Green Marketing TV » Green Videos & Podcasts

Runa Amazon Guayusa: A Social Enterprise That Empowers Indigenous Farmers in Ecuador [VIDEO]

Green Marketing TV — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 13:30:17 +0000

A few months ago, I visited the Ecuador offices of Runa Amazon Guayusa, a social enterprise founded by a friend from the SF Bay Area, Tyler Gage. Now Tyler’s story has a special place in my heart because it was I who introduced Tyler to the Mamallactas, a family of Kichwa shamans from Ecuador, who served Tyler his first cup of Guayusa tea while he was still a student at Brown University. Watching the evolution of a positive encounter transform into a vision, and then bloom into a full fledged, well funded international social enterprise has been deeply inspiring.

After enjoying his first cup of guayusa, Tyler identified a lucrative gap in the market – here was a highly caffeinated drink that didn’t yet exist on the shelves of US grocery stores. Tyler wrote the business plan for Runa while he was still in university. After he graduated, he and his business partner / class mate / and best friend, Runa Co-Founder Dan MacCombie, flew to Ecuador and spent several months there researching the feasibility of their business idea. Once they determined that their concept was viable.

While I didn’t have time to do a full blown interview with Tyler, with the help of video nomad extraordinaire Shae Frydenlund we were able to film Tyler answering some key questions on what it took to get a social enterprise – one that works with indigenous farmers in Ecuador to provide US markets with sustainably harvested guayusa – off the ground.

In this interview, Tyler Gage, President and Co-founder of Runa Amazon Guayusa, shares how his experiences with the Kichwa people of the Amazon rainforest inspired him to found a social enterprise that exports sustainably harvested guayusa tea sourced from indigenous communities in Ecuador. Runa Amazon Guayusa tea company empowers indigenous peoples by allowing them to earn income by growing Guayusa on rainforest land that would otherwise be sold to loggers. Tyler explains the process of founding a social enterprise in a developing country, and offers advice for those interested in starting their own socially-conscious business.

Runa means, in the Kichwa language, “a fully living human being”. It’s a term of immense cultural pride for the Kichwa people and something we, as change makers, can all aspire to be.

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The Art of Green Marketing for Sustainable Brands – Park Howell, Park&Co [VIDEO]

Lorna Li — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 13:00:22 +0000

Did your logo just sprout a leaf? Does your sustainable brand rely on children, flowers, and the earth in cupped hands to communicate your green-ness? If so, your green business may be guilty of one or more brand curdling green marketing cliches.

Park Howell of Park&Co, the Sustainability Storyteller, helps companies tell their sustainable story with authenticity, and originality.

In this interview we cover:

Which companies tell their sustainability story well, without the hackneyed green marketing cliches
Big brands that are failing the “got green?” test
Successful examples of green marketing, where the “green” in the brand name actually works
Egregious examples of green wash, in products that have no business calling themselves green
Whether green marketing is really dead and if we should just give up

This revealing discussion with several real world green marketing examples, ought to help you better define your green marketing strategies and bring you closer to becoming a remarkable sustainable brand.

Watch the Full Program

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About Park Howell

Park Howell, president and owner of Park&Co, and phoenix-based sustainable marketing firm, as been in the advertising and marketing business for nearly 25 years, and last year received the coveted “Ad Person of the Year” Award from the American Advertising Federation of Metropolitan Phoenix. Park&Co is about more more than just award-winning ad campaigns. The agency creates movements that ignites the growth of people, products, companies and causes that dare to make the world a better place. Their sustainability work includes the invention of Water – Use It Wisely, the world’s largest water conservation outreach effort; and ecodriving program that was recently launched through Coca-Cola’s 25,000 driver fleet; Goodwill of Central Arizona, which has become that fastest growing Goodwill in the world under the agency’s marketing and sales guidance; and the sustainability story behind Resolution Copper Mining. Park&Co opened in 1995 and can be found at Parkandco.com.

Check out Park Howell’s blog at www.parkhowell.com or connect with Park on Twitter @ParkHowell, or on Facebook.

Resources

Tools

Got Green? and 10 Other Brand-Curdling Clichés to Avoid in Your Green Marketing – Downloadable PPT on Slideshare
Do You Suffer from Gang Green? – Downloadable PDF

Companies Mentioned

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How to Start an Online Platform that Matches Students with Mentors [VIDEO]

Maryruth Belsey Priebe — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:18:24 +0000

Working almost like a dating service for mentors and college students, StudentMentor is a nonprofit organization that helps to match people up to enhance the education process for anyone interested. Ashkon Jafari is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of StudentMentor and has tons of wisdom to impart to those interested in discovering the ins and outs of establishing an innovative nonprofit organization like this in the US. Listen in to this interview between Ashkon and Lorna Li for a glimpse into his thoughts on:

The importance of having a mentor and how it can increase your earnings and boost your overall success
The career benefits of serving on the board of directors for a nonprofit
What it takes to start a nonprofit organization like StudentMentor.org
Knowing whether you need to establish a 501CS in order to start a nonprofit social enterprise
How to procure sponsors and donations as a new nonprofit organization
How to attract volunteers to your nonprofit enterprise
How to advertise your work and attract more members

You’ll also learn about how beneficial having a mentor can be for your earning potential and future career success.

Watch the Full Program

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About Ashkon Jafari

Ashkon Jafari is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of StudentMentor.org, a nonprofit organization leveraging technology to provide mentorship to college students across the country. Previously, Ashkon was the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Making a Difference for Good USA, a nonprofit working to improve the lives of rural Cambodians through rural development and education. Prior to that role, he worked in finance for NVIDIA and was a key player on their philanthropic team. Ashkon is the creator and host of Social Innovation Live, a talk show where he has interviewed a Nobel Laureate and many leaders from around the world, and sponsored by the Stanford Center for Social Innovation. Ashkon graduated in the top 1% of his class and has a B.S. in Finance from Santa Clara University. He is a StartingBloc Fellow.

Connect with Ashkon on Twitter and Facebook.

Resources

Tools

Companies Mentioned

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Sacred Commerce Meets Green Business – Alexia Marcous, Dharma MS [VIDEO]

Lorna Li — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:34:45 +0000

How do you walk your talk while running a triple bottom line business? How do you avoid turning your socially responsible business into a sweatshop for good?

Alexia Marcous, Co-Founder and Vice President of Dharma Merchant Services, shares with us what it took to their grow their business, how they practice compassionate commerce, and the joys of running a B-Corporation that serves other amazing green businesses.

Dharma Merchant Services is an online merchant service provider with an ethical grounding like no other. Throughout her business, providing the accounts and equipment that businesses need in order to accept credit card payments, Alexia Marcous works to bring her ethics into focus. That means overcoming egregious contracts, undisclosed terms, cancellation fees, and bringing ethics back into the world of business. Check out this interview to find out why these principles are so central to Alexia’s entrepreneurial approach, including her thoughts on:

The benefits of incorporating the spiritual into your business
Using passive residual income to give back to the community
Balancing work and life demands
Why she chose to make her company a Certified B Corporation
The challenges and benefits of being a greener business and where to get a green certification

She’ll also talk about her own personal journey of seeking to incorporate the sacred through right action and right livelihood into her daily life.

Watch the Full Program

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About Alexia Marcous

Alexia holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an M.B.A. from Drexel University. Alexia was a computer programmer and systems architect consultant for 12 years, serving companies and non-profits in the financial, insurance, pharmaceutical, energy and technology industries. She currently sits on the board of the Green Chamber of Commerce as Vice President and serves on the Political Action Committee.

For more information about Alexia Marcous and Dharma Merchant services go to www.dharmams.com, or connect with Dharma MS on Facebook or Twitter.

Resources

Companies Mentioned

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Joel Makower on the Biggest Developments in Green Business & Green Jobs [VIDEO]

Maryruth Belsey Priebe — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:08:45 +0000

As the go-to speaker and writer on all things green entrepreneurial, Joel Makower has had his fair share of start-ups and working for mainstream businesses. He’s turned his vast business experience and passion for sustainability and the world of cleantech toward the development of GreenBiz Group Inc. where he is the co-founder and chair. Makower is also the executive editor at GreenBiz.com, a leading resource for green businesses, green marketing, and green careers.

In this interview with Green Marketing TV, Joel talks about some exciting developments in the world of green business and green jobs:

The development of the GreenBiz Executive Network, which includes 60 big companies.
The creation of the Clean-Tech Investor Summit that brings together research and new developments in the world of renewable energies.
Should you go out and get a green MBA? Joel weighs in.
How to define a green job, trends in green careers, and how to find a green job.
What it takes to build sustainability into your existing job description or business model.

Joel also talks about how to build a thriving online community, what it takes to increase the number of quality visitors you get, and how to make money with all of your online efforts.

Watch the Full Program

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About Joel Makower

For more than 20 years, Joel Makower has been a well-respected voice on business, the environment, and the bottom line. As a writer, speaker, and strategist on corporate environmental practices, clean technology, and green marketing, he has helped a wide range of companies align environmental responsibility with business success.

Joel is co-founder and executive editor of Greener World Media, Inc., which produces GreenBiz.com and its sister sites, ClimateBiz.com, GreenerBuildings.com, GreenerDesign.com, and GreenerComputing.com. Joel is also the principal author of the annual State of Green Business report and the Greener by Design conference, both produced by Greener World Media.

Books by Joel Makower

Green Conferences

Green Industry Resources

Greener World Media Websites

Companies Mentioned

Raw Transcript

00:40 Lorna Li: Hi there, I’m Lorna Li, Editor-in-chief of Green Marketing TV and EntrepreneursForaChange.com. Today, we have a very special guest with us and that is Joel Makower, a bestselling author, speaker and entrepreneur who has been pioneering the greening of mainstream business for the past 20 years. Now, Joel is a co-founder of GreenBiz.com which is one of the leading online publications that covers green business, green marketing, Clean Tech, and green careers. So if you don’t want to miss out on the latest green business news, I highly recommend that you head over to GreenBiz.com and sign up for their GreenBuzz newsletter. And if you want to find out more about Joel Makower, go ahead and visit his blog which is called Two Steps Forward, and you can go there by going to ReadJoel.com. Today, Joel and I are going to talk about the state of green jobs and how to have a green dream career. So Joel, I know you as the founder of GreenBiz and over the past few years, I’ve actually discovered more of all the different things that you’re doing. So, can you share with us some of the latest projects that you’re working on right now.

