(Think you had enough?) The Agency. After the shakeup.

Green is about interdependence, about recognizing that "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower." The deeper we realize this the more we have to rethink things.

Social marketing is a great fit, because it takes mutually conditioned existence as a starting point. So go to the Agency to get your social media!? Well, maybe not. As Hugh MacLeod Twitters,
Advertising, PR and MSM: Social Media is "The next big thing", it just may not be "Your next big thing". Sorry. Not my problem.

The PR/Ad/Marketing/Web/Design Agency has to date, like the music companies of old, been both the producer and distributor of content. These two functions are being decoupled in the music world: I can make my own record, and maybe need something else - a music distribution broker. The same may go for the Agencies of this world.

I'm working with Vancouver Film School instructor Ron Serna on a very cool video art piece. About 45 seconds long, it is a look at the loosening of obsession around Brand. It will (I hope) be beautiful. We've been delaying it, and now there is snow on the ground. Dang. We have been talking about how to afford the time to pull off shooting and editing it. We both have kids and debts - you know. Maybe we could put a company's logo in it or shoot a slightly cloying version and make some dough.
That kind of wrecks it.

But what about this:

• Green companies are trying to advertise to get the word out, and it all sounds like bad consumerism, greenwashed. Something's broken.
  
• Richard Edelman ( says my friend Paul) and others are betting the farm on social media.
• Social media involves creating sharing objects.
• Art is a true sharing object.
• The demand for PR/Ad/Marketing/Web/Design narratives is not what we thought it was. Cluetrain...The demand for "messages" may be limited, if not null. People are doing it for themselves etc. I mean, we are clicking past the ads now.
  
• Art is always in demand.
  
• What if Advertising gave way ( in some companies) todistributing art that resonates beside and and in sympathy the core value/thrust/passion of the company. Just like corporations carefully pick the art that is hanging in their foyers ( eg heavy on the American realist art, early Canadian masters, whatever) they could also 'hang' "good" videos in their web sites.
  
• This is just the tip of it.

So I'm fielding offers or will seek out corporate distributors for the art piece Ron and I are making! Sounds preposterous?

PR/Ad/Marketing/Web/Design Agencies can't limit what the client sees in terms of potential content proposals to the client, because the client now has amateur created content in the form of Lonely Girl 15, the Wine Cone, and all kinds of real neat art. Like the art of Shane Koyczan Agencies aren't competing against 3 other RFIs, they are competing against every amateur or non amateur social object available on the web. The door is slammed open. Agencies should step back and take a good look at this; IMO some would be better off acting as content brokers or content framers, rather than producer/distributors.
Of course, I say this an amateur.

Aha moment

Hugh MacLeod on Twitter
Advertising, PR and MSM: Social Media is "The next big thing", it just may not be "Your next big thing". Sorry. Not my problem.

Because green is ultimately cool

Green marketing is socially responsible, because green is about responsibility, and the product (object) and communications (object) must be in synch, like a bridge and an island.

Just as "green consumerism" is an oxymoron, so is green "push" command-and-control, anti social marketing.

The rules of conventional branding don't quite apply. Neither does the conventional wisdom around environmentalism apply.

Take Tourism. Is it good for the environment? Well, conventional environmentalism might say NO. But then again, some environmentalism suggests that staying holed up in your home, or pushing home grown rutabagas on those poor lousy innocents = environmentalism.

But if green is about embracing change in a positive way, about contributing to a better life, then Travel can be green; in so far as Travel is not hard wired to consumerism then it can be green.
There is an element of faith in this. Let's say that Travel is not equivalent to staying at a chic hotel in Banff and buying expensive stuff ( "good for the economy!!). And let's say that if we start with redefining Travel to embrace all of us, then everybody benefits. Is there money in it? You have to think so. Which leads me to....

Tourism Canada, and fellow Bowen Islander Michelle Glave, worked on this fantasitc bit by Shane Koyczan:


Social marketing is ultimately cool; green is ultimately cool.
Nice local, "green" post by Michelle Glave, BTW, on One Day Bowen.

green social marketing is different

If push marketing is about creating sales funnels, social marketing as I've defined it is about building voluntary bridges.

1 Take a good look at the product offering - which is the primary social object - the thing that people buy, use and share.
2 Make a second (synthetic ) social object whose intent is to segue to the product offering.

Social marketing creates multiple, synthetic social objects-as-bridges that communities can use, or not. Like great youtube entertainment/ads/. Highly social objects may also be modifiable by the user: like blogs, forums, or events that are co created by the user; like throwing user-centered parties that serve, say, free booze.

Ideally, green marketing needs something more. A couple of assumptions: one, the need to have communications = congruent with the product offering, and two, that green products originate from good intenet, intent to serve humanity. It seems that the best green products, like great music, are labors of love, artistic gestures, and attempts to better the human condition. The hypothesis is that:

The primary aspiration of green marketing is good intent, even above sales.
congruence means green marketing needs to also be a labor of love, and a work of art. Getting an agency to pump up the sales with a slick, layered series of multimedia social objects is not a good fit in green marketing if the work is not properly grounded in basic generosity. For social marketing to be truly social, after all, it has to have a social conscience, and the marketers must have good intent: building bridges to the product and the world, for goodness sake. Sounds like Sunday school, I know...

