Green Marketing 2.0| SEO SEM Social Media Consulting - Lorna Li

The Story of Stuff – Great Social Marketing Through Social Media

lorna li — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 01:29:10 +0000

My buddies at Free Range Studios created this fantastic viral video that was featured at Bioneers last October. While lambasted in the mainstream media, the Story of Stuff has been a fave of left-leaning environmental activists and educators.

Why? Because it makes you think about where our stuff comes from and where it is going, and the part we all play in this consumption oriented system.

What makes the Story of Stuff successful?

In a similar style to CommonCraft’s In Plain English video series, the Story of Stuff uses simple animations to illustrate complex concepts. Video animation is a great medium to tell a complex story in a simple, yet compelling way. The message is easily digestible by kids as well as adults.

Imagine trying to explain the Story of Stuff in text, with, maybe a few diagrams. The message would probably be lost. The relationships between consumers, government, and corporations a little too complex to grok in words. The text version of the Story of Stuff would never go viral.

The Story of Stuff is a must see for anyone wanting to create an education campaign using social media, in order to raise awareness of sustainability issues.

4 Pillars of Personal Success & Manifestation

lorna li — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:47:01 +0000

I believe in the power of manifestation, and have applied the principles of The Secret toward achieving my personal goals with great success. However, I believe that in addition to forming a mental intention to accomplish a goal, especially a big goal, the action that one takes towards fulfilling this intent are equally, if not more important than just the concept itself. In other words, just thinking about being rich is not going to suddenly – poof - make you rich. You have to create an action plan and then take the appropriate actions towards increasing wealth.

I know many people who wholeheartedly believe in The Secret and the power of The Power of Intention, but still remain, pretty much, stuck in the same situation they are trying to get out of. The other day I was discussing with a friend of mine who is just now starting to formulate his life goals beyond working McJobs to fund long backpacking stints around the world, while scrimping and penny-pinching in between jaunts. He’s now in a place where he wants to have a meaningful career and one day, be able to support a family. He’s determined to make a six figure salary next year. But how to get there from a year and a half of unemployment and a work history of menial jobs?

Having thought a lot about the art of meaningful, spiritually, & financially fulfilling work over the past decade and a half, I shared with him the 4 attributes that I believe are essential towards fulfilling a big, hairy, audacious goal (BHAG):

Clear Vision – the Universe is conspiring to help you. However, if you are not clear with exactly what it is you want, the Universe will misfire, presenting you with opportunities and choices that may be off, or a diluted version of what you want. Spending the time to ask yourself what it is you truly want is the most important part of the manifestation process. This process is as much emotional as it is intellectual – its important to feel as if you were on the verge, if not already living the achievement of your goal. This way the emotional connection between your body and mind will ground the vision in the present moment. Achieving your goal will feel real, and eventually become real. Because the clear visioning process is so important, remember to focus on the positive fulfillment of your goals. Don’t focus on the negative, by obsessing about the things you want to avoid.
Statement of Intention – once you have arrived at a clear vision of your goals, the next step is to state your intention to the Universe. Sum up your goal in a 30 second elevator pitch to the Universe. Be able to state your goal clearly, with confidence. Write it down. Then proceed to write down all the details around the goal itself. Let’s say your goal is to work for a company that “develops a cutting edge social application that enables people to connect like never before at the local level.” Imagine what this application would do and map out the ways in which people would interact. Imagine the kind of developers you would work with, and the kind of people who would be on your team. Where would funding come from? How much money would you make? What title would you have? Make a big list and down all the details. Make a vision board with magazine cut-outs and drawings. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone through this process, only to stash my list somewhere, find it months later and discover that I’d achieved nearly every, if not every item on the list. That’s why it’s important to be specific – the more specific you get, the easier it is for the Universe to conspire to help you.
Right Action – this means integrity, coupled with efficiency. Being busy is not the same as being efficient. It’s super easy to fill the day with busy-ness, to run yourself ragged going from one thing to another, and yet never appear to make any progress. If this is happening, take a step back and identify which actions are bringing you closer to your goal and which are simply taking up your time. Eliminate the time suckers. It could also be that you have too many projects going on at the same time, and are simply stretched too thin. At this point, it’s important to identify which project is the most important and focus. From an energetic perspective, working from a place of integrity is the most efficient.
Community – networking and creating ongoing relationships with like-minded people, especially those who share similar goals, is critical to success, especially to the success of big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs). No (wo)man is an island, and it’s very difficult to manifest a big, challenging vision and succeed all alone. Most successful people and organizations are buoyed by the community of people that surround them. For this reason, it’s valuable to seek mentorship from people who are ahead of you in the process, as well as comraderie among peers who are at the same stage of development. Never forget to pay it forward, to people behind you on the path. At the same time, it’s necessary to prune out the people in your life who will tear you down, be a negative influence, bum you out, and display habits & behaviors that are not in line with your vision. By creating a great community and support network around you, we all end up inspiring each other to grow, share, and learn.