01:59 Joel Makower: Well, first of all thanks, Lorna, for having me. There’s a lot going on in my little… Well, first of all, there is the GreenBiz group which is a company I co-founded that did have as you said GreenBiz.com as a flagship website. But we do more than just websites. Online media is part of it, we also do events, conferences and events, like the state of Green Business Forum and a GreenBiz Innovation Forum and some others that we’ll be announcing in the coming months actually. We do research reports and we’re growing that part of the business that we print out reports like state of Green Business and the Green Building Market and Impact Report and GreenBiz Salary Survey, things like that. And finally we run something called the GreenBiz Executive Network which is a peer-to-peer learning forum for senior sustainability professionals in big companies.

02:52 JM: So we have about 60 big companies and we bring them together two or three times a year to learn… They come together and learn from one another. So that’s the GreenBiz part and one way I also put under the company called Clean Edge which is in the clean technology research, we do Clean-Tech Investor Summit that we had down at Palm Springs and a number of research reports. So I’ve had the great good fortune and through those and through some other activities to look at the greening of companies looking at the clean technology market place for the past 10 years. And increasingly look at the convergence finally of those two places, green business and Clean Tech.

03:36 LL: Wow, you sound like a really busy guy and I think it’s amazing that you’re doing all these things. One thing I’ve always been curious about, publisher to publisher, is how long did it take you to grow GreenBiz as the leading green biz website and how long did it take for you to monetize? So you guys got to have great writers. Where do you find these writers and how do you monetize all your traffic?

04:04 JM: Sure. You asked several questions and there’s a little bit of history. So I’ve been writing about this since really the late ’80s I started, I wrote a book in 1989 called A Green Consumer which is looking at the green market place back then and what we thought at that time was this great way that consumers are going to come in and start to vote with their dollars environmentally speaking. Then I very quickly, have a journalist by training, I wrote the book, I had a weekly syndicated column in about a hundred papers called The Green Consumer and was speaking into preaching the gospel that every time you open your wallet, you cast a vote for or against the environment and the market place isn’t a democracy, it doesn’t take just 51% of people voting to make a difference. What I realized in the course of writing and speaking about this stuff back in 1990-91 was that there really was no green consumer movement in the US; that consumers weren’t all that interested in change despite what they’re telling, and have been telling and continue to tell pollsters.

05:08 JM: That’s changed a little bit and if you want to target green market segmentation, I frankly don’t think that there’s much in a way of green consumerism out there. But what I realized along the way as I was being called into companies to talk about the so called green market place, was that companies themselves were doing a lot of things environmentally speaking or trying to for a number of reasons. Some because they had to and some because they generally want to do and some because they saw it was a great opportunity on a number of fronts. And that was interesting to me so I started a newsletter in 1991 called the Green Business Letter, wrote some other books. And then the web came along and I started… Because your question about how we built the wide green biz and monetized it, and it’s not a short story but I’ll try to make it short.

05:56 JM: When the web came along, I started a website for my newsletter, subscription-based printed monthly newsletter. And then I realized that there was a terrific amount of information coming across my desk that wasn’t being captured. And later, 10 years later, I realized there was a name for people like me just called content aggregators. But at that time, I was kind of an information pack rat and I felt that there’s an opportunity partly to sell more newsletter subscriptions to create a free resource center of all these stuff. And I quickly realized that I made up this green business resource center was bigger than just a little marketing come on and that became a project unto itself. This is 1998-99. You may remember back then, or if you do not remember, there was no business model in that period of time for giving away information on the internet. And so, I decided to create a non-profit in 1999 to publish this information resource center called GreenBiz.com.

06:54 JM: So, GreenBiz started out as a non-profit and it went along for a number of years and it didn’t really… It did the tin cup thing, asking for donations in foundations and things like that. Never really paid by itself but managed to grow. In about 2005, I met a gentleman named Pete May who showed me that there was a business model. In fact, every sector now had a company that did websites and conferences and research reports, and nobody had done that in the sustainability realm that I had somehow managed to build, a pretty good ground around GreenBiz¸why don’t we do this? So I turned a non-profit into a for-profit. And Pete May, really, who is my co-founder and the CEO of the GreenBiz Group, my company, is changed in 20 years of B2B publishing and he had built 8-figure revenue streams for magazines and trade magazines and like. And he came in and very quickly, in the first two weeks probably, raised more money in advertising than we raised for five years in GreenBiz as a non-profit.

08:04 JM: So that’s how we started to monetize. And then, it allowed us to grow and build a real content team. There’s no magic to it. We monetized it, actually, we’ve grown it from a number of different… From one revenue stream, advertising, to a number of different revenue streams including conference registration and company sponsorships and exhibitors to usage reports and as I said, its membership organization. So we strategically tried to get from a 100% revenue from sponsorship and advertising to only 50%. And now, we’re actually going less than 50% as the company grows and grows to the size that it is. So the bigger we get, the less money we wanted to get from advertising because that’s the least reliable form of revenue.

08:53 LL: Yeah, it’s especially challenging right now to monetize websites wholly on advertising. I think a lot of web publishers are really feeling the pinch year especially since it is been getting really competitive these days. In the old days, did you actually work with ad networks or did you have people call companies directly and ask if they would be willing to advertise?

09:16 JM: No. We’re in a little bit of a different league, Lorna, because we one of the things we’ve managed to do quite successfully is, as you know, the unit of measure in advertising is CPM, the cost per thousand readers. And CPMs… I don’t really know. I’m not on the advertising side, I’m on the content side, but my understanding is that they’re $10, $20. In some cases, $5, some cases, in big sites where its low value, it’s a dollar. I don’t know exactly the numbers but it’s not very much and it has gone down over time as more and more websites aggregate more and more people but low value audiences. And we’re in a very high value audience which are professionals in companies interested in the environment. Not just environmental professionals, they are marketing people and branding people, they are human resource people. They are operations facilities management, purchasing, fleets, on and on. And because of that, we’re getting irrationally high CPMs – $50, $60, $70, $80.

10:23 JM: And so we’ve actually done very, very well with advertising. In fact, it continues… Even though, it represents a smaller and smaller fraction, it grows every year, in terms of the dollar. Since the whole company is growing. So we’re finding that there is an audience. Again, we’re a B2B site, so we’re not looking at consumers, we’re looking at other business people and that’s a big difference. So we’re finding actually quite a bit of success in selling advertisements, in getting big companies, IBMs of the world and SAP and AutoDesk and lots and lots of companies to want to be connected to us not just because we get eyeballs as they used to say in the web word but because we’re associated with thought leadership and people want to be part of that.

11:13 LL: What do you find are the most effective methods for you in actually growing your traffic?

11:19 JM: That’s the challenge. I mean, we have… For us, again, it’s not just the quantity but the quality of traffic. So we tussle with this in our editorial team in terms of, do we want to put out stories that we know will get Digg’ed a lot, and a lot of the social media traffics and everyone will be clicking but not necessarily people who we want to attract. But the shorthand, it’s kind of become a joke, in terms, you can call it “the solar bikini stories.” You must have, once upon a time, heard a story about someone who created a solar bikini…

11:53 LL: Is that true? Really? [laughter]

11:55 JM: I think, it’s definitely true. I can send you a picture of it. I don’t even know what the solar does, it must be to power your iPod or something. But, people loved it and got, you know, everyone was digging it and got cast all over the place. We got lots and lots of traffic but they were one time visitors who came for that, left, did not subscribe to our newsletter, did not… Obviously people who weren’t going to pay sizeable amounts to attend our conferences and other things that we sell. So, we’re always struggling with, do we do link bait stories, as they are called, that are just going to get a lot and grow the traffic? Or do we stick to the quality? And the second do you want to do link bait stories and once in a while you actually get some story that is both. But those are rare and so it’s a very hard thing to do to continue to create the quality stories that we aspire to do and then to get out to the audiences that we want to attract.

12:54 LL: I agree it’s really hard to make B2B viral. I have a lot of experience with that in my other job, so kudos to you for being able to get some content like that. What about your writers? Where do you find them? Are they all volunteer writers or are some of them paid or do you have both?

13:15 JM: Well, we have a staff of four full time salaried writers here in the office in Oakland, California and then we have a small number of contract writers. People like Mark Gunther, who basically these days splits his time between Fortune magazine and GreenBiz. He gets a monthly thing and he writes some number of stories for us. We have some other… We’ve been a fortunate beneficiary of an unfortunate trend, which is a lot of great reporters from Fortune, Wall Street Journal and Business Week finding themselves separated involuntarily from their jobs and have great skills out there in terms of reporting on energy and environment. We can’t bring them all in, we can’t afford them all, but we do have some of those. But beyond that, we have somewhere every year between four and five hundred people write for us for free. We call them contributors for multiple reasons [chuckle] literally contributing content.

14:23 JM: And these are largely professionals in the field. Some of them are consultants, a few of them are from NGOs, some of them are MBAs or business students who have something to say or something, some trend that they are looking at or some experience. These are again, helping our audience, which are people in mainstream companies trying to understand how to integrate environmental thinking into their operations and do it in a way that aligns with their core business practices, not just a feel good add-on kind of thing. So we have a lot of people writing for us and we’re getting… We have a number of organizations sort of known organizations in this field, the Rocky Mountain Institute, Business for Social Responsibility, several others who have regular columns for us who write regularly and we have multiple people from the organizations writing for us. It’s been a terrific way to get our little team of four here in Oakland to either directly or indirectly by having other people writing for us that they edit and put up on the site create between roughly 2200 to 2500 stories every year. That’s amazing output for, again, four if you think 250 business days, that’s basically about ten stories a day.

