It had to happen...Less Green for More Green

Yesterday I got a solicitation in email to purchase the new study from Natural Marketing Institute on the Mainstreaming of Sustainability.

 It has been nine years since NMI conducted the first... research study on the Lifestyles Of Health And Sustainability (LOHAS) marketplace. In 2002, only a few companies were talking about sustainability. [Now] most Fortune 100 companies have C-level sustainability staff and have infused sustainability throughout the organization so that it is everyone's responsibility to consider the environmental and social impacts of their products and operations.

Today I received an solicitation in email to purchase a Green Deal of the day.  Now, I'm a big fan of Groupon, LivingSocial, ideeli, you name it.  I know, I know: higher consumption... but less gas when buying daily deals online vs at brick and mortars! But check out the Green Deal rationale, which makes sense to ME:

You want that big coupon for that local restaurant or that online retailer that makes you call all your friends because you can't believe what an amazing deal you just got.  But you don't want to get great savings at the expense of your commitment to taking care of people and the planet.

Now you can get a great deal AND support the companies who share your values.

  So, I love that now, instead of all our early cries about mainstream companies jumping on the green bandwagon, now the green guys are going mainstream.  At this point, I'm all for things moving both ways, and finding a good, green middle ground. 

Multi-tasking too much? SITT with it...

It has to be said -- OFTEN, since most of us still don't get it (or at least ignore it) myself included, and I wrote a damn blog about this same topic two years ago and called it MT Brains (get it?): multi-tasking is not efficient.  It FEELS like it is; we get smugly proud of looking/acting busy and managing tasks, putting out fires, and juggling three screen lifestyles all at once.  But the micro-seconds it takes our brains to recalibrate when we jump from one task to another actually SETS US BACK and sucks time and focus for the worse.  And it's physically affecting our brains, and the brains of the up and coming generation.

Check out the story on kids and tech addiction, in the NY Times.  This is startling, but not surprising. Prognostications for the future of our society, anyone?   

There's scientific proof that our attention and comprehension skills are negatively impacted by multitasking, so we need to counteract it...even with focused breathing for a few minutes. Think of it like a counter-stretch during a work-out.

This is why I'm taking advantage of SITT training with Dr M.A. Greenstein  -- Somatic Intelligence Training Technologies.   

Also known as “mindfulness practice”  S.I.T. (sm) trains users to embed the practice of mindfulness in an embodied way, grounding it the emergent science of contemplative brain/mind/body studies.   

insula portion of the brain

Dr G is amazingly generous with her time for a pittance of a fee, and with her honey-smooth voice talks us through the art of healthy, cleansing breath.  Think about it for a second:  where are your shoulders right now?  Up by your ears?  How is your breathing?  When's the last time you took a slow, deep, luxurious inhale?  She taught me about the insula, and how focused breathing helps expand that portion of the brain.  It's a fact, jack.  She wrote her thesis on it and spoke at TED.  So, I'm here trying to evangelize something that costs nothing to do but could cost us a lot if we don't:  Take some time each day to do nothing but observe your breath, or, as she says, "Be aware of your awareness."

And now back to our regularly scheduled frenzy.

Tearing down the Walls to Good Customer Service

Call me a princess, but I had to return or exchange a bunch of damaged or bad quality things in the past two weeks.  From a third try at getting my eyeglass prescription filled correctly to a keratin treatment re-do to a mattress that smelled like mildew (eeww!).  The good news is that all three of those companies redid or replaced the items without much hassle and with decent customer service.  (Thank you, Loft 26, Cohens, and Sleepys!) 

The bad news is that I'm nostalgic for a time when workmanship was excellent and important to begin with.  (Of course, I only HEAR about those times from older relatives or movies on Turner Classics.)

Back to the good news.  Customer service.  We're in a time when consumer goods are a dime a dozen and Miss Manners is rolling over in her grave.  We just don't seem to care as much.  BUT, now with more people out of work, companies can be more discriminating in the workers they hire, and bad employee attitudes may put bad workers at bay.

Danny Meyer, whom I've long respected for his conscientiousness about sustainability as well as creating quality restaurants from Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe to the hot new Shake Shake phenomenon , just added a brand extension to Union Square Hospitality Group all about customer service.  Today on the Wall Street Journal Report he explained how his new HQ -- for Hospitality Quotient -- is new company to help those who are already the best at what they do or make, make their stakeholders even happier with good treatment and good customer service.

