This is my contribution in “Age of Conversation 3: It’s Time To Get Busy!” (emphasis added for this post). Read more about the project, or, even better, buy the book now.

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Social sustainability gets short shrift in branding. Reasons abound: it’s hard to define and measure quantitatively; it’s intangible, processual, and complex; it’s not as sexy as caring for the environment and not as immediately profitable. No wonder the People bottom line stays in the background.

It doesn’t have to be so. Define brand as the sum of your stakeholders’ experiences with your company or product, and conversation as “the informal exchange of ideas by spoken word”. Then, consider that conversation with the brand is part of the overall brand experience, and that the acquisition of ideas or information benefits both the brand and the stakeholder, injecting meaning into the interaction. Combine people, conversation, experience, and meaning, and social sustainability no longer appears so daunting.

Of course, people converse not with brands, but with other people. Every staff person interacting with a stakeholder engages in conversation on behalf of your brand, building the brand experience, creating meaning. Social media is one set of tools making brand conversations possible. Empowering your people with social media to converse with your stakeholders means shifting from centrally-planned corporate messaging to decentralized, personal interactions that reflect the diversity of your staff.

People talk like people, not like press releases. If there’s one principle to follow in conversing through social media for social sustainability, it’s to emulate the way you’d talk in person. Converse online as you’d converse offline: no shouting, no one-way broadcasts, no corporate speak. As a company, set goals and measurable results and supply sufficient resources to follow through on your brand conversations. Then, let your people converse.

Like threads in a loom, the myriad of conversations your employees have with your stakeholders, through social media or other channels, will weave your brand into being. Thanks to consistent conversation, your brand will become more experiential, more conversational, and more human. What’s more, by listening to, participating in, and engaging with your stakeholders’ community, the conversation will enhance your social sustainability.

I have mentioned AIGA Portland’s event “SHIFT: A Green Salon” a couple of times, here and here. The group’s sustainability committee puts on the awesome pecha kucha to spotlight answers to the titular question. At each SHIFT, 10 designers, marketers, scholars, practitioners, or students present, in 5-minute talks, their ideas, thoughts, and solutions across a broad spectrum of design.

SHIFT 4, which takes place on Tuesday, August 24th from 7 to 9:30 pm at Ecotrust, will be an even more exciting one for me: it will feature my presentation titled, “Crowdsourcing & Design: The Case of the Social Book”! I will use the examples of “The Portland Bottom Line” and “Our Portland Story” to highlight how books can connect people and benefit causes. I’ll also present some background on the newly brewing venture that’s been keeping me busy.

With that, come to SHIFT 4! If not for me, then for the 9 other presenters and their talks–judging from the line up and titles, it promises to be yet another fantastic and insightful evening! And if you need even more nudging, come for cupcakes and free beer! AIGA Portland says, “The event includes mingling before and after the presentations, a short Q&A, local snacks, cupcakes from Peach Cheesecake, and free beer if you bring your own mug”.

See you there!

As my new venture takes shape (more on that in the coming weeks), I read a lot about startups. Amid the predictable stream of advice about the need for a “single-minded, uncompromising obsession with One Thing” (via War Room), the most intriguing case studies showcase companies that set out to offer Product A and ended up making it big with Product B. Not only do I see in those stories parallels with my own development and evolution toward the new venture, I’ve drawn a major business/life lesson from them. It’s one of those “Duh!” moments when you read it, but actually doing or experiencing it is what truly makes a difference (goes for all the advice you read online).

Even if you build your business around a particular product or service, and even if you maintain singular focus on being the best in your category, things will come your way that may take you in a whole new, unexpected direction.

• You get into the bookkeeping business only to find yourself–say, thanks to an awesome client–become a financial consultant.
• You resolve to offer the best steak in town only to find what really attracts patrons are your cocktails.
• Or, as I saw with Semiosis Communications, you want to do project work in marketing strategy and branding, but you get steered in long-term, ongoing marketing communications and content marketing work.

Sometimes things evolve, other times they just fall into your lap. Needless to say, the new must not only be profitable, it must feel right.

That the new and unexpected may have been there all along may be a likely corollary, as I discovered with the new venture (as my wife said, “It’s more you.”). You may be pushing to be someone your entire being doesn’t encompass; you may wish to do something you love but that isn’t what you’re in love with. With every gain you may have to lose something. Finding yourself in business can be just as difficult as in life in general.

The same applies in your marketing efforts. You opt for print (brochures, sales letters, direct mail), but find email works wonders. You faithfully put ads in the local paper, but it’s the freebies that bring in customers. You count on face-to-face networking and trainings to generate business, and you eventually realize your existing relationships and social media activity are the main drivers (yes, another Semiosis example; my original business/marketing plan went out the window 6 months after I started–I never looked back).

The key is to see opportunities as such and having a mindset and system in place to make adjustments. Indeed, a much greater man than I, said long ago, “Fortune favors the prepared mind” (in hockey, the expression is, “Keep your stick on the ice”). You just never know, so might as well be ready. Keep your eyes peeled. Keep an open mind and an open heart.

Have you experienced something like this in your business or marketing? Please share in comments.

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Image credit: Daveography (formerly raptortheangel)

This is the eighth and final post in a series on improving the environmental sustainability of marketing communications. Previously: Measurement (in two parts); A model; Rethink; Reduce; Reuse; Recycle. Today: Replenish. A summary post to follow soon.