15:45 LL: That’s pretty good. Do they find you or do you guys do outreach to all these different organizations or sustainability professionals?

15:54 JM: It’s a little bit of both. Certainly, people ping us all the time and want to write for us and some of them… I have a one pager that I send to people who want to write for us for two reasons: One, who is one you’ll never hear from again. It’s just a way to say, “Hey, here’s this” then they never follow up. But the ones that do, well, who have a better sense who our audience is and what our voice is, what kind of stories we want. A little bit of transparency, if you’re writing about a client of yours, that’s okay or a customer that’s okay, but we’d like to know that. Or, if you’re involved in this or have some financial interest in what you’re writing about that’s okay, but we need to be transparent. So, we have a few rules of engagement. But increasingly we’re going to organizations. We are fortunate enough to be in a position where we get to pick our partners a lot and so we’re finding organizations that we want to work with, ones that aren’t necessarily being heard by our audience that may have some great output.

16:57 JM: The Rocky Mountain Institute is a terrific example of that. They write just incredibly thoughtful and factual, and researched and deep stories about energy efficiency in buildings. Like so many non-profits organizations they publish on their website, maybe have some kind of email distribution, but nobody really sees, at least in terms of our audience. So, we can pull the best of those and the best from lots of other organizations and then increasingly working with those and it’s working really well. And along the way we do find that there are… We meet all the time corporate executives and others who say, “Hey,” or we hear stories on stage from people at conferences when we ask people, we say, “We’d love it if you’d want to write about that for us, to initiate that project, that ongoing, that product you’re developing, that lesson you learned that you just shared with an audience.” And so, you know, everybody’s got a great story.

17:54 LL: That’s a great strategy for ensuring that you guys get the best content for all the different topics that you cover. So I want to take our conversation to one of your areas of expertise on GreenBiz which is the topic of green careers or green jobs. Based on what you’ve seen so far with regards to just your own research and the content that you’re getting published through GreenBiz, what’s your take on the green jobs market now and where do you see it in the next few years?

18:21 JM: Well, green jobs is one of those things like green business that people talk about as if we all agree on what it means and there’s a standard definition.

18:31 LL: That’s true.

18:32 JM: There isn’t at all. And so, my question is always, what do you mean by a green job? Do you mean someone who’s installing solar panels or fixing electric cars? Or, how do you think about somebody at General Motors who last year was making a Cadillac Escalades and this year is making Chevy Volts? Is that a green job? And how do you think about the admin or the bookkeeper at BrightSource Energy here in Oakland which is one the largest solar, integrated solar firms, they’re building massive solar farms in the Mojave Desert, is that admin or bookkeeper, is that a green job? We don’t really know what that means and so, the question is, and this is the question I get all the time and I speak at business schools while I was just, or colleges, I was just, two days ago down in North Carolina at a school called Guilford College of Liberal Art School Quaker focus, they had a speaker series and they’re very focused on sustainability.

19:38 JM: And then, inevitably, the question is, “Well, this is great. I love this. How do I get a job?” And I hear that from college, I hear it from grad students, I hear it from mid-career professionals, I hear it from light-career professionals. Everybody’s… I mean everybody but a lot of people see this as a really interesting opportunity. One that may sit with their values or they may just be next great way to be employed or make money. And so I have this conversation with a lot of them. And then part of this is… It is the long way of getting to your question, and everybody, they kind of know it when they see it and in some cases, one of the challenges that people say, “Well, I want to go work for Clean Tech companies or I want to work for a green business.” Starting with that basic premise, I mean very rationally so that that’s going to be a green job.

20:31 JM: And yeah, there were some of those but there aren’t that many green business, whatever that means, there are businesses with green values, there are businesses with green practices. Are those green businesses? I don’t know. I mean how do you think about a print shop that only uses recycled paper and prints using soy-based inks and recycles everything? I mean is that a green business? They might not even called… They may be doing all these since and not even self-identified as a green business, that’s just how you practice business these days. So, anyway, I think that the challenge and the opportunity is first of all, figure out what do you want to do. What are you good at? Just in career, in any kind of business, are you good at marketing, are you good at design, are you good at sales, are you good at law or policy or people?

21:23 JM: And in some ways, it’s much better to go to… Start with the skill and a set of environmental beliefs or passions and knowledge in going to any company and deploy those beliefs and knowledge and passions there and try to create… There may be a company that wasn’t even thinking about this or maybe a company that’s thought about it didn’t quite know how to get there, and you can move the needle for that company. A lot of small businesses have fallen to that category. And so, I guess I’m just saying that a lot of this is that, I think the best opportunities aren’t in distinctly green, so-called green businesses, they’re so-called clean technologies. They are all over the place and that every job has a potential to be a green job. I know that sounds like a platitude.

22:13 LL: Yeah, no, it’s kind of really hard to visualize because I think when I look at these different green jobs boards for example, there are certain kinds of jobs that typically show up that are considered to be green. The solar panel installer would definitely be a green job. I mean is there any kind of broad grouping of the different kinds of green jobs? Have you seen in your research a particular job type that seems to be more abundant now than before, like sustainability managers at large companies for example?

22:46 JM: Yeah. There’s a growing demand but it’s a… At any time you don’t need both hands to count the number of job openings that there are or maybe both hands but you can leave your shoes untouched. The thing is that, how do you think about the sales person at a solar company, is that a green job? I mean, the point I’m making, Lorna, is that all of these companies that are doing something green, and there’s a lot more companies than you think, they need everything that a company needs. They need sales people, they need marketing people, they need office admin, they need legal help, they need writers, they need everything. And so, you… It doesn’t mean that you may not want to go in and learn some specific skill around organic gardening or organic farming or textile production or some other technical skill like solar or wind or electric vehicle designer, repair or maintenance or something.

23:55 JM: There are those emerging job categories but they’re not a lot. And I think that’s why a lot of people get frustrated because they’re looking for this instead of just explicitly something that they can say, “This is a green job, I’m installing solar panels.” But beyond installing solar panels and a relative handful of other job descriptions, there aren’t a lot of other great jobs out there. If you look at, we have at GreenBiz, we have a jobs board and in there you’re going to see a lot calls for protecting people like engineers and chemists. You’re going to see a lot of calls for sales people, everyone’s looking for good salespeople in any kind of company and certainly in so-called green companies or clean technology companies, like everyone else, they need quality salespeople. And so in some ways it’s not as magical as a lot of people think. People want this magical job with this magical company. So once in a while they find that but those are rare.

24:55 LL: Yeah, I think for a lot of people who are trying to connect with green jobs, they want to feel that there’s something within their job capacities that’s actually contributing to making the world a more sustainable place, making the world a better place. So, yeah, I would say that even though your question of, is a salesperson at a solar company, would that be considered a green job? I would say in some sense it is because it does tend to attract those people that are looking to find more meaning in their work.

25:24 JM: Yeah, that’s a good opinion. But I’m actually seeing more and more people who just… They say this is as the next pot of gold and they’re coming in for… There’s nothing wrong with that. If you’re like the best damn salesperson and you don’t really care what you’re selling, and you can help sell solar and get more solar panel, more power to you. I don’t care what your politics are, I don’t care what your passions are, I don’t even care if you care about or believe in global warming, if you can move a needle on that then that’s a great thing. But I was going to say, you talk about people wanting more meaning in their work, in their lives, I can’t tell you how many admin-types or office managers I’ve met who have started an effort to green their office and have in the process of that have formed a green team and in the process of creating a green team they had to work with purchasing department or facility management or fleets or some other part of human resources to create things like transit passes or bicycle racks or other things for the company.

26:30 JM: And those people, non-technically perhaps trained, won’t think as a green professional in any aspect of it, made a big difference in terms of moving the needle within the company, influencing other people in the business, influencing the way people work in terms of turning off their computers and the lights, what they’re wasting things, printing on both sides of the paper, all these basic things that we should all be doing. And they weren’t necessarily looking for a green job, or maybe they were, but that’s how these things happen. And so there are so many opportunities, there are opportunities in janitorial departments where people say, “We want to start switching to green cleaners, we want to rethink the way we’re cleaning, how much water we use and where the waste goes and we want to do this partly because it’s good for the environment.” Probably because it’s good for the staff’s health, because they’re not breathing the stuff, it’s better for the people who work at the building because they’re not breathing all this stuff from cells either. And so, are they green jobs? I don’t really know but they sure are making a difference and they know it and they love it.

27:40 LL: So it sounds like it might actually be one of the easiest ways to get sustainability in your job description, which is if you’re in a company already, and you decide to spearhead a sustainability initiative, create a dream team, then that actually might be an easier way of navigating into a “green job” rather than actually searching for something online on a job board perhaps.

28:04 JM: Yeah. I mean it’s all good but you’re right, that is why in fact sometimes those office managers who create the green teams all of a sudden can find themselves ascending within the company, could be the environmental coordinator. Or maybe they start doing Earth Day event, maybe they start multiple events throughout the year, and they… Some of those people have risen to become the head of sustainability for small, mid-sized companies.

28:30 LL: So how does a person become a Chief Sustainability Officer at a big company?

28:34 JM: Yeah, there used to be a sort of one path to that, which is largely through engineering because back in the day and then in the ’90s, and even in the ’80s, the companies that first had those kind of people tended to be engineers working on compliance-related issues, you know, smokestacks and filters and scrubbers, and all that kind of stuff. And in some businesses, that still is where these people come from. But increasingly, as I mentioned before we ran a membership organization, we have about 60 members of Chief Sustainability Officers at huge companies, FedEx and Microsoft and Wells Fargo and Frito Lay and Nore Cores and Avon and Campbell Soup and Steel Case and a bunch of companies that you’ve never heard of, that I’ve never heard of before, they joined us. They come from all over the place, some of them were in sales, some of them were in marketing, some of them were doing this work at a division, some of them just found themselves… They just evolved.

