We are “pushing” out EarthSayers content to an audience who has expressed an interest in our cause.  We experiment with the day and time of day we post and offer a wide range of experts, leaders, and citizens from all walks of life. It does seem to generate traffic to our site, meaning people do click through, but not in droves. What we are going to do next is emphasize the subject matter of the video, rather than the person presenting the information and see if it we increase click through numbers.

A social science research paper, “Twitter in Congress: Outreach vs Transparency” by Feng Chi and Nathan Yank, both of the University of Toronto raises an interesting distinction which was referenced by the authors from Felten (2009):  “outreach means government telling us what it wants us to hear; transparency means giving us the information that we, the citizens, want to get.” Ultimately, outreach can be used in conjunction with Twitter to push some agendas, while transparency can be used to portray honesty and openness regarding day-to-day operations; both of which involve connecting with the public, and more specifically, constituents via the Internet.”

I suspect this distinction also applies to other profit and non-profit organizations as well, but there is not with reason not to use Twitter for both outreach and transparency.

The authors then make an important point:

“Because both outreach and transparency are important for democracy, we attempt to tease out these two motives using a simple cost-benefit trade-off that underlies the adoption decisions of those in the 111th House of Representatives in order to ascertain each motivei?s value.” We feel very strongly about EarthSayers, as the only media outlet focused on the sustainability movement and highlighting the voices of sustainability,  that the the new media and related social media outlets be used in the service of democracy.  And in that regard, the findings of the study suggested “that Democrats and Republicans benefit from Twitter in different ways.

A bolder claim from our study says that Democrats care about transparency, while Republicans care about outreach.

YOU
What matters is not how the advertiser (you or academic or activist or advocate or consultant) likes to talk about its products (services, ideas, concepts, processes, mission, cause, objective), but how customers (citizens, students, clients, users) actually talk about them.”

THEM

One example of search on the term, sustainable development and the associated keywords and phrases:
The yellow indicates terms that present an opportunity to develop what is called, search directed content, and create webpages with appropriate titles and links.

US
Feedback on what is being used in search has become all the more important because search engines are also contributing to the poverty of attention that advertisers, educators, well, nearly everybody is complaining about.

Adapted from a blog post Why SEO Doesn’t Translate by Guy Gilpin , Monday, August 9, 2010

The New York Times notes “companies have shown remarkable ingenuity in skirting the rule or veiling their requests through nonprofit organizations.”  They reported by way of example on four such schemes that are all the more egregious given the number of educational and social services organizations being starved out of existence by the lack of public funding and having little earmark acumen and zero funds to grease the pump.

Here are the examples provided in the New York Times article of July 5, 2010.

¶The Virtual Reality Medical Center, a California-based company that sells visual simulation headgear as an experimental form of medical therapy, had sought nearly $6 million in earmarks before the ban. Soon after, company officials instead proposed that the money go to the Interactive Media Institute, a nonprofit group controlled by the center’s top executives, which had been set up to sponsor educational conferences.

¶In Pennsylvania, General Electric is likely to get as much as 80 percent of a $2 million earmark proposed by Pennsylvania State University for research on clean-burning GE locomotives. At the suggestion of the company and the university’s lobbyist, according to a Penn State professor, the university is listed as the lead player in the collaboration instead of GE, as was done previously. GE executives made a series of political contributions to Representative Kathy Dahlkemper, Democrat of Pennsylvania, days after she submitted the earmark request.

¶In New York, the Copper Development Association, a nonprofit group controlled by copper manufacturers, is pursuing a $4.1 million earmark to hire suppliers to install its members’ copper products in New York City subway cars, asserting that the metal has qualities that inhibit the spread of infectious diseases.

¶And a group called the Solar Energy Consortium in Kingston, N.Y., is pursuing nearly $30 million in earmarks, with the help of Representative Maurice D. Hinchey, Democrat of New York. The group, working out of a tiny office above a machine shop, does not perform its own research. Instead, it plans to pass on most of the earmark money to local businesses, some of which directly collected federal earmarks for solar projects this year but would no longer qualify.

All legal, but is it ethical?

Today’s New York Times article on Yahoo’s efforts to use search data to create search-generated content calls out a little known growth industry around the Web and highlights what every educator needs to know.

“Search-generated content has been growing on the Internet, as evidenced by the success of companies like Associated Content, which Yahoo recently bought, and Demand Media, which has used freelance writers to create an online library of more than a million instructional articles.”