So these are my 4 pillars of success for the manifestation of a big personal goal or vision. What do you think?

Backgrounder: A roundup up of Carbon Fraud reports – Probe International

lorna li — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:12:50 +0000

Backgrounder: A roundup up of Carbon Fraud reports Probe International Fraud in the green market can take many forms – from intentionally inaccurate carbon footprint measurements to misleading green marketing claims to the … and more??

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Backgrounder: A roundup up of Carbon Fraud reports – Probe International

Taking the Green Plunge (Part 2 of 2) – American Coin-Op

lorna li — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:12:30 +0000

Taking the Green Plunge (Part 2 of 2) American Coin-Op “I'm doing big-time green marketing . I have 'green' in big letters with quotes on the front of my store

Link:
Taking the Green Plunge (Part 2 of 2) – American Coin-Op

Green Marketing: What Works, What Doesn’t – What They Think (blog)

lorna li — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:11:54 +0000

Green Marketing : What Works, What Doesn’t What They Think (blog) Marketers recently turned very strongly to green marketing tactics as firms look for “ green” business partners and businesses jump on the corporate social …

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Green Marketing: What Works, What Doesn’t – What They Think (blog)

Justmeans Social Media for Sustainability Conference Oct 19, 2009

lorna li — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 07:41:37 +0000

If you’re in San Francisco on Monday and want to learn about how companies use social media for good, check out the Justmeans Social Media for Sustainability conference at Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF.

Justmeans is a social network for the “business for good” community, a place where professional do gooders of all orientations, from activists to social entrepreneurs to CSR (corporate social responsibility) buffs and green marketing fanatics, can network, share information, and collaborate on making business better for people and the planet.

The conference explores the different social media tools and platforms available to company employees and strategies around engaging stakeholders and creating a vibrant community. Important questions that will be addressed at Social Media for Sustainability include:

How can social media propel sustainability communications?
Which companies are most effectively using social media to reach stakeholders?
How do you make sure your message is heard in the new media atmosphere?
Should companies be using social media to influence the way that people act beyond the purchase of a product?

Some of the speakers on Social Media for Sustainability include:

Jeff Hollender, CEO, Seventh Generation
Bob Pearson, President, the Blog Council
Chad Boettcher, SVP Social Innovation, Weber Shandwick
Danny Kennedy, Co-Founder and President, Sungevity
Graham Hill, Founder, Treehugger
Kevin Long, Co-Founder, Justmeans, Ashoka Fellow
Ryan Mickle, Co-Publisher, Triple Pundit, LLC
Ron Gonen, Co-Founder and CEO, RecycleBank

Drinking Gives You The Same Benefits As Yoga

lorna li — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:59:06 +0000

My dad sends me the funniest things via email. Here’s the latest – the similarities between and drinking.

Savasana
Position of total relaxation

Balasana
Position that brings the sensation of peace and calm.

Setu Bandha Sarvangasana
This position calms the brain and heals tired legs.

Marjayasana
This position stimulates the mid-drift area and the spinal column.

Halasana
Excellent for back pain and insomnia.

Dolphin
Excellent for the shoulder area, thorax, legs, and arms.

Salambhasana
Great exercise to stimulate the lumbar area, legs, and arms.

Ananda Balasana
This position is great for massaging the hip area.

Malasana
This position releases your ankles and back muscles.

No related posts.

10 Best Green Social Networks

lorna li — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:54:06 +0000

The Green web is growing. Rapidly. And it’s a good thing. Online communities, blogs and social sites aimed at connecting well meaning people with great causes (and each other) have mushroomed. Nowadays, all it takes to rally around issues like climate change, clean energy, or health care reform is an Internet connection.

At the same time, with all the Green social networks out there, it’s hard to know which online community is worth the time investment. Because, face it, social networking takes time. Whether you are an individual activist seeking to meet other like-minded people or a social change organization trying to build community around your cause, choosing the right online community can ensure that you get the most impact for your efforts.