29:39 JM: And so some of them came through purchasing or one of the specific parts of the business. Maybe they were running a part of a business unit that had the biggest environmental impact for the company, they did a lot within that business unit to help green up that part of the company and then they were tasked with creating a company-wide effort. So they’re all different and that’s what’s kind of fun is that you end up… You put them all in a room and you don’t end up with safety engineers, you end up with this really interesting mix of people who have lots of different professional experience and of course they come from many different sectors, consumer phasing, business phasing and the like. And so it’s quite an interesting mix. What’s great is they get…

30:30 JM: There are two things that characterize all these people that I find particularly interesting. One is that they tend to be inventing their own wheel, which is to say they’re all doing what they’re doing sort of for the first time in their company, and no one has done that in their company and they are just sort of figuring it out as they go along. And the second part of that, it kind of goes hand in hand, is that they have a very high capacity for sharing. Not being proprietary but saying, “Look this is what we did. I’ll show you what we did. Come on over, we’re happy to share it.” And learning from others, so this is great give and take among these people who want to learn how you do things you’ve done, how do you communicate internally, how do you engage employees, and how do you make the business case to the CFO or the CEO, on and on, it’s just a great exchange of questions.

31:26 LL: So can you summarize some best practices on trying to navigate to a greener career?

31:34 JM: That’s hard. I mean, first of all…

31:36 LL: Should a person go out a green MBA for example? Is it worth it?

31:40 JM: If you’re thinking about getting an MBA, I think getting a green MBA is interesting because it gives you a certain set of skills but being a green MBA in and of itself I think you still want to have some kind of focus, some kind of discipline, beyond green, finance or marketing or sales or strategy or something else. And so you really want to have a… I’m fond of saying that the state of the world is too important to be left just to environmental professionals that we need everybody on board. And in fact the environmental people inside companies are often, particularly bigger companies, and even small or mid-sized companies, are often kind of categorized, they’re seen as the greenies, the people who are going to come and mess up our day. They’re not seen as integral to the business.

32:35 JM: It’s really interesting, just take two minutes, and it’s an interesting analogy, if you think about IT people, information technology people. Twenty years ago the IT guy that usually was a guy initially, in the company, sat off to the side was kind of seen as different, maybe a little odd, spoke their own language, weren’t seen as core to the company, they worked… You only saw them when there’s a problem. “Oh my God, here comes Steve. Look busy.” whatever. And now of course, to some extent we’re all IT professionals, we’re all upgrading and downloading and plugging in and troubleshooting and the IT is in general as seen as critical to what the company does. And then of course the IT people all now, in a bigger company, answer to a Chief Information Officer. Same with the environmental people. Initially they all sat off to the side, they were seen as different, maybe a little odd. They weren’t seen as core to what companies did. They spoke their own language, they could geek out on biological oxygen demand per parts of billion methyl-ethyl something.

33:38 JM: But they weren’t seen as adding value to the company and you only saw them or heard from when there’s a problem and when they’re going to make you do something different than the way you already do it. And now, environmental professionals… We’re all to some extent thinking about recycling and energy use and waste band and driving and chipping and materials and things like that. And increasingly, this is being as seen as core to the company and increasingly they’re answering to a Chief Sustainability Officer. So all of this is to say that there are opportunities throughout the company and maybe that you get those by being an MBA, but I think you can just be a professional and to be good at something, and then bring your environmental passion to that.

34:28 LL: Fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing with us all this great information. And we’re about at the end of our segment. This is Lorna Li, Editor-in-chief for Green Marketing TV, and EntrepreneursForaChange.com and we were speaking with Joel Makower, co-founder of GreenBiz.com. Please visit GreenBiz.com. Sign-up for the GreenBuzz newsletter and check out Joel’s blog, Two Steps Forward, at readjoel.com.

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Q&A Friday: Leveraging Your Web Presence For Successful Eco Consulting [VIDEO]

Lorna Li — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 00:05:46 +0000

In this episode of Q&A Friday we’ll tackle the challenging question of how to turn your passion into a financially sustainable eco consulting business, using your existing web presence. We are going to review Valentina’s websites Proyecto 333, ValeDeOro.es and ValeDeOro.com and give her some advice on how she can best balance her time between her bread and butter business – social media consulting – with her desire to grow her business as a workshop facilitator and personal organizer helping people simplify their lives, sustainably.

Valentina from Spain, asks us:

I am a freelancer “officially” working as a social media consultant for green companies. On the side I run my blog on sustainability and minimalism (http://valedeoro.es) and do workshops on sustainable living / simplifying your life (http://valedeoro.com)

One is income, the other is passion and thus comes much easier to me.

Is it feasible to focus on both business “branches” at the same time?

I don’t want to abandon the social media quite already, because it pays the rent. On the other side I don’t want to abandon my blogs either, because they bring so much satisfaction (only not paying the rent yet).

But I feel they are competing for my energy and conventional wisdom tells me not to focus on too many things at the same time. What are your suggestions?

First off, I want to commend you, Valentina, for your dedication to your passion. It’s not easy balancing work and “play” especially when “play” doesn’t bring a sustainable income yet.

Online Audit of Proyecto 333 and ValeDeOro

Here’s my analysis of your websites and recommendations on how you can get these websites to generate more business for you. When your websites start generating more income, it will be easier for you to let go of your “job” and focus more on your passion.

Here are action items for you, Valentina:

Create an opt-in giveaway to entice visitors to sign up to your email list
Install a light box pop up opt-in form on your sites – the PopUp Domination WordPress plugin is great
Test subscription forms in different areas of your websites – try the Subscribers Magnet WordPress plugin by MaxBlogPress
Use your blog to link to your business services pages. Run ads on your blog that link to your business services pages.
Get Buy Now buttons on your services pages
Get an online scheduling app on your website so people can book time with you right away- try Tungle.me
Do your keyword research and make sure you create blog content that is optimized for intent to buy keywords

The Twitter management software I mentioned that is helpful in automating Tweets, in addition to finding and following people in your niche, is called TweetAdder.

The online scheduling application I mentioned is called Tungle.me. It syncs with Google Calendar, syncs across time zones and you can easily indicate multiple time options for meetings.

Online payment is as easy as getting a Paypal button up on your services pages. Paypal also let’s you do drop down price selection as well, if you have different payment options. Check out the Business section of your Paypal account.

Is it Feasible to Focus on Both Business Branches At the Same Time?

Yes, it is feasible, and many entrepreneurs do this. You keep doing both until the other generates a healthy enough income for you to take the plunge. But you need to understand its a time versus money thing. If a significant portion of your time is focused on the money making side, the time it takes to scale your passion based business stretches out longer. You can offset this by hiring people to implement for you, like offshore virtual assistants. But this is a double edged sword. It’s still you that needs to make the important strategic decisions, so unless you can really step in and ensure your passion based business is moving towards financial viability, you can easily spend a lot of money on contractors who are not impacting your bottom line.

If the time frame to monetization is taking too long for you, you may feel that you need to create the space to focus 100% on your passion based business. In this case, you will need to assess your finances, your burn rate, and determine how long you can go with zero income before you have to “get a job” again.

Identify Points of Synergy Between Your “Job” and Your “Passion”

The great news is that you do social media consulting for green companies, and the green market is also your target audience. You can find all kinds of juicy points of synergy here. For example, if one of your green business clients requires you to compile a list of all the Twitter users who are into eco shopping & fashion, is there a way you can parlay that into relationships for your eco consulting business?

If you are using your own Twitter account or accounts to promote your clients work, there’s no reason why you can’t keep the relationships. Your social media is another “list”, so to speak. You can promote your services to your social media network just as if it were an email list, though having an targeted email list is better.

Get On Top of Your Online ADD and Multiple Website Personality Disorder

Online attention deficit disorder is the biggest challenge for Internet entrepreneurs. Ever find yourself on embarking on an unplanned hyperlink journey? Every day? Every hour? You need to learn to focus.

Not just your attention, but your online activities. How is your contribution to your different websites – be it your blogs, or social media profiles – bringing you closer to your goals? Are you blogging for the sheer pleasure of it? Are you doing keyword research and creating content that captures valuable search engine traffic for your niche? Is the content you produce targeted towards the resolving the pain points of your target audience? Enough so that they would hire / buy from you?

Watch Out for the Burn Out Factor
One of the dangers that entrepreneurs face when trying to grow your side hustle at the same time as your “job” is the burnout that comes from burning the candle at both ends. You will need to carefully manage your time, and make sure you get enough rest, otherwise your productivity will go down the tubes, as you push yourself to squeeze more out of your tired body and mind.

Once your websites start bringing in more income, it will be a natural transition to shift more of your focus to your passion. Until then, unless you have the luxury of coasting for a while, you will need to carefully manage your priorities and balance your work and your play.

What do you think? Do you have any other suggestions for Valentina for monetizing her passion? Let’s hear it in the comments below.

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The Hottest Green Business Opportunities with Glenn Croston [VIDEO]

Lorna Li — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 23:39:07 +0000

Glenn Croston is an green business consultant, speaker, and author of 2 books 75 Green Businesses and Starting Green.

Glenn is a rare individual with a science background, and an entrepreneurial streak, with keen insight into the numerous green business niches that make up the green economy today. He’s the founder of Starting Up Green, a consultancy that helps the next generation of green entrepreneurs from cleantech inventors to stay-at-home moms, join the sustainable business revolution.

In this interview with Green Marketing TV, Glenn Croston provides insight on the green economy and answers some compelling questions:

What is a green business, anyways?
What are the top trends in the green economy that will change the world?
Can small businesses go green and save money?
What kinds of businesses can you start for under $1000
What kind of green business opportunities are best suited for solopreneurs?