In a way, we can also thank social media for influencing this potential trend:  Let's look at what Frank Eliason set out to do with @comcastcares on Twitter.  Knowing people can say and write exactly what they want about a company he and others, like the classic examples of Zappos and Dell, helped inspire them to make good customer service a mandate on the social web. It's all tied together.  The walls are down, companies are bare naked, and even Cohen's Opticals knows I can write something good or bad so maybe, just maybe, companies are erring on the side of better workmanship, better customer-facing employee training and better HQ overall.  And better customer service can actually help stimulate the economy!  I like this post on it from last year: http://www.goodexperience.com/2009/04/on-hospitality-in-a-t.php

Now, there are still the places like Bard Graduate Center, which has ignored my pleas and emails to begin their construction on Saturday mornings later than the 7A start they have had in place for the past weeks.  So, I can take it to my blog, and at least feel I had a place to share my pain...and hope they will remember that the walls between public opinion and good customer service are as thin as the walls between our physical buildings.
ARGH!!

Happy Synchronicity

I LinkedIn with David, after meeting him at a trade show a few years ago and our professional paths continue to cross here and there. This week he sent me a friendly email  letting me know about an upcoming "Broadway on Broadway" event at TImes Square. Apparently, his client's tech product - Aerva's Pic2Screen application - will be make it a consumer-controlled billboard - enabling tourists to upload their photos on the jumbo Kodak screen. Super-sized social media.

Cool.  I like Broadway. I like new consumer tech applications.

So, I clicked on the link to read more on David's blog, Eat Media, which featured an article on Aerva that he included. His blog included his Twitter feed where I happened to see his interesting tweet about how that Kodak screen enabled more awareness for a Diabetes event, featuring pictures on the big screen of kids with juvenile diabetes who were working to raise research money.

Cool.  I like cause marketing.  I like new tech that helps consumers raise their consciousness.  AND, I am working with Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation on some of their chapter's social media efforts. So I clicked on THAT link from Twitter and read more about that case study.

That led me to a terrific story about 9 year old Noah, The Diabetes Dude.

And that is where this story ends...and begins:

The story is REALLY about Noah, and HIS combination of charisma and a good idea to help leverage star power, media, and social media to get people thinking and acting. 

Noah The Diabetes Dude, and his parents have set out to do their version of the traveling garden gnome, but using blue flamingos as a pop icon of diabetes awareness..."flocking" people with the plastic birds to create engagement and interest. 

They have a nice little site, a blog, videos, photos, a donation button...even an interactive Google map to track the growth of their flock!

The value of sharing good content, across multiple platforms, and the joy of synchronicity led me to learn more about this inspiring little activist, so I hope you'll read about Noah from here, and decide to do your part to "flock someone" and spread the word and donate some dough to help eradicate this terrible disease.

Cool?

Oh the Places you might not Like to go on Facebook

There's Trouble again in Facebook land, and that starts with T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Places.

Per a really interesting article in Ad Age that describes a "real life" experiment in trying out the new Places feature on Facebook in real life, there are a lot of aggravated people. The issue at hand is again the DEFAULT settings that Facebook arrogantly selected including one that enables anyone to check anyone in to a location, true or not, desired to be revealed or not.

You would think Facebook would have gotten the clue from the Beacon fiasco, but not so much.

There are a lot of good articles on Places to learn more (like on Mashable ) if you want, but as always, I think the reader comments (including my own) especially on this particular article are a reflection of the feelings of many. It all feels very similar to the uproar created by Beacon which infamously automatically posted purchases made online via Facebook connected sites to one's wall. The Beacon anecdote that circulated as an example of a good idea gone wrong was the guy who cancels on a date, only to have the movie tickets he purchased posted on his Facebook page, to his girlfriend's dismay. Now imagine being location-outed by a friend to the delight of a stalker-ish ex, or your boss if you're playing hookey!

We have got to pull the reins in on giving power to the people and keep it with the person.

The majority of commenters on this story echo how I feel, and why I immediately disabled the ability of someone else to "check me in" on Places. While I have a lot of respect for Read, Write Web content, they are not as much concerned about "asynchronous" check-ins. But they DO bring up another issue - that of labeling a place with a less-than-desirable name...like, say, your own home, or a restaurant you didn't love...and having it stick.

So, if you agree, and I think most do, go to your privacy setting immediately.
Here's a how-to from my @rww source.

Predicting a Social Media Based Society

As a media marketer, I've been awed by the impact of social media on all our lives for a while now. In a Faith Popcorn moment recently I was trying to imagine the even greater impact it will have on society down-the-road. Will the transparency social networking forces on brands now drive us to be kinder, gentler human brands because of the power of mob to criticize? We already open ourselves up to criticism for every opinion posted. And we make instant heroes of the Steven Slaters of the world (212,000 Facebook fans and counting) who act out secret fantasies in public.