Compare this to the old school educators and social activists who blanch at the phrase, content generation, and hold steady to the practices of print, and you will begin to understand why our citizens don’t get answers to their basic questions about global warming, climate change, sustainability or even about our oceans and water pollution.

It starts and ends with interest.

Yahoo and advertisers have a big interest in being in the top organic search results on key search terms because supplying relevant information when a person is in the buying cycle is a basic tenet of marketing success. Indeed, a recent article in DM News suggests Search Engine Optimization (part of what we are talking about) was once overlooked, but have realized it “doesn’t strain their budgets” and improved analytics make it “easy to understand the relationship between natural search rankings and revenue.”

Those in the business of education or those who would benefit the most from an informed public have shown very little interest.

The power of the Web has been highly commercialized largely because it is a buying machine. But it is also a learning and training machine, yet it just may be that to meet searchers needs is just too crass of a reason to create content that explains important concepts and issues and may interfere with the editorial and research freedom to publish what is important and what is not and to use language such as “eco-economics” and avoid prosperity in favor of ROI.   Yahoo points out (you really need to read the NYTimes article) to its journalistic detractors: “The information is valuable because editors can integrate it into their decision making. It’s an asset. It’s a totally amazing and useful tool that we have at Yahoo. But it does not lead Yahoo editorial content.”  A tool.

In other words, how can it not be crucial to understand that although there are 28M webpages out there on the subject of “global warming” less than 170,000 of them are titled to appear in top rankings (and thus be seen) to a search on the term, global warming, and even less on the question what is global warming? Yet there is significant search on this term, more on this term than on sustainability or climate change.

This chart (1) from Google Insights gives you a general idea of the popularity, if you will, of the three terms in relationship to each other. You can use the chart below to get some feel for search traffic on these terms which come from a snapshot (1%) of the search traffic over a years period of time using software called, WordTracker.   For nearly every sustainability-related topic that I looked at, the search on “what is” or “definition of” was relatively high and the number of Web pages with a title that grabs was low.  This is a great opportunity for organizations with a cause to gain traction with searchers out there who are entering or are in the learning cycle. In the hundreds of video programs we have reviewed for inclusion in our sustainability collection on EarthSayers.tv, the voices of sustainability, the titles reflect a general disconnect from what the video actually covers, choosing in some cases to emphasize the name of the person answering the question, what is sustainability, or the event at which the person attended and was recorded. These are just two examples of hundreds.

But first to change things, the educators and proponents of sustainability have to know and understand the capability of SEO and search engine marketing. Indeed, from my own experience, a greater interest in the Web would be a starting point for many of our leaders addressing environmental, social, cultural or economic sustainability, followed by increasing their (1) personal, (2) professional, (3) organizational, and (4) cause presence (brand) on the Web in all four categories,  and take a crash course on SEO so they can better align their language and messaging with their objectives and audience.  SEO by the way is complicated and is a learning experience for even the most seasoned of marketing professionals.

This is my agenda.

If you invite me to participate in a meeting around sustainability, this is what I am going to talk about; if you want me to increase your revenue for a sustainable product or service, this is what I am going to talk about and help you achieve; and if you ask me how to increase your membership, this is what I am going to talk about and make suggestions around. If you ask me about sustainability, I’ll probably refer you to one of the hundreds voices of sustainability found at EarthSayers.tv.

P.S. I included Walmart in the following chart to give an idea of corporate-related efforts to be in the top rankings, mostly using paid search, but increasingly using organic search more effectively.

Note: (1)

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100

Excerpt:

While the responses indicate some variations across industry sectors and geographies, our survey reveals five consistent global themes:

1. Executive leadership is critical to good governance
2. Business drivers are dominated by top line and bottom-line impacts, creating a race to innovate
3. Despite regulatory uncertainty, climate change investment is on the rise
4. Execution is challenging but executives are committed to action
5. Transparent reporting is gaining momentum

But getting the attention of  progressives and their organizations on the importance of search and high rankings is difficult, largely because they lack any experience on the commercial side of the Web, resulting in much of the information and news produced around sustainability being buried in the back water of Google and Blinkx search results.  A couple of years ago when we first started EarthSayers a search on Blinkx, a video search engine, netted 21,000 sustainability videos. Today it’s over 250,000!

So as the information chests GROW of the well meaning organizations and leaders, ranging from environmentalists to triple bottom line advocates, and the bloggers and twitterers, including our own @earthsayer, seed the Web organically, we aren’t really impacting the rankings on sustainability or on any of the related categories such as global warming and climate change.  This is a failure contributing to the decline in awareness tracked in polls and surveys.