Glenn also talks about biofuels, the promise of algae, upcycling, the business case for sustainability, and how people from every background can build successful and profitable green business.

Check it out and let us know your thoughts.

Hottest Green Business Opportunities Transcript

Click the button below to hear the free audio.

00:38 LL: Hi there! I’m Lorna Li, the Editor in chief of Green Marketing TV and Entrepreneurs for a Change. I’m your host today, and we have a very special guest with us. His name is Glenn Croston. He is a green business consultant, speaker, and author of two books, “Starting Green” and “75 Green Businesses.” He’s going to talk to us about some of the exciting opportunities that await entrepreneurs in a green economy today. For more information about Glenn go to www.startingupgreen.com. So Glenn, I discovered your book “75 Green Businesses” while researching green business ideas for Green Marketing TV, and I’m really curious about how you got started as a sustainability consultant.

01:27 Glenn Croston: Sure. My story is kind of an evolution of how I got to this point in doing the work that I’m doing now. It started out with my history as a biologist. I got training as a PhD biologist, and as a biologist, kind of looking at the natural world and looking at the massive impact we’re having on it. So, from there though it also became clear that as much as we talk about the problems, what we really need are solutions. As a dad, I’m a dad I have a couple of daughters, and being really motivated to kind of do something about that, and we just started doing something at home in our personal lives to go green, and from there though, I wanted to see what more could I do, and trying to harness the power of business to be a part of the solution and give ideas for everyone out there who wants to be a part of it, who would like to create a business that can help to provide solutions. That’s where that first book came in is to say these are 75 ideas where people can contribute challenges around, look at them differently, look at the opportunities to provide solutions. And the second book, “Starting Green,” is kind of more of a how-to guide of how to make that happen.

02:34 LL: So it’s really interesting, your background as a scientist, I can’t even tell you how many times people say to me, “Climate change is a hoax. It’s not really happening,” but at the same time, the people that I know in the science profession in general are telling me that we are in the sixth largest extinction in planetary history. What have you heard?

02:54 GC: Well where we live in our day-to-day lives, it’s hard to see an immediate impact for most of us, and so… And our psychology is such that we really would rather not deal with that because we have other things which are usually more urgent, that we have to pay our bills and take care of our kids and pay the mortgage, and that’s what most people are dealing with, is the immediate, urgent daily necessities. So we have this psychological bent which kind of drives us to look at this and say, “We’ll worry about it later.” And later kind of almost never comes unless a crisis provokes us and forces us to deal with it, but we do have… I think the science of it is undeniable, and it’s not just about climate change. It’s about the impact of this year we’re going to have seven billion people living on the planet. When I was a kid, it was four, and not long before that it was two billion. I mean there’s seven…

03:42 LL: That’s shocking.

03:45 GC: Seven billion and I think most people aren’t even aware of that. Seven billion people on the planet, and you can’t have seven billion people on the planet without really kind of totally reshaping the Earth. The oceans, the air, the land, that we are using up a massive fraction of the land for agriculture and other purposes. The oceans are getting acidified. Species loss is really undeniable, and I mean, unless you’ve been trying to deny it, but the truth is there for anybody who is willing to look at it, and the climate. And I know these are hard things for us to deal with because people are kind of overwhelmed by all the other challenges in their lives sometimes, but the science is really clear. I think it’s important for us to… It’s helpful for us to just acknowledge that and to say, “It’s here. It’s happening.” But, the reason people deny it, I think, is often because they feel like it’s so overwhelming, and they feel like it’s so out of their control. The psychological that helps them to deal with it is to just putting it out and putting it away and packaging it off and not handling it, but it’s useful for us to say, “Look, as big as these challenges are, as enormous as they seem, they’re not overwhelming. We can deal with it, and we can each of us make a difference, and through the business world, hopefully we can even have a bigger difference than in our own personal lives.”

04:58 LL: Absolutely! In my research, the biggest causes of environmental degradation, as much as consumers are sincerely trying to lighten their ecological footprint, it definitely seems like most impact to the environment comes from businesses, but I think one of the questions that arises is, “What exactly is a green business?” Can you help us understand that concept?

05:19 GC: I try to stay away from having a strict definition because there’s different green business certification schemes out there that define it different ways, and the FTC has their guidelines for what you have to do in regards to communicating your sustainability efforts. But to me it really starts out as people making a difference in your business. Working to improve your current environmental impact, and to be better than you have been and hopefully better than your competition is. In the long run what being green will mean is that we’re really, truly sustainable that we’re running our businesses and our lives in a way which will allow us to live on the planet for the long term and not just dealing with our day-to-day necessities.

06:03 LL: So it seems like green business is a concept that’s really picking up and being embraced widely. I’ve been looking at the green economy; it seems like there’s a lot of opportunities. The green economy is growing. What do you see as the ten top trends in the green economy that are really going to change the world or make an impact?

06:24 GC: There are a lot of things. One of the trends is our need for food that we have. We’re faced with rising food prices globally and yet people, the seven billion people on the planet, they need a source, they need healthy sustainably produced affordable food. Another one is water. Once again, with increasing populations, with climate change, our world’s water resources are getting less reliable, less predictable. So we need business and other entities that can help to deliver clean water for people everywhere. They need energy. As the developing world becomes more and more developed, there’s more and more consumers who want what we have. They want things that use energy so we need energy and we need energy efficiency. That’s another opportunity is that we need to produce this energy cleanly and we need to use what we do have more efficiently.

07:17 GC: Green building. Everyone needs a place to live. In the past, especially in the US, we’ve been kind of wasteful with how we use energy in our homes, with our lighting, with our heating and our cooling. We know better ways to use energy, more efficient ways to use energy in our homes, but it hasn’t always been implemented. So we have to implement that. We’re going to see our transportation systems changing a lot over the next years and the coming years and decades. One of the trends being that in the future, the price of oil would go up, not saying when it would happen but saying that it’s almost guaranteed that it would happen. I didn’t know it would happened so soon, it’s already happening now that the price of oil has gone up. The price of gas is going way up already again. It was up in 2008, now it’s up back in the same neighborhood again and that’s going to change how people drive, how we transport our goods and drive us to be more efficient, creating business opportunities.

08:10 GC: We look at waste as a problem and it is, that we waste so much and put stuff in the landfill. That’s a resource which is lost, but more and more people are looking at that landfill as kind of an urban mine that we can use too as a resource, that we can take those plastics going into the landfill, the organic material, the metals, take all the stuff going in the landfill and that’s a resource. We can find better ways to use it in the future. And services. Services are a huge area where every service business I think has a greener version. If you’re a lawyer, you can be a green lawyer. If you’re a dentist, there are green dentists. If you’re a dry cleaner, there’s green dry cleaners. So there’s another whole sector of opportunities there in terms of greening the service sector. The big opportunity here isn’t even just for so-called green businesses, it’s for every business to become more efficient.

09:03 GC: That’s I think where I’d like to see things go, is that we’re not even talking about green businesses anymore, because being a green business is just synonymous with being a good business, being less wasteful. Being green doesn’t mean your business isn’t successful, in fact the Fortune 500 people out there who are investing in sustainability a lot of times, of course, I think they want to do the right thing but I think they’re also doing it because they’ve found this is very profitable for them. That 3M and Dupont and WalMart, I’m sure part of the motivation is that they’re parents and they have kids and I think they’d like to see that we’re headed in the right direction in the future. But they’ve also found that for the millions that they’ve invested, they’re saving billions in terms of reducing waste and opening up new markets.

09:46 LL: That’s true, and these big enterprises can really achieve economies of scale if they are trying to go green and reduce their energy consumption or have a more efficient fleet of vehicles, for example. But for a smaller business, do you think it’s possible to go green and save money the way the big guys are? I mean, it seems like everything that is more eco-friendly tends to cost more. I think that’s where a lot of small or medium businesses get hung up. What are your thoughts on going green for SMBs?

10:17 GC: Sure, you know what, I think there are just as many opportunities for small to midsize businesses as there are for large ones and it is hard sometimes for small businesses because when you’re a small business person you have to wear a lot of hats. Your time is precious, your money is precious, you’re trying to squeeze as much as you can out of every dollar. But all the more reason actually for people like that to invest in sustainability is that while there are expensive things that you can do, there’s also plenty you can do which is going to save you money and save you a significant amount of money. Things like investing in reducing your wasted printed materials, and there’s a company I know that’s doing print management to reduce that problem. And reducing energy that maybe you need a little help with that, but investing in energy efficiency usually has a really quick return on your investment not something that necessarily has to take years and years to pay out. This can pay out quite frequently oftentimes.

11:08 GC: But it doesn’t always mean they have to invest in fancy new technologies or expensive ones. Sometimes being green means just reusing stuff that we already have, reusing some old office chairs that you don’t necessarily have to go out and buy brand new office material that’s out of the most sophisticated eco-manufacture materials. Sometimes getting new stuff is a pretty green move because it’s stuff which is already been made, no new resources required, not just green material, there’s no new resources required. That’s a pretty green move. So there’s plenty we can do for small businesses, midsize businesses that aren’t that hard, that save them a lot of money, that can fit in with their existing business and really helps them to save money.

11:48 LL: I agree, I think there a couple of companies that I really appreciate creating a bit of a paradigm shift so to speak. For example, DocuSign, oh my God, it’s great, can you imagine all that paper that you’ve saved by doing electronic signatures.

12:04 GC: Yeah, yeah. And if you want to do printing then… And there’s still printing required. I mean, I try not to be… That’s another thing, a preconception people have about the green world is that it’s extreme, that we’re extremists. And, like, talking about printed materials, I think that most businesses at the end of the day, they’re still going to have some need for printed materials, for things likes like brochures and such. But if you are gonna work with those materials, work with a green printer. Like, I know a guy in San Diego here, a guy named Thomas Ackerman of Spirit Graphics and Design, and he’s a green printer. He’s doing everything in an eco-friendly way. But more importantly, he’s also a great a printer. Because people like him, they’re interested in providing, not just a good product, but a good service. So, often times there’s easy ways to do things that feed into your existing business and that also are still good for the planet.

