New environmental blog
Calvin posted this on Mar 11th 2008 at 11:56 under Blog, Business, Climate Change, Environment
Tom Raferty of “Tom Referty’s Social Media” has just set up a new blog to explore green issues. He ran a competition on his blog to suggest a domain and ended up choosing lowerfootprint.com — which was one of my offerings.
Tom passed on a Fire Eagle invitation (thanks Tom) for the winning suggestion. Fire Eagle is Yahoo’s new geographically aware platform that, in theory, will let other applications “know” where in the world you are at any given time, allowing them to tailor their services accordingly. I’ve signed up, but so far there’s no user-level application for the technology… although I see there are a few things in the pipeline. I’ll write more when there’s something to report.
Meanwhile I’d like to wish Tom all the best with his new venture. The more we can all do to bring the issues surrounding climate change to a mainstream audience, the better. Check it out, subscribe to the RSS feed, comment, encourage debate, spread the word, raise awareness.
Businesses are slowly coming around to the fact that they need to become more ecologically responsible — and the greener application of technology certainly has a big huge role to play in that transition. At present jury’s still out on how many are doing it for ethical/environmental reasons and how many are simply jumping on the eco-PR bandwagon — but the fact that they’re doing it at all is, I suppose, a step in the right direction.
Technorati Tags: climate change,environment,lower footprint,carbon footprint,Tom Raferty,fire eagle
Tom Raftery on 11 Mar 2008 at 22:47 #
Calvin, thanks again for the domain name - I love it.
Thanks for the plug for the blog as well, as it is just starting out it needs all the help it can get!
On the business front, I am quite optimistic. If you substitute efficient for Green, it starts to make a lot of financial sense to be more environmentally aware!
Calvin on 12 Mar 2008 at 10:28 #
Hi Tom,
You’re welcome, on both counts.
And you’re absolutely right of course, the only way mainstream businesses are going to embrace a more sustainable model is when someone actually demonstrates that IT MAKES BUSINESS SENSE.
At the end of the day, money talks!
The big problem is that most of the campaigning for greener business seems to appeal to some misguided notion of corporate altruism (a rare beast indeed), or focusses on “shock and awe” in an attempt to pummel the message home. I think the whole “Look at all the bad things that will happen if you don’t do this” approach is fundamentally flawed. Instead we need to focus on “look at all the great things that will happen if you do this.”
At the end of the day advocates of sustainable business are trying to SELL the concept — and what’s the first rule of sales? HIGHLIGHT THE BENEFITS!
If you want to foster businesses buy-in to a more sustainable model you have to highlight the benefits. If the goal of environmental sustainability is to reach a mainstream audience, be that in the consumer or corporate arena, then the focus has to shift to the positives, rather than drumming home the negatives. It needs to be about pleasure, not pain.
Then, and only then, will we see it gain the sort of traction it needs to make a tangible difference.
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