Coming out of this intent, is the execution of green brand identity that into is, if you like, "biodegradable".
The persistence of a brand identity, and the level of enhanced self esteem I get from it, is inversely proportional to my sustained attention to the environment. I sip my Free Trade cappuccino, and type on my IMac and I see but don't connect much: I am in a brand cocoon. The longer this lasts, the more unlikely it is that the street person's pain is not felt. The more likely it is that I get in the car, step on the gas, and feel pretty damn good about myself. If Zero, as Seth Godin says, is the new black, then "how do you brand zero?" is a riddle that Marketing simply has to solve.

Clearly, I'm stretching. More on this later.

Magoo

A client today told me about a Discovery show he watched last night. It was about blind man who could draw incredibly well.
Of course, being blind can help, but government without outside input is a kind of blindness you rarely want to take a risk on. IMO, Canada seems to be risking doing just this, if it allows its government put an environmental policy together without traditional input.
At any rate, I believe governments, companies and individuals stumble and bumble along enough like Magoo , and far more than we realize. And, like the wisdom of crowds, there may wisdom in some of our be stumbling and bumbling. We like to think so, anyway.
Just stumbled into the Talent Imitates; Genius Steals branding blog. A new treasure trove of branding and communications data, uniquely complied by the author.

The Green fact sheet is a party favor

One of the challenges of blogging is to avoid the pitfalls of linear, authored narrative. The problem is, consumers hunt and peck at best. Mostly reader resent being reduced to being treated as "information consumers" at all. We're just guests here, not devotees.

Right now I am rewriting a company's fact sheets. Clunk.
Creating a "green" or "good" linear narrative misses the point. The design needs to reflect actual use, which is, for fact sheets:

Look at it, snap decision to read on for 5 seconds, flip it over, sniff, we'll OK maybe I'll talk to them.

Effective social objects should be like a party. Does it have a beat; can you enter in on it half way through and still enjoy it. Does it work for you.

The next gen of social object of course goes further than the fact sheet - a one-way piece of communications if ever there was one. But there will always an element of me-making -something. A better role model than the propagandist or artist is the host, because Host-meets-guest is fundamental. It is also reciprocal.

There is an art of leadership involved in creating the nucleus for interaction. Chris Corrigan, whom I've been reading again lately, has applied this notion of hosting to catalyzing inter-organizational change.

"Authorship" implies a controlled narrative. Working in social marketing is not verbal hypnosis, or controlling a conversation with all its puffery. Marketing is just another application of the art of hosting. A fact sheet, after all, can be a fine example of a useful, social object.

OK, now I like my job again.

If Green is engagement

Today, the Marketing Green blog reports that the political winds are shifting in the US:

Marketers should consider taking action soon rather than later to green their brands in order to avoid playing catch-up afterwards. Once Congress takes action, companies will lose the opportunity to build green credentials and shape their brand ahead of the pack. Those that wait may struggle to catch up as consumers may question the integrity of their motivations.

As more and more companies engage in green tactical practices, like water capture and reuse projects, or buying eco friendly office products, or creating recycled products, what Green vector of differentiation is left?

Green is about relationship to the environment. Which no-one has a monopoly on.

And it is not confined to things.

As I see it, the social media landscape is where companies will continue to be judged. Push marketing is about doing things to. Social marketing is about entering non-biased relationship.

Doc Searls:

"To me the most powerful line in Cluetrain came from Chris Locke who wrote,

We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.

"Deal with it" doesn't mean "Make better advertising" or "Target your advertising more effectively" or "Turn your users into marketers" (which is Facebook's latest idea). All that is just more grasp. What we need is better reach by customers. Better advertising doesn't do that. We need something else entirely. Something that lives on the customer side. Something that makes customers and users more powerful, more independent, more valuable than just "consumers" (which Jerry Michalski calls "gullets with wallets and eyeballs")."

Successful green marketing involves real commitment to relationship. In concrete terms, it means offering successful social objects.

Social media map

From David Armano's blog, Logic + Emotion
[LATER] Well, first I had nothing to add. Much as I like the graphics and respect the Logic & Emotion blog, now Im not sure that the big ripples have this kind of influence. Mark Earls is right: people are more influenced by their immediate group than we realize. And now, more than ever, every friendship group is a cult, every community has its own common mind that influences everyone in it, far more than the breakfast cereal ad on the TV.

The center collapses.

I went to a funny meeting last night with Theresa Putkey, a friend and the local chair of the Society of Technical Communicators. Wow, now I really am name dropping.