12:48 LL: What else do you do?

12:49 GC: Thanks! Well, I’m working on another book project right now, which is… It kind of evolved out of thinking about things like the environmental challenges that we face and how it is with things like climate change. We talked about earlier that we don’t always necessarily, as a society, have affective responses to these or our resource depletion or our need to transition away from oil as a transportation fuel. And really that kind of led me to thinking more about our psychology and how it is that we deal with these kind of risks, long-term risks, and saying that we need to find a better way to handle these over the long-term. So that’s another book project I’m working on right now, which I’m calling “Risking Everything,” which is all about, sort of how our psychology works and affects how we perceive risks like these and respond to them. And I’m also helping out with… One area that I’m spending a lot of time on lately is helping out green businesses, small to mid-size green businesses, with some of their PR needs, where I’m saying, these businesses, like the big businesses, they need help with getting their businesses singing and getting and helping people to intercommunicate with their clients out there in the world. And yet they don’t always have thousands to spend per month on that type of thing. So I’m trying to provide to address the need that these people have with affordable solutions for reaching out to their clients and communicating with them.

14:05 LL: Wow! Well, that sounds really exciting. So your new book, it’s called “Risking Everything”. When’s the ETA? Wen can we look out for it on Amazon?

14:13 GC: It’s gonna be 2012. There yeah go. I think so.

[laughter]

14:16 LL: Alright, so diving back into some of the green business opportunities that you see with… That are available or hot in the next 5 or 10 years, you mentioned there’s a great need for greening our transportation. And I know that there’s a lot of enthusiasm around the potential for biofuels to help us shift away our addiction to oil, but at the same time there’s a lot of controversy around biofuels. Can you share with us more about your thoughts on the opportunities, and how do we really get to a point where biofuels feel like a viable solution? I mean, I’ve heard of everything from biofuels having a high degree of cost, in terms of energy to even create, versus taking away resources from food consumption, to even rainforest destruction and human rights abuses. So, what are your thoughts, Glenn?

15:16 GC: Sure. I think that biofuels definitely have promise as part of our future transportation mix, but it doesn’t mean… But they’re not all created equal. Not every biofuel solution is necessarily gonna have the same benefits as others might. So, for example… And these are the kinds of issues we do need to consider when we’re trying to encourage the use of biofuels. So, in the US for example, we’ve invested a lot of money in government subsidies in corn ethanol. And yeah, most people, science people who look at this and even economists, anybody who, from a policy perspective, they look at this and they say this might be good politics, but it may not be good science because it does take a lot of energy to generate corn ethanol, and it doesn’t really have any significant climate benefit. And it is probably taking, diverting potential food resources away from food and into fuel and driving up fuel prices.

16:11 GC: So corn ethanol probably isn’t the best solution. And similarly, if you’re using cane sugar for a biofuel, then you want to do it in an environmentally sensitive way. You want to do it in a way that doesn’t deplete the rainforest and/or cause human rights abuses or anything like that. So we have to be sensitive to these concerns. And it’s not that every biofuel is necessarily a good biofuel, but there are opportunities still in the long run, with people… For example, if you can generate biofuels using cellulosic ethanol from material, which is raised or which doesn’t compete with food production, like, you’re talking about switchgrass, for example. We’re not really there today, but in the future we could work out methodology for that. That could be very promising in the future. Using agricultural waste for cellulosic ethanol production, that’s one. If worldwide, if you can produce ethanol from cane sugar, it’s actually much more efficient than corn. So, like what Brazil has done, they’re doing and producing large quantities of ethanol from cane sugar in Brazil. And yes, they need to be careful about their rainforest and so on, but they’ve done a lot in Brazil to move into biofuels, and there’s probably some lessons we can learn there.

17:31 LL: So how far are we away from algae biofuels?

17:34 GC: Algae. Well, algae are really an interesting topic, where algae are still… They have enormous promise, and there’s no question that you can grow algae. A number of people have done that, and businesses are working on that. The only question is what does it… I think the only question really is what does it cost you, and how scalable is it? People have grown algae for a long time for nutraceutical types of applications, in which you cultivate the algae in large outdoor ponds, you harvest them as one. But nutraceuticals are worth a lot of money whereas for biofuels to grow algae, you need to have the costs way way way lower than they have been historically. And already we need the cost of oil to go much, much higher to really make it economically feasible. I think that’s what the question is for algae is, it’s not whether you can grow algae, we know you can do it but can you do it in a cost-effective way which is really scalable to making the kind of meaningful difference. So there’s people working on it and I’m optimistic that at some point the cost will come down, the price of oil will go up. At some point it will make economic sense and there’s a number of different businesses working on making that a reality.

18:44 LL: Now that is the big question, making it cost-effective. Reading your book “75 Businesses” it seems like a lot of the startup ideas actually require a lot of financing, a lot of sort of capital to get off the ground, especially in the area of energy and transportation. It seems like in order to even get started you also have to have some kind of engineering or R&D background. Can you tell us more about the opportunities that you’ve identified that have a lower threshold for entry for your average individual?

19:16 GC: Yes, there are definitely businesses that are very resource-intensive that require years of research and development and lots of money and so really that’s not for everyone. But there are plenty of opportunities for everyone else. I don’t want people to think that that’s the way the whole field works. In fact, one of the reasons I wrote the book was for people to get the message that there’s something there for everyone really, based on your background and where you’re coming from. There are plenty of service-related businesses that people can start with little money, things like energy auditing, which don’t necessarily take a ton of money to get involved with, people involved with direct sales types of organizations like Greenerine that cost very little money to get started with, so I think there are lots of things people can do which are not necessarily huge million dollar sorts of businesses but still very good business that they can start with very little money and start in their own home, and then take it from there.

20:20 LL: So in your book you have this little guide, kind of like in the restaurant guide so to speak to determine how much money is needed for each venture. You have single dollar sign, double dollar sign up to, I can’t remember, 3 or 4 dollar signs, so can you translate that into actual dollar figures? Is single dollar sign opportunity $10,000 in startup capital or is it 5 and is the two dollar sign is that like 20 or is it doubled?

20:49 GC: There’s things you can start for hundreds or less than a thousand, like I’m saying, that these are like startup, work at home types of things, starting out kind of small, bootstrapping your way. You can start things for hundreds of dollars. It doesn’t necessarily take a lot of money, and then two stars would be thousands of dollars and three stars, as I recall, tens of thousands of dollars. It’s kind of a logarithmic scale. Hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands, up to millions, if you were talking about investing in biofuel production or something. That’s not something people start in their garage, that’s a big endeavor. But I don’t think people should be really inhibited by the cost potentially, they should look at it the other way around and say, “Well rather than think about what I can’t do let’s think about what I can do with the resources I have.”

21:37 GC: I don’t care, maybe you don’t have a ton of money but you can think about bootstrapping, you can think about… There are things you can do with tinkering in your own garage. I know a guy, guy named James Cass in Las Vegas and this guy in his own garage through tinkering over the years he’s invented an energy efficient air cooling system, a hybrid air cooler using indirect evaporative cooling and he didn’t have I think, a ton of a hundred million dollars to invest in this. By just through time and perseverance and bootstrapping it, he’s making it work. I think we have to look at these as not so much as insurmountable problems money-wise or in other areas, but it’s just this another factor you have to consider and find a way of dealing with it. There’s a… I read this interesting thing about bootstrapping once where these guys look at the lack of money almost look at it as an opportunity to say, “Sometimes when people have a ton of money to throw at a problem they’re not always the most efficient in how they use that money.”

22:33 LL: That’s very true.

22:34 GC: When you’re bootstrapping and you really… You have to be creative, it forces people to be efficient. The things that they can’t wait years and years and years before they ever bother producing a product or testing it out with customers. They have to get the product in customer’s hands as quickly as possible, see what works, see what gets traction and see what doesn’t, rapidly evolve forward. So I think that it can actually almost be a… It may not feel like it but bootstrapping and having sort of cost-constrain helps you to get creative and efficient early on which can really pay off later.

23:05 LL: So a single dollar sign business opportunity could feasibly be a opportunity that you can start for under a thousand dollars?

23:13 GC: Yeah. There’s plenty, lots of stuff that you can do starting just by looking at where they are today and saying, “Okay I don’t have a lot of money but let’s not think about that, let’s think about what can I do.”

23:23 LL: So what are the best opportunities that you’ve identified that a soloprenuer can do?

23:29 GC: Okay there’s lots of things and I think there’s a lot of opportunities in what I often call the conserver economy where, if you look at the economy, even though we’re kind of in this recovery phase, it’s not like everybody is raking in the dough, or it’s a booming economy. There’s plenty of unemployed people still, people under economic pressure. They don’t have their homes and piggy banks still where they can cash out, refinance and go and get this. So everybody’s kind of getting more efficient than we used to. We’re finding… One consequence of that is that people don’t necessarily go out to the malls shopping for new stuff all the time. They’re trying to find new ways, creative ways to get more out of what they already have, where instead of buying new stuff at the mall you can share or swap with people online or in your community to get the stuff you need, and that goes for clothes, or furniture, or for a lot of different things.

24:22 GC: So there is an opportunity there for people to look at this problem in terms of people who are cash constrained and look at that as an opportunity to help them to find new ways to get what they need through sharing, swapping, reusing, fixing, repairing stuff that they used to throw away. It’s funny, but now it seems like a green business, but one of the consequences of the down turn was that people like cobblers and tailors were having phenomenal business because people used to just throw their old shoes away and go buy news ones, all of a sudden they were just starting to fix those old shoes and repair them and get more life out of them. That’s kind of a green business. You know what? I mean the fact that you’re getting more life out of that old resource is pretty green. You may not think of cobblers as green business people and yet in a way, they are.