Top 10 Green Social Networks

Here are the top 10 most influential, active, and interesting social networks for Green causes:

Care2 was started in 1998 by Randy Paynter who wanted to harness the power of the Internet to make the world a better place. Care2 originally started as a online email and ecard service that donated a percentage of revenues to environmental nonprofits. It has since evolved into an interactive online community with nearly 12M members. On Care2 you can support in a variety of social causes, from animal welfare to women’s rights, by donating to featured nonprofits, signing petitions, joining an interest group or simply staying informed.

Needless to say, the project has since outgrown Randy’s apartment and is now a company that has 50 employees, 9 million users and 400 non profit partners.

Change.org is the leading online community for social change. Originally Change.org provided a novel way for people to connect around positive social change – you would type in the change(s) you wanted to create in the world and you be able to find others in the community who were tagged with those same causes. The site has since evolved, providing daily news and information about important social issues, as well as the means for people to take action, and connect with nonprofits.

Change.org is a profitable social entrepreneurship venture based in San Francisco, CA founded by Stanford graduate Ben Rattray in 2005.

WiserEarth is a free online community space connecting the people, nonprofits and businesses working toward a just and sustainable world. It is a project of Paul Hawken’s Natural Capital Institute and built on a wiki platform that supports the world’s most detailed classification of issue areas related to social justice and environmental restoration. Here you will find the world’s largest free and editable international directory of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and socially responsible organizations (110,000 in 243 countries, territories, and sovereign islands) – wow!

In the spirit of Wikipedia, WiserEarth is open source, with content publicly available for use under the Creative Commons license.

11thhouraction.com was inspired by popular documentary “The 11th Hour” (narrated by Leonardo Dicaprio). It’s environmentally focused social network aimed at empowering inspire individuals and communities engage in planet-saving actions.

Users can sign up, create a blog, create their own environmental action campaigns, or commit to a personal action, like carpooling or recycling more. Actions get plotted on a map, so you can view the community’s environmental activism across the globe, or locate an action group near you.

DoSomething.org encourages teenagers to take positive social action, without the supervision of adults. This fun, teeny-bopperish site encourages kids to get out and do something through volunteerism, and also offers small grants to help teenagers to start their own projects. And if you want to start a club, all you need are 5 friends to apply, and DoSomething.org will provide resources, online infrastructure, opportunities to do good, and even fund your projects. Who needs grownups?

Taking It Global is another youth oriented social network with a mission to transform teenagers and young adults (ages 13-30) into young leaders of today.

Taking It Global provides a collaborative learning community that allows youth across the world access to global opportunities, cross-cultural connections and meaningful participation in decision-making. In addition to being an online social network, Taking It Global provides tools for educators, and helps facilitate research and learning opportunities through workshops and webinars for its members.

Since their inception Taking It Global has reached 14 million young people across 12 languages.

Holistic Local is a social network with a LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health & Sustainability) orientation, that focuses on connecting people who are into spirituality, health, the environment and conscious living locally. You can discover transformational workshops, participate in their holistic marketplace, access articles & e-books, and connect with thousands of crunchy-feely new age members.

The Gaia Community claims to be different from other a social networks. Firstly, you have to “apply” to join, although “applying” is no different than registering for free as on every other social network. Before you are allowed in, you must also click on this affirmation “I recognize that Gaia is creating an online sanctuary for personal development and, in the spirit of this, I commit to honoring the Terms of Use.” The Gaia Community aims to inspire and empower you to realize your own brilliant purpose and discover who you truly are. In addition to finding and connecting with other spiritually aware members, participating in conscious, planet affirming discussions, on Gaia, you may even find your soulmate.

The nag is a tongue in cheek UK based site lightens up on the earnest, do-gooder mentality that plagues environmental activists and makes eco-activism fun. First you start by ranting – get it off your chest. After you’ve let it all out, then you suggest solutions. After that, get out and do something! So while you’re ranting about the evils of bottled water in restaurants, it may actually occur to you in the midst of it all to ask for tap?

Lime.com – is all about healthy living with a green twist. The online community is operated by Gaiam, a green lifestyle company that provides information, goods and services to customers who value the environment, a sustainable economy, healthy lifestyles, alternative healthcare and personal development. Lime TV features videos from holistic health luminaries like Deepak Chopra and celebrity yogis like Rodney Yee. You can also listen to wide selection of Green lifestyle podcasts on topics such as herbal remedies, fitness, and meditation. Who would have thought that online Enlightenment was possible?