A bunch of creative writers gave a talk about the creative process, and ended up just going on about their copyright. Some of the crowd were wooed by this, and cherished dreams of making 6 and 7 figures on a blockbuster they wrote. Except that they won't. Others sat and yawned. And some, myself included, vascillated between basking in reflected glory and, well, our reality.

Chris Corrigan quotes McLuhan: "The artist, when he encounters the present…is always seeking new patterns, new pattern recognition, which is his task. The absolute indispensability of the artist is that he alone in the present can give the pattern recognition."

This is a great observation, no doubt. The artist is, if you like, a service provider. But, in a branded age of blockbusters, artists have been cast as either superstars or nobodys. There is a more basic story: we are artists of our own worlds. Green marketing needs to address this reality above all.

For the most part, the narratives we write are not that interesting. There is the odd Tolstoy, and a lot of really ordinary, hook-laden writing. Movies, books, marketing stuff, business plans reports... all of these are usually pretty mediocre. Some of it informs ( like Tech Writing, which one can respect as useful writing), but most narratives conspire to take us outside of our actual experience and fantasize. We curl up with a big popular book or movie and are held in its arms. We complain about "too much information" but the moral problem is: we purposely leave relationship and choose mediated experiences over direct experience.

In the multi channel universe, the waning of manufactured blockbusters and the elongation of the Long Tail gives us a chance to listen to a lot of diverse stories - and maybe to reflect that relationship is more important than the stories we tell. I have to support the writers in the writers strike, but at the same time it seems like watching a sun set - blazing and impressive, then waning. It's a glimpse into the glorious, totalitarian warfare of old media.

Green marketing is social marketing

The language of marketing is about conquest, power, push.
And, as I understand it, branding is about creating a niche that is exclusive, that enables the company to rise above commoditization. It is about creating a special space that visitors can rent time in. When the fresh cup of coffee is served, I am part of the dream. When the cup is drained, the paper cup is stained, and time's up. I can only get the dream back by coming back, and paying again.

These things we buy, in the space of life and death, are actually mundane. Just brown liquid in a paper cup. But marketing communications makes it seem otherwise, by promising betterment, or inducing fear or reprisal, or flattering people. In other words, by making people cherish themselves, even more. Like Hollywood does.

Fat lot of good, but Green products are still often sold this old Hollywood way. In so far as the conventional branded experience encourages me to be cool in myself, it actually subverts integration of self and other. Which brings me to my point: Conventional branding is the opposite of green. QED.

Green is socially integrated; social marketing is the fit. More on this.

Shameless plug all round

His recent book launch is reason to link to the book. Plus it's his birthday.
John Grant's book, the Green Marketing Manifesto is out. It's supposed to be a good book. I'd like to read it.

Real Value

I'm working on a short but intense contract doing marketing materials - a software company serving the investment community. Here we are very aware of the meltdown due to the sub prime crisis continues that is now affecting prime mortgage markets, and is shaking down the entire US and global economy. "The reality is that most financial institutions – banks, commercial banks, pension funds, hedge funds – have barely started to recognize the lower “fair value” of their impaired securities." [more from Nouriel Roubini's Blog]

The underlying problem is complex, but at the heart of it we can see a deep Green issue: it is a crisis that is caused by an ethical crisis in lending, and a crisis about what is fair, what is real value.

The Green economy is with us already. Called Green for lack of a better word, it is a free enterprise economy that more apt to look at what is fair, what is the actual value of things. It looks to how value is created and sustained. It offers rewards for true wealth creation, and adds new check on how wealth is unfairly siphoned off. Hence the idea of a carbon tax.

Most people are ready to make personal sacrifices to address climate change, according to a BBC poll of 22,000 people in 21 countries. Four out of five people indicated they were prepared to change their lifestyle - even in the US and China, the world's two biggest emitters of carbon dioxide.See BBC Story

Improving rooftop conversations

Bill Clinton, an important voice in the next US election, is talking about new energy initiatives being a smart new base for the US economy.

Clinton has a knack for mobilizing real passion for this kind of thing. But Clinton, as his presidency shows, is a pragmatist. The tottering of the US economy can be directly linked to US dependency on disposable resource usage. It is common sense that practical alternatives form the basis of a national energy policy.

On Friday I visited a client, tile manufacturer Interstyle. Up above the factory floor is 100,000 square feet of roofing. See that blue thing on the left? It's a settling tank for post industrial water.









Combined with rain water from the roof, this water is stored in the pale blue water tank shown below. The water from the tank is used as a coolant in Interstyle's glaze process. At the end of the pipe, purified water is settled out and added to the pale blue tank once again.

The entire system was installed this year. The ROI is less than two years.I've called this kind of technology deployment as something to do with "basic goodness." Interstyle's VP of Product Development is more practical. He describes it as "common sense."

Investors

No doubt influenced by my current work for a financial services software company, today I added Climateer Investor to my link list ("Projects friends and other influences"). It is a packed source of current information on green business tends, including legislation and financials. All points of view etc.