So, think about where will we be as the walls are continuously torn down... where that will put us in 20, 30 years under our belts of a medium that is only in its toddler-dom today?
What adjustments will we make?
Will the pendulum swing backwards to greater privacy than ever, as a backlash to too much crowd judgments on every move one makes?
Will it burst open even further and manners and mores be damned?
Will we become vanilla pudding, scared to make a move or take a stance?

I wonder.

Tamar Weinberg wrote a nice blog on balancing social media social lives and blending with relationships offline, applying practices of one on the other.

As social media enthusiasts, we often forget that we live in a different type of world than everyone else. We might be more keen to open up to strangers and share our feelings with people we don’t know. It’s the world we’re living in — for us, at least, and it will continue as we spread these ideas to our peers and colleagues, all of whom will likely slowly open up to this world in due time. All paths will ultimately lead to here whether or not these “outsiders” have chosen to accept it yet.

Faith Popcorn, criticized by some, lauded by others, predicts less conspicuous consumption (driven by fear of criticism again or is it the economy, stupid?...though we won't hesitate to rubberneck in awe of a Real Housewives' lifestyle and shop their bankruptcy sale). Either way, social media is part of the problem and the solution:

Amy Avitabile, senior vice president of marketing at Lord & Taylor, called the use of social networking a “complete game-changer.” Lord & Taylor is using Facebook and Twitter in nonpromotional ways. It also has a mobile strategy for messaging. While Lord & Taylor was late to the party with e-commerce (its site is less than two years old) “it’s the number-one trending door by a lot,” she said....

“Our big message was to alleviate the guilt of shopping,” said Avitabile. “We don’t sell things she needs, but what she wants.” So the store developed the “Shop Smart” campaign, created by David Lipman with the tag line “Shop More, Guilt Less.”

Popcorn also thinks supermarkets will work to compete with local farmer's markets' rise in popularity but may fail without "authenticity and transparency." Why? Again, because of social media, and our ability as consumers -- or just humans -- to point fingers and get to the truth.
Truth is the breath of life to human society. It is the food of the immortal spirit. Yet a single word of it may kill a man as suddenly as a drop of prussic acid.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Thoughts? Criticisms on this post? Please share, but leave the prussic acid at home.

Looking Up

My dear friend Rita, a respected businesswoman in the marketing world, forwarded me a link to Pete Blackshaw's column today in AdAge. I was very moved by the piece and submitted a long comment back to Pete, but the topic is worth a couple hundred extra words...at least.

Pete, a regular AdAge columnist and VP at Nielsen Online Digital Strategy, lost his sister recently. He became aware of the contrast between real, deep offline connections and community created by her passing and shared grief and support vs the surface kinds of connections we are all running after in our online world. Here's a link to his column: http://bit.ly/Blackshaw-adage

I found myself buying every admonishment and silently vowing to work those offline relationships harder than my Twitter-based ones, but found the comments posted very interesting for the push back from a few readers. This is actually why online conversations can be so important and compelling. We actually have more opportunity than ever before to share and hear other opinions. This hopefully will make the world a little smaller, but it also reminds me of the need to remember the middle ground.

Here's what I wrote in response to Pete's column and others' comments:

"Pete, I too am sorry for your loss, and sadly grateful for the column it inspired.

Yes, there are those who feel the connection you made between your experience of a family member's death, offline, with the lifestyle we live now, online, was "kind of too much" or "nearly blasphemous."
And others will share the pathos completely and hang their heads in shame for a moment vs just hanging their heads down over a smartphone, thanks to the reminder that we need to emerge from our avatar-selves and raise our eyes and our consciousness more frequently, and seize the offline day too.

That said, the ship has sailed and I fear we won't easily be able to find our way back to the kind of connections we SHOULD have. I'm guilty of missing the chance to share a smile or receiving one, and have heard annoyed passersby say, "Look up!" And I've been annoyed in return to see every single person on the train completely absorbed in their own digital world.

Tim Sanders wrote his book, Love Is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends back in 2002 on the premise that "being a lovecat" is the only way to succeed in the 21st century, and necessary to overcome our Dilbert society of isolation in cubbies.

We crave community. I think we're creating it in any way we can.

Digitally, time suck that it is, is just easier for many. Unfortunately, we end up back in the digital version of a cubbie after all.

Thank you for the excellent reminder to look up."