us—right now—can dramatically improve quality of life. This sense of “geospatial awareness” is possible through today’s smartphones, whereby a piece of content or information—a moment—is captured and preserved based on the unique time and place in which it occurred. It is essentially to document spacetime. Protests, natural disasters, sporting events, parties, political crises…real-time information about anything happening anywhere at any time, as well as the history of what happened. This will take several years and a number of different applications to realize. In the end, though, it will revolutionize how we access and consume content. It will complete the democratization and decentralization of news and information…based on time and location.

Cautionary note: Privacy is the single biggest issue in the LBS industry. It’s important to understand what information you are sharing with regard to your location and with whom.

Author’s note: We’ll be hosting geolocation events for Social Media Week in Los Angeles this September. This is the third in Max Gladwell’s #10Ways series of distributed blog posts. It was published simultaneously on as many as 300 blogs.

This video was made using CamStudio.  It was my first video tutorial and was very easy to make.

The hardest part was creating the script.  Well, I take that back.  The hardest part, by far, was listening to my own voice.  I am a talker, so I apologize to everyone else who has to hear my voice all the time.

Developers and designers have told me time and time again that there are better platforms than PowerPoint for making and animating graphics, but PowerPoint is what I used!  I would like to learn other platforms for this, but just haven’t had the time.

Gap Inc. has a long history of engaging stakeholders in their social responsibility plans and achievements.  With over 130,000 employees worldwide, Gap knows that employees are among the most valuable of those stakeholders.

So, to celebrate the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day (April 22, 2010) Gap Inc. is hosting their second annual Earth Week Green Festival. The Green Festival brings together Gap Inc. Bay Area employees (approximately 4,000) with local sustainable organizations and provides employees with services and products that will allow them to make simple environmentally-conscious choices. The festival helps Gap employees make positive impacts in their communities and lets employees gather, learn and socialize around a common theme of sustainability.  Last year’s event was a great success. Twenty-five local vendors were represented and more than 250 employees attended.

This year’s event already has some great vendors signed on to bring sustainable products and ideas to the Gap family.  If your organization is interested in participating, you should definitely reach out to Catherine Rhoades of Gap Inc. and find out how your organization can help make the festival an even greater success.

2010 Earth Week Festival Vendors

18 Rabbitts

Coral Reef Alliance

Farm Fresh To You

Fresh Snack Pack

Green Street Cleaners

Green Zebra

Kimpton Hotels

Organic Wine Company

PG&E

Rain Forest Action Network

SF Department For The Environment

The Pant Café Organic

Thirsty Bear Brewing Company

Trust For Public land

ZipCar

Chicago wants to become a leader among global cities in its environmental stewardship and vision.  As an integral part of that leadership, Chicago recognized an opportunity to dramatically reduce the city’s carbon footprint.  Mayor Daley and the city have made climate change a top priority and have formed the Chicago Climate Action Plan to help the city, its businesses and its residents lower greenhouse gas emissions and live in a healthier, more environmentally-friendly way.

The plan includes five main strategies and 35 sub-strategies for businesses and individuals to take action, but the city has devised a way to take those strategies to citizens in a creative and informative way to help residents understand that they play a valuable role in helping to reduce the city’s environmental footprint.  The CCAP is sponsoring the Earth Day 2010 Video Contest to enable students in Chicago’s middle schools, high schools and colleges to engage their creativity and talent to help teach the principles of the plan to all Chicagoans and have a chance to win some cash prizes for themselves and their schools to help out with education costs.

When:  Videos may be submitted now until April 12

Who:  All Chicago-area middle and high school and college students are encouraged to participate – individually or in teams

What:  Submit a 90 second video via the contest website detailing how you are making an impact by participating in one or more of the CCAP’s 35 strategies

Why:  The “why” is easy.  Chicago is on the right path with its dedication to global leadership in reducing carbon emissions.  It is not an easy task, though, to create a plan, generate interest and help people understand what they can do to help.  The video contest is a great use of Chicago’s outstanding student population, allowing them to demonstrate not only their environmental passion but also their creative talents.  Probably more entertaining than announcements from the city, these videos are an engaging way to share personal actions and information about taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Plus, it benefits students’ education with prizes sponsored by the Abbott Fund.

Mayor Daley will announce winners on Earth Day (April 22^nd).  Chicago students – enter your videos now and make sure you are the generation to lead Chicago into its green future!