A recent Gallup poll cited in the Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, April 12, 2010, reports “forty-eight per cent of the respondents believe the threat of global warming to be generally exaggerated. This figure was up from thirty-five percent a year ago. According to the same poll, only fifty-two per cent of Americans believe that “most scientist believe that global warming is occurring – down from sixty-five per cent in 2008. The dark green line below represent the per cent of people (32%) who believe global warming is going to affect their lives, down from a high of 40 per cent.

Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker article also makes note of “a quarter of the TV weather-casters AGREE with the statement ‘global warming is a scam,’ and nearly two-thirds believe that, if warming is occurring, it is caused mostly by natural change.”  This is painful to consider.

The Web as new media can play a critical role in educating our citizens about sustainability and the related issues, especially if we use it to bring to the fore with high page rankings the unfiltered voices of business and civic leaders, experts, consultants, and citizens from all walks of life. There is way too much  processed information, particularly in the form of unsubstantiated marketing claims and green lists, and too little authentic voices of sustainability that can be found by searching the Web. Research shows that children rarely go beyond the first page of rankings and it is not a stretch to assume adults are not much different. We are working to fix the problem as soon as possible by educating leaders, aggregating sustainability videos, and using a sustainability taxonomy we created for our site to seed the Web methodically, but we can’t do it alone.  We need help drawing attention to the problem that is, at the same time, a great opportunity to increase sustainability awareness and educate our citizens.

Note:

According to PEJ New Media Index “Global warming emerged as the second-largest story in the blogosphere (at 16%). It, too, has proven a favorite over the past year. Last week marked the 10th time that the subject has been among the top five stories on blogs since PEJ New Media Index began monitoring the blogosphere in January 2009.

Research from the New Scientist showed that there is a huge gulf (their word) between perception and reality on the part of consumers.

I actually started this posting on EarthDay after receiving another list this time from Brandkeys, a consulting company specializing in customer loyalty. Their list in alphabetical order is of the 25 Top “Green” companies (see below).  BP is on this list (but not on the ones above) and gave me pause even before the recent catastrophe.   The press release notes that their research suggests consumers “want brands to walk-the-talk, and “green” has become the cost-of-entry in many categories, making larger and larger contributions to brand engagement and loyalty.” There are some excellent companies on this list including Seventh Generation and Tom’s of Maine in the consumer products category and the Marriott in the lodging industry. And many of these companies have strong sustainability initiatives backed up by a track record.

The problem is that this business of lists when it comes to the topic of green, the keyword for where sustainability and consumerism intersect, is the business of marketing, not sustainability and certainly not when it comes to environmental sustainability. In terms of marketing, it is my opinion that these lists mislead consumers, add to the confusion in the marketplace, and are based on unsubstantiated claims.  The next question is what role do the CSR folks play in all this list making and is it responsible CSR?

Top-25 Green Brands from this year’s Brand Keys Loyalty Engagement Index:

1. American Express
2. Apple
3. Avon
4. BP
5. Coke
6. Coors
7. Dell
8. Ford
9. Honda
10. HP
11. Johnson & Johnson
12. Kellogg’s
13. Kohl’s
14. Marriott
15. McDonalds
16. Microsoft
17. Nike
18. Pepsi
19. Samsung
20. Seventh Generation
21. Staples
22. Starbucks
23. Tom’s of Maine
24. UPS
25. Wells Fargo

“Indeed 72% of respondents says considering sustainability is “extremely” or “very  important”  for  managing  corporate  reputation  and  brands.”

The report covers the importance of sustainability being one of the top three priorities on the CEO’s list and energy companies might serve as a role model given they are closer to the dual issues of “potential regulation and increasing natural resource constraints.”

As to branding sustainability, in those cases where there is an authentic story and track record to back up claims, the marketer’s checklist ought to include getting the word out by publishing a sustainability section on the Corporate Website, embedding sustainability data in communication mainstream investors,  issuing a sustainability report, communicating with socially responsible investors, and participating in rankings and indexing, although many of the lists these days are PR hokum.  Here’s the chart showing these options with orange representing the more proactive companies.  Download the PDF from this site.

McKinsey Global Survey 3/2010

Bottom line:

“Most companies are not actively managing sustainability, even though executives think it’s important to a variety of corporate activities. Those that do are reaping benefits for themselves and for society.”

Excerpt from the New York Times article: Can Business Do the Job All by Itself?

By TOM ZELLER Jr.

Published: March 28, 2010