From the monthly archives:

March 2009

Is social enterprise the ultimate sustainable organization?

03.30.2009

Last weekend’s Regional Innovation Forum at the Portland Expo Center featured the Social Innovation Track, where social enterprise and entrepreneurship took central stage. The track was facilitated by Amy Pearl, Executive Director of Springboard Innovation*, a Portland non-profit which enables  community members to solve community challenges with sustainable, innovative solutions, helping people become social entrepreneurs [...]

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This week’s most helpful posts, 13/2009

03.29.2009

Most valuable and underused social media strategy, Bloghound – …is embedding customer reviews in your website. Customer reviews. Who would have thought?

Mining Twitter for leads, Duct Tape Marketing – Get down and dirty with Twitter Advanced Search. Here’s how.

Social media ROI: A calculator for nonprofit campaigns, FreshNetworks – A few things to keep in mind [...]

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Social media from Intel to your sustainable business

03.25.2009

During last night’s Social Media Club of Portland presentation “Getting it: Careers in social media”, Intel’s Kelly Feller touched on several points applicable to sustainable businesses wanting to incorporate social media into their business. Here are a few of notes, impressions, and quotes from the talk as well as the audience:

In order for your social [...]

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Regional Innovation Forum: A call to leadership and collaboration for sustainability

03.24.2009

Portland’s sustainability geeks are abuzz with the upcoming Better Living Show, “the Northwest’s largest sustainable lifestyle show”. Less known and potentially more interesting, inspiring, and educational will be the Show’s parallel event, the Regional Innovation Forum (3/27 and 3/28 at the Portland Expo Center).
“Imagine a conference where the content is inspiring and the quality [...]

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Learn your customer’s story

03.23.2009

Get to know and understand your customer. Cultivate relationships. Build community. You hear marketers circulate these refrains all the time. What does any of it mean? How do you do it?
Learn your customer’s story.

Stories are how we communicate. First this happened, next that, and then something else. Stories are how we learn and how we [...]

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This week’s most helpful posts, 12/2009

03.22.2009

Value propositions 101, Rocket Watcher – One helpful way of defining the value proposition for your product or service (and a great blog to boot).

Who’s in charge of  your company culture?, Brains on Fire – Trick question. No one should be in charge of your company culture because rather than being institutionalized culture should be [...]

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The 7th sin of greenwashing

03.21.2009

TerraChoice’s six sins of greenwashing classify the major ways companies mislead “consumers regarding [their] environmental practices (…) or the environmental benefits of a product or service.” The six sins are:

Hidden trade-off
No proof
Vagueness
Irrelevance
Fibbing
Lesser of two evils

After pondering these the other day, I’ve added a 7th sin to the list: the sin of condescension. The sin of [...]

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Stay frosty!

03.19.2009

As a newcomer to the U.S. and with English as my fourth language – after Slovak, Czech, and Hungarian – I daily learn a new word or phrase or culture tidbit (I’m told the English language will reach 1 million words in April). The phrase that seems most appropriate for the last day of winter: [...]

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The sustainability of pay-what-you-want

03.16.2009

The Oregonian reported Saturday, that the Portland-area restaurant mini-chain Blue Sage Cafe is letting customers pay what they want for their food. During the month-long promotion, customers receive the full bill and a chance to write in how much they wish to pay.
The pay-what-you-want has spread to a variety of products/services, including music (Radiohead, Nine [...]

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