25:08 LL: Yeah, It’s kind of interesting. There’s a Chinese saying that “Where there’s crisis, there’s also great opportunity.”

25:15 GC: Yeah, absolutely. I mean it is a period of change that we’re going through, and I think part of those changes that were really out of necessity and kind of being forced to rethink our consumerism and, which should become kind of a habit and rethinking the values behind that, and moving more into a different way of meeting our needs. And I’ve heard that young people today are not necessarily all that into going out and buying a pile of stuff that they’re actually pretty open into the idea of car sharing, for example. Like they’re not necessarily caught up in what car it is they have parked in the drive way, but that they have a transportation need that they need to get filled and doing that in a cost-effective way because they don’t have a ton of money. Car sharing makes sense for a lot of people like that, and it also happens to be both economically efficient and eco-efficient. Car sharing, bike sharing, tool sharing, swapping movies or disks, clothes swapping events in your community. There’s kind of a ton of opportunities there which people can take advantage of.

26:26 LL: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. We’ve come to the end of our segment. This is Lorna Li, Editor in chief of Green Marketing TV and Entrepreneurs for a Change, and we had an awesome time talking to Glenn Crosston, who is an author, speaker, and consultant. Author of two books “Starting Up Green” and “75 Green Businesses.” To find out more more about Glenn and his amazing work go to www.startingupgreen.com. Thank you.

26:54 GC: Thanks, Lorna.

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Plastic State of Mind: Green Entrepreneurs Turned Activists Take on Plastic Bags

Maryruth Belsey Priebe — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 11:30:18 +0000

Using art as a way to promote an environmental cause is perhaps one of the most effective methods for mobilizing the masses. The 350.org EARTH project is one example of how artists are expressing their concerns about climate change and the need for action. On a much more local level, Plastic State of Mind is a YouTube video that’s recently received viral attention, pushing the issue of plastic waste into the public consciousness.

Ben Zolno, writer, producer, filmmaker, green entrepreneur, founder of New Message Media, and the biggest force behind Plastic State of Mind, has found a way to turn video activism into a full-time career and we wanted to find out how he did it. Joining him are two others involved in the making of the video. Jenni Perez is involved in urban sustainability, particularly as a direct organizer for the localized movement through Bay Localize. She’s also an artist and was the singer in the video. AshEL Eldridge III, an educator for climate action and youth leadership facilitator, is also a spiritual activist and poet and the starring male rapper in the video.

How did you fund the video project?

Ben: Green Sangha commissioned me to do this video. We found each other at a local clean energy alliance meeting that Jenni helped to organize and they heard about my passion for sustainability and the kind of work that I do, and that’s how we hooked up! They got a grant for very little money and had a poem of sorts that had been written by someone but it didn’t yet have a beat or anything.

I wanted it to be seen by more people so I said, “This is going to be big, I’ll do it out of pocket, other people will volunteer their time, which they did, and let’s make it more fun. Let’s make it a parody. Something that people are already looking to the Internet for. They want parody, they want hot music trends, so why not go to one of the most popular music tracks of 2010 – one of the more frequently parodied things people are already looking for that – and have a good time? Make it silly and stupid rather than straight and hard.” Green Sangha resonated with that early on so it was really easy to work together.

What logistics were involved in producing and creating a music video like this?

Ben: After selecting a song, about three hours went into writing the lyrics. Once approved, I created a storyboard to convey the idea fully. Since I can’t draw, the storyboard consisted of photos I found on the web, and web-cam photos of me in various poses. I then recorded my voice rapping and singing to a karaoke version of Empire State of Mind, and played it back for my client to give them an idea of what it would sound like.

I approached David Nakabayashi and Harrison Parker, who worked on a campaign to beat Prop 16 in California’s June 2010 primary election, about shooting the project. Harrison offered to create an animated story board to my voice track, to give the client, performers and crew an idea of what we were going for.

The next step was to record the artists. We recorded a new music track built from scratch by my neighbor Colin Menzies, the rapper, AshEL Eldridge, in his home office, and the singer, Jenni Perez, in a closet-turned sound studio, then mixed them well enough to have a working track for shooting the music video. Later, Amurai worked the track and added elements of his own to make the song really pop.

Considering the nature of the budget, the most challenging aspect was to coordinate talented volunteers for key positions, and to book the location. We used the amazing Good Earth Natural Foods in Fairfax CA – the only grocery we called that really understands the stakes of plastic pollution, and they were amazing. I worked with Amy English to coordinate, and by the end of the night/morning – we shot from 9 PM to 6 AM – we had what we needed.

AshEl uses art to promote a green message - ban single use plastics

In your opinion, how is art important in the movement to promote sustainability?

AshEL: Art is crucial. You look at any campaign that engages masses of people, art and culture is at the base of all of that. People need to be inspired. It’s becoming more essential today than ever. You look at the Glenn Becks of the world and performing artists – they all use art to get their message across. I work with many artistic mediums – hip hop, poetry – to address issues like water, green jobs, and so on. You can see some of it at Earth Amplified.

Ben: This is something that I’ve thought about for the last few years. People say it has to come from the government, it has to come from up high – but no, it’s really gotta come from the people, it’s gotta come from the bottom up. And I’ve actually swung toward that original thought – it doesn’t have to come from the ground up. It doesn’t have to be a grand movement of people rising up and saying, “No more” to the big corporations controlling everything from pesticides to energy use to soil depletion. It doesn’t have to come from beneath us.

At this point, we are a culture of people that are so engrained in our way of life, that are controlled by these major corporations because the idea is that we have to grow our economy further and further and further all of the time, that there’s no way people are going to say, “You know what? I don’t want to be part of this economy. I want to put down my cell phone. I want to go off and live on a farm somewhere sustainably, put down all my electricity, stop seeing my friends, stop taking these pills that are going to make me live longer.”

The point is that I think that art has a way of reaching larger audiences in a way that a straight message does not. A lecture that is up on YouTube or an article on a blog isn’t going to be as helpful as something that is already popular – that already has eyes yearning for it. When it comes to music and hip hop, that’s one of the things that people are already looking out for. So instead of creating a message and hoping people will come and see them, go to their art, where they already are and insert your message there.

Music is a great way to get a message together in a concise format just like any short form like a poem or something like that. Having restrictions there forces you to take really large subject matters and push them down into words, beats, tiny lines that normally you’d want to have a 200 page book for, but you have to get into 3 minutes. It’s a great artistic challenge.

How do eco problems relate to the other peace-making, social-justice problems you’re involved with?

AshEL: It’s all interconnected. I also work with Alliance for Planet Education, and we talk to hundreds of students about climate change, which is obviously connected to environmental justice issues. Poor people of the planet and communities of color are going to be the first and worst hit by climate change.

With that understanding, you can see that it’s all connected together.

In a capitalist infrastructure, we haven’t reconciled the disparity, which is really at the root cause of the climate crisis. If there was equity, we would find solutions to climate change. We have to connect all of the dots, there’s no way to separate them.

Ben Zolno turned video activism into a career

What goals do you have for this video?

Ben: Number of views is one of the only objective means of video success that you can have, unfortunately. You can kinda get a metric as to who’s watching them based on what YouTube (New Message Media’s YouTube Channel here) tells you because those are the people that are signed up for YouTube, or another Google service. But then you have to rely on the fact that people who are interacting with YouTube are telling them accurate information about their age, gender, income levels, etc.

So number of views I really appreciate – it’s a good quick reference as to how popular your video is, how well it is exposed. When it comes to with sponsors, and our sponsors – To-Go Ware and People Towels – it’s nice to be able to say, “Here’s how many view we have and here are the kinds of people that are seeing it.”

Another good measure is how bloggers pick it up. There are two results that we’re seeing from bloggers. The first is that people were taking copy from our tool kit or press release. Second, those that didn’t get that initial information from us are saying “Hey, I found this on our Facebook fan page,” or “Hey, I heard about this from a friend,” or one of the best ones is, “Hey, I can’t remember where I first saw this, but I think you should see it.” That means that it’s really getting out there.

When it comes to legislative changes, that would be the ideal – if we can have some kind of evidence that this video directly influenced supervisors of LA County who are people that saw the video before they made their decision to go ahead and ban plastic bags in the LA County and other areas. Or have the Governor see it and inspiring him to have a special legislative session to make sure that California bans plastic bags. They tried it in 1998, that didn’t work, but maybe seeing some momentum behind this, the amount of views it has, and having his staffers showing that they believe in this film and expressing to him the popularity of it, then I think that is a great tool.

That’s what it comes down to for me. If people are seeing it in general and they like it or hate it or are commenting, that’s nice. But, I’m spinning my wheels unless it’s making some direct or indirect policy change.

How are you promoting this video?

Ben: We had a three part process.

We let everyone know that it was coming out soon – the week coming up. We did that by getting a list of all of the bloggers, calling some of our friends that are well-connected in the enviro world in the US and California. And we showed them a preview of the launch video. We told them we’d send them the real video and provide copy to make it an email blast.
We asked people to send out an email blast to their viewers because a Facebook post is really nice but people might miss it. If they post at two in the morning and no one sees it – or not the important people, which would be people that have the most friends, or the friends that are most active – if those people don’t see it, it’s not as significant. People can forward the email, look at it any time, post it to Facebook, etc. We also gave them sample Tweets, sample Facebook posts, embed codes and things like that.
The day before the launch, we reminded people that the video was coming out the next day. Then the day of, on top of that, we at New Message Media went onto Facebook and made sure that every group and fan page we’re involved with on Facebook had something posted by us. Those of our personal friends that had the most friends or were the most active on Facebook were asked to make sure they posted something.

And we asked for personal assurances, “Can you send out this video tomorrow to all of your friends and do a little write-up on it?” We sent those to their individual email boxes. We also tag posted. We could have used a bigger hands-on team, but our budget for promoting this was almost nothing – totally pro bono.

Who is your target audience?