I like businesses.  I particularly like start-ups and their ability to re-invent the way business operates.  I think that is important when we begin to consider companies based on their 360-degree impact on our lives (that is, not just the benefits of the products and services they create, but also the potential consequences they produce).  The auto-maker Tesla comes to mind as a startup that is pushing electric vehicles into the mainstream with new energy and vision.

However, unlike well-run businesses, the federal government has a chance to make decisions that are short-term losses (well, maybe even a long-term losses) and not worry about quarterly reporting and firm-level ROI.  If they take a loss to change the cost, technology, demand or resource efficiency of the transportation industry – or even other industries – it can still be a success for the country and economy.  Whereas, if a private sector shipping company loses billions of dollars buying electric vehicles as an early adopter, it is held accountable while its rivals benefit from the advances in the market.  FedEx, UPS, Coca-Cola Enterprises and every other company that delivers products or goods can benefit from the USPS expenditure.

I am not saying that this is how it will work out.  There are challenges and no bill or initiative is perfect.  But it is how it could work out with the proper planning, execution and support.  To get more efficient government and corporate fleets, improved electric infrastructure and lower-cost, more efficient consumer transportation, it seems worth the cost and effort.

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance.

We have seen examples of blog coordination to create positive social change before.  A few of my favorites were started by Rob Reed through his  Max Gladwell blog.  His 10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media post was syndicated simultaneously on many of the most influential sustainability and green blogs around the world and it really put SocialYell on the map as a way to rate and review organizations based on corporate responsibility.  And we were lucky enough to participate in the next “10 ways” post and use our blog to get the word out on 10 Ways to Support Charity Through Social Media.  I bring this up not just to relive old times, but to point out that there are at least 2 important things going on here.

One, clearly, is to raise awareness about climate change.

It seems almost unbelievable that we need more “awareness” that we are contributing to climate change in an unnatural and unsustainable way and that we need to take action to make big changes in the way we live and the ways we use energy, but we do.  The disconnect is a lot like the one we all see when we Cc a bunch of people on an email.  Know what I mean?  When a recipient sees other people in the address field, it is easy for her to think that someone else is taking care of it.  Instead of talking about how “we” need to act now, I’d like to hear people tell themselves “I” need to act now and tell others “YOU” need to act now!  It is like Justin’s dad said (of @shitmydadsays fame):

“You need to flush the toilet more than once…No, YOU, YOU specifically need to.”

There is no CC in Climate Change! Well, um, you know what I mean.

Which brings me to the second important thing going on here: mass coordination over the fastest growing information medium in history to affect change.  Never before have we been able to communicate on a personal level in such a mass way.  I want to take this chance to tell our readers that YOU, YOU, specifically need to act.  YOU need to take the bus instead of drive, YOU need to search for alternative energy options in your area, YOU need to write your congress person, YOU need to read the Blog Action Day posts and learn how to make the changes that need to be made. I do, too!

While I clearly love it when SocialYell and our blog posts get shared to many people, I’d like to encourage people to email or talk with people one-on-one about changing the way they take accountability for climate change.  No Cc’ing.  No guilt trips.  Just honest conversations about how every individual is accountable for climate change.

One, PBS’s film about America’s national parks, was an inspirational tale of vision and understanding of the value of nature – particularly the value of predatory animals like bears and wolves. At one time in our history, there was an explicit goal to eliminate all wolves from our lands – and it almost succeeded.  It makes sense.  Wolves hunt for the same things we eat, so the initial reaction was to eliminate them.  But, as the PBS film portrays, our outlook gradually changed, thanks to some of our country’s animal and nature conservation pioneers.  Of course a film about the American national parks covers much more than just our interaction with and understanding of animals.  It is well worth a viewing!

The other was a Discovery Channel show: Lion Feeding Frenzy.  In this video, a lion expert and the show’s host study lions and their hunting abilities by baiting them into some tests while observing from a protective box.  They bait the lions with meat hung on a rope from a tree and observe as the lions leap to take the bait.  When more lions notice, one of the observers declares:  ”Any second, this group of aggressive males could attack us from all angles!”

I understand that portraying a terrifying killer probably sells better than educating on the ways of nature and importance of these (and other) creatures.  After all, the first has an audience of everybody and the latter has an audience only of people who care.  Discovery has done a great job over the years of growing the number of people who care, but they also sell media and have to attract viewers.  Terrifying and/or sensational videos such as “Lion Feeding Frenzy”, “Bear Feeding Frenzy”, “Crocodile Feeding Frenzy” and much of the programming during Shark Week (“Missing Limbs”, “Bloody Aftermath”, “Jaws in the Creek”) may attract more viewers, but they aren’t among Discovery’s most sustainable, conservation education pieces.