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The final phase in your effort to green-up your marketing communications program is Replenish. In Replenish, you recognize, acknowledge, and honor that the amount of energy and resources in the planet’s ecosystem is finite. You, then, must return to the ecosystem whatever energy or resources your marcom consumes.

In the marcom environmental sustainability improvement model, a sustained effort to go through the Rethink — Reduce — Reuse — Recycle chain must precede the Replenish phase. Replenish what you end up consuming after you’ve done everything you can in the model’s previous stages. In fact, the best method of replenishment is not to consume in the first place.

At the same time, because the model itself is a loop, after Replenish you must get back to the Rethink stage to figure out further improvements of your marcom’s environmental footprint.

As in the preceding phases of the model, measurement is key: you must know how much you consumed to know how much to replenish. That includes energy, materials, energy to produce materials, and any waste, by-products, or externalities produced.

Methods of Replenish

Carbon offsets are the most common method currently used by environmentally-minded (and many other) businesses.

“Offsets are typically achieved through financial support of projects that reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in the short- or long-term. The most common project type is renewable energy, such as wind farms, biomass energy, or hydroelectric dams. Others include energy efficiency projects, the destruction of industrial pollutants or agricultural byproducts, destruction of landfill methane, and forestry projects.” — Wikipedia

With offsets, you essentially purchase the reduction of greenhouse gases by the same amount that your marketing communications produced.

If used simply for PR purposes while continuing to do business as usual, offsets are more than controversial: they’re a wrong method of Replenish. That’s why the completion of the model’s preceding stages is so important! Once again, you can replenish your marcom’s energy and resource consumption by simply reducing its consumption.

A related way to replenish your marcom’s consumption is only purchasing renewable energy and materials. Many utilities offer renewable power programs, such as PGE’s Green Source or NW Natural’s Smart Energy, though often (as in the latter example) these are simply offset programs.

Sourcing your marcom from eco-certified suppliers can serve as another alternative way of replenishing your consumption. Examples include Chain of Custody certifications for printers or publishers, e.g. Forest Stewardship Council or Sustainable Forestry Initiative certificates; or website certification programs like Co2Stats.com, which buys “EPA-endorsed certificates showing that you are effectively powering the site with renewable energy from wind and solar farms”.

If you’re more into taking a broader, systemic view, you can follow Jeffrey Sachs’s advice and support organizations providing development aid to alleviate poverty in the Third World. While an interesting proposition, the issue is beyond this blog’s scope so I’ll leave it up to you to delve into it.

What methods do you use to replenish your marcom’s energy and resource consumption?

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Image credit: elvis_payne and fish 2000

This is the first in a series on sustainable marketing measurement, code name Metrics Monday. Today: An introduction.

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“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” –management meme, source unknown, possibly Peter Drucker or Robert Kaplan

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” –Albert Einstein

“Organizations exist to create value, and not all value can be monetized.” –Bob Lieberman

For way too long now I’ve steered clear of discussing sustainable marketing metrics. With this new series I aim to put the matter to rest, or preferably up for lively discussion.

The three quotes above hint at some of the larger points weaving this series together. As an archetypal industrial-age business discipline, marketing requires metrics. The post-industrial age demands a different approach, one anchored in more subjective measures of quality, value, and impact. Furthermore, the obsession with metrics leads to the measurement of things that don’t matter. Finally, marketing done from the sustainability mindset requires, not disposing of metrics altogether, but measuring with a different set of metrics and from a new, human-centric mindset.

This series will explore several themes:

• Extrinsic vs. intrinsic, or instrumental vs. expressive metrics. Do you work toward achieving some externally-imposed goals, or do you do business for the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself? How do you measure marketing done for its own sake?

• Process vs. outcome metrics: There’s a difference between measuring the what and the how of process and measuring the change or impact of outcomes. What difference are your marketing activities making in the world?

• Quantitative vs. qualitative metrics. On counting beans and evaluating what can and cannot — or, should and should not — be counted.

• Brand-centric vs. stakeholder-centric metric. You usually set out to measure your marketing efforts for your own or your company’s benefit. What if you measured the effect of your marketing program on your stakeholders instead?

• Financial + social + environmental metrics aka the Triple Bottom Line. From financial metrics, I’ll explore Return On Investment, where the continuing debate around ROI of social media will be particularly helpful, offering transferable lessons. In social metrics, I’ll tackle social return on investment (SROI). And I tackled measuring environmental impact of marketing in the just-concluded series on improving environmental sustainability of marketing communications.

• Linear vs. systems metrics. What you typically measure in marketing is uni-directional and growth-oriented, suitable for an old-school linear enterprise. Sustainability requires measurement from the systems-thinking perspective — the cyclical and relational metrics.

• The Hawthorne Effect. What is measured changes itself in response to being measured, rendering measurement imprecise at best.

• Externalities. Externalities must be factored in the true cost and benefit of marketing, as well as business overall.

• The micropower of measurement, or the metrics discourse. Hard to say where this one will lead, but I do subscribe to some of Michel Foucault’s theory of discourses and how they shape our reality. We must break out of the “limits of acceptable speech” in discussing and applying marketing and business metrics. In marketing metrics, too, we must be the change we wish to see in the world.

What have I missed? Have you been thinking about new marketing metrics, and if so, what would you like to discuss in the Metrics Monday series?

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Image credits: aussiegal and impactmatt