Ben: Usually what we try to do is have the target audience that has actual decision-making power – a politician, a policy maker, a CEO that can make the change, someone on the fence of the issue to let them know that they’ve got to make a change. This time, we were just asked to make a public service announcement. So it was mostly the general public but mainly also people that were going to be in different groups in our society – those that love music, those that enjoy comedy on the Internet, those that are into hip hop or parody in particular, definitely wanted to hit up people in the environmental community.

But we made it more mainstream so that it could reach people outside the choir. People inside the choir already know that they shouldn’t be using single-use plastic bags. Though we did have a line in there that said, “Shoulda brought your own bag, ya, but you forgot it, though.” That’s to hit up all of the enviro people that are so, “Ya, I’ve got my reusable bags” but forget them in the car.

What mistakes have you made in working with this kind of media?

Ben: One of the major mistakes I’ve made before is to make the pieces too direct. But people don’t like things that are too preachy, that tell them what to do – “Look, here’s the message, plastic bags are killing our environment, you should really stop.” Well, ya, duh. What you’re doing is really, really bad. People don’t want to hear what they really need to hear.

So the way to work around that is to get people where they are – get people where they are already doing something fun – something cute, for babies, for sex, for music. That’s how I try to fix that mistake.

Another mistake, is not making sure that I had all of the enviros or the groups that could help promote the video ahead of time. Not getting them involved early enough. Word of mouth doesn’t work on its own if it just starts from me and a couple of friends. I don’t have a magic key to the network. But I do know enough people that have enough influence at some of these organizations that offer me the power of getting people all around the world from different backgrounds to listen up and to be able to access that.

Another one that was a mistake on this particular project was that we allowed a leak of the video to stay online. The video was originally just for screening purposes. I put something up on Vimeo, 300 people saw it and it did really well. But then I guess some people were motivated enough to seek this video out on the Internet and send it to all of their friends.

The next thing we knew, it went to Julia Butterfly Hills page on Facebook, then Annie Leonard picked up, and it grew and grew, and we had over 1,000 hits a day and this made us nervous because the idea was that we wanted to launch all at the same time. We heard that to really make a video go viral you have to make it hot and make it what everyone’s talking about, they heard about it from four different sources, and the best way to do that is all in one day.

Other people had already written blogs about this, so we kept it up and asked people not to send it out. But what that did was got a lot of people to write us and ask how they could help on launch day. That’s how lots of organizations got the information from us to help with launch day. If we could do it again, we would have had just a 30 second or highlights to let people that this has production value, it’s good, funny, stupid – all the things that people really like in videos.

What other sustainability activism are you involved in? Is your activism a “full time job” or a side interest?

Ben: I started off working on issues of energy and peak oil. Peak everything from peak soil to peak fresh water to peak energy to peak coal. I’m involved in a lot of permaculture videos – getting people to understand how water cycle works, how biodiversity affects them. You can see some of my work on the site: New Message Media.

Thankfully, activism is my full time job. I make a good amount of money on smaller projects and then little or no money on comparable projects. It all depends on the budget people have. I work within peoples’ budgets that will help the most amount of people. It might only reach a small group of people, like policymakers, but it’s whatever will help.

Jenni Perez, green activist, urges consumers to help ban plastic bags

What advice would you give other green activists to as they seek ways to make their message heard?

Ben: My advice – try to think about what everyone is doing, what everyone cares about, what is most universal, and try to meet them in that venue.

If I could give any kind of advice, I would say, “Go to where you are.” They won’t come to your rally, they won’t come to a demonstration, they just won’t do it. These don’t work. It’s not because I don’t believe in them. I really think rallies and demonstrations are the most forthcoming, clear, exciting things. They work for me.

But I really believe this is a generation of slacktivists, as they’re known, and that people are too busy to take a look outside of their world to say, “Okay, I’m going to make a huge change.” You have to go where they are. Are they into music? Great, make a music video.

Jenni: Aside from the primary work that activists are doing – aside from the videos they’re making, the talks they’re giving – I would suggest take your activism into your everyday world. Ben mentioned the concept that people don’t like activists coming off as preachy. I think that’s definitely true. I would suggest being an example. When you’re at the grocery store, don’t take the plastic bags, even if you’ve forgotten your reusable bag, don’t take it. Hold the five cartons of frozen ice cream in your hands and just make an example of what you’re doing and really walk the walk in addition to talking the talk.

AshEL: Make entertainment. To me, it’s obvious that environment is a right. It’s not that scientists are wrong, or politicians are wrong – it’s more about making the message compelling. Make us laugh, have people feel like they’re part of a movement. Magnetize people to a movement, a new plateau, a world without plastic bags. We could live in a world like that.

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The Basics of YouTube Marketing for Green Businesses

Kerry Given — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 12:30:53 +0000

YouTube.com is a great marketing tool for small green businesses. Youtube is the third most visited website in the world, with more than 100 million videos viewed every single day. YouTube videos are also easy to embed on most other social networks and blogging platforms, allowing them to easily go viral. Best of all, YouTube is completely free to join and start posting videos!

The Most Effective Types of YouTube Videos for Green Businesses

Green businesses can use YouTube for a variety of different purposes:

Product advertising. YouTube is a great way to demonstrate the features of a new product, share before and after presentations demonstrating the difference your services made to a customer or client, and more. You can easily convert product advertising to sales by posting contact information such as your company’s phone number or URL at the beginning and end of your video.
Brand awareness. You can also use YouTube videos in a more general way to increase brand awareness. This could take any of a number of forms. For example, some companies might post entertaining or humorous videos with the goal of going viral. A famous example is Blendtec‘s “Will It Blend?” series that demonstrated the powers of the company’s high end blenders on a variety of objects ranging from lightbulbs to iPhones! Another idea is to create useful how-to videos relating to some aspect of your business. For example, an organic lawn care company might create a video teaching customers how to recognize different types of common weeds, or a green massage therapist might demonstrate a simple massage technique for couples.
Product support. YouTube is a great place to post how to videos and other customer support information. For example, you can post short videos answering frequently asked questions from customers, or create a video demonstrating proper assembly, maintenance, or use of your product.

Some businesses also set up private YouTube channels to post corporate welcome messages, training videos, and other materials for employees and clients.

Customizing Your YouTube Channel

When you create and upload your first video, you create your own YouTube “channel.” Visitors to your YouTube channel page will find useful information such as a list of all the videos you’ve uploaded and playlists you’ve created, a list of subscribers to your channel, a list of your favorite videos on YouTube, and more.

You can customize your channel to include a description of your business, your business logo, a link to your business’s website or green business blog, a background image for your channel, and more. The popular green cleaning products company Seventh Generation offers an example of a beautifully customized and branded YouTube channel.

Promoting Your YouTube Videos

Don’t assume that you’ll get a lot of views simply by uploading a video! One of YouTube’s best features is how easy it is to share your videos on other websites. Cross promote and share your videos on your business website or blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, and any other social networking profiles you have. If your video is an especially good introduction to your company, you may even want to add a link to your video or channel to your email signature, business cards, or other promotional materials.

More YouTube Marketing Tips

Tag thoughtfully. Adding relevant, SEO-friendly tags is one of the most important ways to help YouTube visitors (and search engines!) find your video.
Add subtitles. Subtitles make your video more accessible to viewers who may be hard of hearing, be non-native English speakers, or even just be trying to watch a video quietly in a public place.
Avoid annotations. Although limited use of annotations may be effective for certain types of videos, overuse is irritating and unattractive.
Curate comments. Deleting spam comments and obvious trolls helps keep your video and channel pages tidier and more professional looking. However, exercise your best judgment when deleting comments – deleting negative or critical comments from customers with legitimate complaints is a bad idea that will open your business up to accusations of censorship. In some cases, you may be able to treat comments such as these as an opportunity to gain back a customer, by responding with product support or other fixes. At the very least, a calm, professional response to such comments (no condescension!) may help protect your company’s reputation in the eyes of other viewers.

It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, a video may just be worth a million! By following these tips, you’ll be well on your way to capturing your share of YouTube’s 100 million views a day.

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How to Start an Eco-Friendly Pizzeria

Green Marketing TV — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:09:09 +0000

The desire for green businesses has been increasing greatly in recent years, and pizza is one of the most popular food choices all around. Therefore, it makes plenty of sense why an eco pizza business would be a promising green business venture. Pizzerias can be found in nearly every city or town, but traditional pizzerias aren’t often considered to be an eco-friendly business. However, there are now some eco pizza businesses popping up. Green pizza businesses offer the same products and services as traditional pizzerias, but operate with stricter sustainability principles, thus making the overall experience not only delicious, but better for the environment.

One green pizza business that has been successful since its start in 2006 is Pizza Fusion. The co-founders, Gordon and Vaughan Lazar, combined sustainability, social responsibility, and profitability to create the concept for their eco pizzeria, which has now grown into a franchise. They did their best to employ eco-friendly practices in all aspects of their green pizzeria, from the ingredients to the energy usage to the delivery, making this an overall green pizza business that meets the customers’ needs while maintaining sustainability and utilizing environmentally friendly practices.

What makes a eco pizza business green?

What separates an eco pizza business from a traditional one are the earth friendly practices the business employs, including using mostly organic ingredients, such as organic cheese, sauce, vegetables, and dough, but the sustainability practices go beyond the food.

In addition to making sure their ingredients are healthy, Pizza Fusion strives to operate an low impact, energy efficient business. Pizza Fusion even plans to use their hot water heater without electricity and to heat their northern stores solely using the oven. The franchise even makes all of their deliveries using hybrid vehicles to lessen their carbon footprint, a great move when considering their deliveries can often top over 60 in a single night.

Pizza Fusion is a great example of how you can start an eco pizza business that is eco-friendly, sustainable, and profitable. By employing environmentally friendly products as well as services, eco pizzerias prove to be much more sustainable overall than a typical pizza business.

Image Credit: peekandeat

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