Arizona green marketing agency, Park&Co, educates on carbon …

lorna li — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:21:24 +0000

Green marketing firm, Park&Co, one of the North America’s first carbon-neutral ad agencies, and the first carbon-neutral agency in Arizona, teams with EcoAid to define the practice of purchasing carbon credits to offset a company’s …

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Arizona green marketing agency, Park&Co, educates on carbon …

The Concise List of Must Have SEO Plugins for WordPress

lorna li — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 07:21:30 +0000

I think I’ve researched every WordPress SEO plugin in existence. The list I amassed was daunting. I had plugin anxiety. All In One SEO Pack or Platinum SEO? Many of them had features that overlapped. The thought of having to install all those plugins and to get them to work with each other was a developer nightmare.

Due to some fortuitous Tweeting, Joost DeValk, the WordPress SEO Guru, picked up on my Tweet and offered to go over my massive list of 30 SEO plugins via Skype, and eliminate the chaff. Granted he wrote many of these – but that’s why he’s the WordPress SEO guru. If you care about WordPress SEO, you oughta mosey on down to Joost’s site and read his WordPress SEO Bible.

Must Have WordPress SEO plugins

The list of plugins below should have your site covered for all things SEO.

HeadSpace2 – HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools. While the name only mentions “Google” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog. You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Friendly Images – Yoast is on the fence this. I kind of like it. Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

Meta Robots Plugin – There’s no easy way to add meta robots tags to WordPress pages, unless of course, when you install this plugin. This plugin makes it possible (and very easy) to:

Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.
Prevent indexing of the subpages to your homepage, by adding a noindex,follow.
Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions
And more!

Yoast Breadcrumbs – This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme.

RSS Plugins

MediaRSS – MediaRSS is a way of embedding media into your feeds. The specification at http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/ provides for many kinds of media: audio, video, etc. This plugin is equipped to locate img tags in your posts and generate XML code that can be used by feed readers.
RSS Footer – This very simple plugin let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, which you can edit like this:

Social Media Plugins

Sociable is a social sharing plugin with big, plush social media buttons that you just want to press. It’s much more attractive and noticable than Share This.

Post Ratings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page. Here is how it looks.

Twitter Plugins – choices abound. I would do Retweet first and then the Twitter Box once we get our Twitter accounts set up.

Retweet Button – The TweetMeme retweet button is for website and blog publishers who want to encourage their audience to tweet their content on twitter. The button shows a live count of the number of times your webpage or blog post has been tweeted.

Tweetbacks – People are talking about your posts, and not only in the comments to your post. A lot of that conversation is happening on Twitter, and now, you can take that conversation right back to your blog! This plugin imports those tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.

Twitter Box – Provides on how to create a fancy box that displays your latest Twitter rants in your sidebar without having to turn to clunky plug-ins that bog your blog down.

Content / Media

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Key features include:

An advanced and versatile algorithm: Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.
Related posts in RSS feeds: Display related posts in your RSS and Atom feeds with custom display options.

Video Player Quicktags – This plugin adds a button to your editor that allows you to paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more. Your site will even stay (X)HTML valid unlike with the code provided by most video sites.

Currently supports these video sites:

* YouTube (including playlists)

* Google Video

* DailyMotion

* Vimeo

* Veoh

* Viddler

* Metacafe

* Blip.tv

* Flickr videos

* Spike.com/IFILM

* MySpaceTV

As well as these file types:

* Flash Video Files (FLV)

* QuickTime (MOV, etc.)

* Generic video files (AVI, MPEG, WMV, etc.)

SlideShare – This plugin allows you to easily add SlideShare presentations to your blog by just copy pasting the default WordPress embed code. It has one (!) setting, “default width”. If you set that setting, it will make all presentations appear at the width you set there, allowing you to easily adapt the width to your theme’s content width.
Smush.it – Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API in WordPress. Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through Smush.it behind the scenes. You don’t have to do anything different. Smush.it optimizes images by:

stripping meta data from JPEGs
optimizing JPEG compression
converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
stripping the un-used colours from indexed images

Commenting

Subscribe to Comments – Subscribe to Comments 2.1 is a plugin that allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there for the simple reason that it helps foster a community around your blog by encouraging commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog

WordPress Maintenance plugins:

WordPress SuperCache – WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.
WP Database Backup – Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

No Self Pings – Some people really like that WordPress sends pings from your own site to your own site when you write posts; it lets them easily leave a trail of related posts. Some people do not like this behavior; it clutters up their comments. So here’s a plugin to disable self pinging.

Other

Zemanta – Zemanta provides contextual content recommendations to you while you write. It enhances your blog post with relevant images, videos, links, and SEO optimized tags. All recommended content is blogger friendly with clearly marked licenses (Creative Commons or similar).

Other Tips:

Creating traditional sitemaps – according to Yoast a traditional sitemap can actually be done within the theme, so there is no need for a plugin.