Posts tagged as:

community-building

Review: Crowds are us

02.05.2010
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How times change: In the 110 years between the work of Gustave Le Bon (1895) and James Surowiecki (2005), crowds went from embodying stupidity to being wise. Compare and contrast:

Le Bon: “In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated. [T]he crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual.”

Surowiecki: “[U]nder the right [...]

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Community building with a building: The Sheldon

01.30.2010
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A while back Sustainable Industries reported on an innovative way of developing a retirement community. The Green Light Cooperative will develop The Sheldon with the help and input from its future tenants and operate it as a coop. A single building will thus manage to manifest elements of participatory development, crowdsourcing, and cooperative housing, while [...]

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Review: “Business and the Buddha: Doing Well by Doing Good”

01.22.2010
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“Buddhism in business, yeah right,” I thought when a friend handed me Business and the Buddha. It just seemed like too much of a stretch to apply one in the other. I stand corrected.
Lloyd Field makes a convincing argument for applying the principles of Buddhism in capitalist business. In the process, he outlines an alternative [...]

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Eyeballs vs. hearts-and-minds marketing

01.06.2010

When prompted to define sustainable marketing, I often use the contrast between eyeballs and hearts-and-minds marketing.
Eyeballs marketing: “My eyes!”
Eyeballs marketing aims to reach as many people with as many touches as possible on the company’s terms. Eyeballs marketing knows it takes a number of times to just get its message registered and remembered, not to [...]

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Applying positive psychology in marketing

01.04.2010

Positive psychology keeps cropping up on my radar, whether it be through works like Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience or the “Stiglitz Report”. In a nutshell, if traditional psychology deals with pathologies of the human psyche like mental illnesses, positive psychology focuses on human strengths and virtues, studying ways to enrich individuals’ lives. What would [...]

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Management- vs. employee-driven community involvement

12.23.2009

Integrating cause marketing into your company’s strategic core makes for the right start toward building a triple bottom line business.
How do you decide what cause or causes to support? You have essentially two alternatives for this internal process: top-down or management-driven, and bottom-up or employee-driven. What are their pros and cons for you as [...]

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Cause marketing and social sustainability, Part 2

12.16.2009

Even though from the social sustainability standpoint its shortcomings outweigh its advantages, cause marketing has its place in fostering the social sustainability of business. You will do well by doing good.
Using cause marketing for enhancing your company’s People bottom line will require a few adjustments, however. These adjustments will 1) shift the definition of cause [...]

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Cause marketing and social sustainability, Part 1

12.15.2009
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With the holiday shopping season nearing its holy climax, what better time to evaluate from the business perspective the viability of cause marketing for social sustainability. Does cause marketing work? How to get the most from it?
Define: Cause marketing
Cause or cause-related marketing is a company’s “marketing effort creating a public association with a social or [...]

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Book review: “Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business”

11.13.2009

Reading Jeff Howe’s book you’d think crowdsourcing is the best thing since the invention of the company. Despite Howe’s stated intention to be impartial in his journalistic account of the rise, present, and future of crowdsourcing, it’s clear he’s in the evangelist camp. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except you won’t learn much about [...]

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