GreenSmith Consulting

GreenSmith Sessions #6: Southern Fried Green Blogging with Jeffrey Davis

The funny factor was definitely in effect for GreenSmith Sessions #6, with Jeffrey Davis, a southern fried green blogger from Nashville, Tennessee. In my work as a digital publicist for green businesses, I interact with a lot of blogs and their editors, and Jeffrey definitely brings a different voice to the web. One influenced by his interest in fitness, the environment, and a lively engagement with the world that is uniquely southern. Both gregarious and considerate, he brings green living ideas to the masses with humor, curiosity, and relevance to people’s every day lives. 

 

 The recent piece Vegetarian Because I Hate Vegetables is a prime example. It leads with:

“I’m not a vegetarian. I experience abundant pleasure in the awesomeness that is animal protein. My wife, however, IS a vegetarian.

Whether you’re a vegetarian, omnivore, or maybe even a cannibal-vore, you must admit that this is one of the most awesome t-shirts in existence.

I love to hear how people arrive at their food paradigms, but vegetarians have some of the most interesting answers.”

Honesty, humor, and thoughtfulness. A great way to reach people. Jeffrey has written for many other people’s blogs, but now leading Eco Snobbery Sucks, he puts front and center his desire to make living a greener, fitter life, and being (or becoming) a greener business something that is not only possible, but doable. And enjoyable. But overall, that it's not an all or nothing proposition, which discourages many.

 

Building on this, Davis will be rolling out a consulting aspect, specifically geared to help businesses green more effectively, and better communicate it to and connect with their customers. 

I had to ask, having little knowledge of how green and the South (southern US) interact, what life was like for Davis down there. The answers both surprised and amused. 

So have a seat, and get ready for a meaty, funny GreenSmith Sessions. You can also save this podcast for later listening.

Click here to play or save GreenSmith Sessions #6 Jeffrey Davis

Paul Smith is a sustainable business innovator, the founder of GreenSmith Consulting, blogs weekly on green start ups of note at Triple Pundit and has an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco. He creates interest in, conversations about, and business for green (and greening) companies, via social media marketing.

Maker Faire Africa and Beyond: GreenSmith Sessions #3 with Mark Grimes

In the third edition of GreenSmith Sessions, I talked with Mark Grimes, a Co-Founder of buzzing coworking hubs NedSpace, and one of the driving forces behind Maker Faire Africa. 

 A man of many hats, mostly of a social entrepreneurial bent, he and a small crew of people from around the globe took a leap of faith last year with the first African edition of this gathering of the inventive, the resourceful, and the appealingly crazy. It worked, and they went back again this past August.

Our conversation ranged from open source stop signs to fulfilling on the eight Millennium Goals , and an interesting puzzle for you: how to reshape social media to fit African entrepreneurs, within the current technological constraints they face?

An idea that particularly stuck out to me is when Grimes explained how small local African companies can compete with the often quite a bit larger Indian companies based there: Let the consumer decide how much they can afford, and build an object, i.e. a bed, within that budget. Makes you wonder, perhaps this idea can be applied in developed markets as well. It’s in a way the reverse of the high end notion of made to fit, this time made to fit your budget.

Please enjoy, comment, and add to what you hear in GreenSmith Sessions, below.

 

images via Maker Faire Africa

 

Click me to play/download GreenSmith Sessions #3 Mark Grimes

Paul Smith is a sustainable business innovator, the founder of GreenSmith Consulting, blogs weekly on green start ups of note at Triple Pundit and has an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco. He creates interest in, conversations about, and business for green (and greening) companies, via social media marketing.

10 Ways Geolocation is Changing the World

This post was written by Rob Reed. He is the founder of MomentFeed, a location-based marketing, strategy, and technology firm.

Location technologies are transforming how we experience, navigate, and ultimately better our world. From the global to the local, here are #10Ways geolocation is a positive force for good.

Social media has changed the world. It has revolutionized communications on a global scale, and the transformation continues with every status update, blog post, and video stream. The global citizenry has become a global network.

Since becoming widely adopted just a couple years ago, social media has supercharged social action, cause marketing, and social entrepreneurship. Indeed, the true value hasn't been the technology itself but how we've used it. Today, a second wave of innovation is defining a new era and setting the stage for change over the coming decade.

Mobile technologies will extend the global online network to anyone with a mobile device while enabling countless local networks to form in the real world. We've decentralized media production and distribution. We're doing the same for energy. And we'll continue this trend for social networking, social action, and commerce.

The combined forces of smartphones, mobile broadband, and location-aware applications will connect us in more meaningful ways to the people, organizations, events, information, and companies that matter most to us---namely, those within a physical proximity of where we live and where we are. Can location-based services (LBS) change the world? Here are #10Ways:

GreenSmith Sessions #2: Humble European CSR Superstar Fabian Pattberg

Welcome back for the second edition of the GreenSmith Sessions, this time with Fabian Pattberg, a man with a multicultural awareness of business, having lived and worked across Europe and exotic Nashville, Tennessee. The GreenSmith Sessions are an evolving series of dynamic conversations with the key influencers, thinkers and doers in the sustainable business realm, and all the neighboring arenas it touches.

Fabian and I had a far ranging conversation, addressing if and how CSR is and can remain relevant in the days of BP, what the US and EU can learn from each other, who he thinks is doing a good job with their CSR reporting (a shocker, trust me!) and other intriguing nuggets of insight.

You can find Fabian on his influential and resource filled blog and website along with Twitter. As he suggested in our session, searching his name will also show you the expanding range of places he is present online and out in the field, helping companies and their stakeholders effectively meet in the middle. 

What's your take on the current state of CSR? Who's doing it well? Who's falling down on the job, so to speak? What can be done to make CSR reporting and activities more powerful, useful, and effective? 

Download GreenSmith Sessions #2 Fabian Pattberg

Play GreenSmith Sessions #2 Fabian Pattberg

Paul Smith is a sustainable business innovator, the founder of GreenSmith Consulting, blogs weekly on green start ups of note at Triple Pundit and has an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco. He creates interest in, conversations about, and business for green (and greening) companies, via social media marketing.

Time to Stop Talking About Going Local, and Doing It. Here's Who Is. (pt 2 of 3)

We’re living in interesting times, and it’s anybody’s guess what the economy, the environment, our society will look, even in the next year. The COP15 UN climate change gathering currently happening in Copenhagen isn’t panning out as many would have wanted, and solutions to unifying the world’s goals look further off.

Wayne Maceyka has a single, clear, suggestion: Go local, in all aspects, (re)building robust, agile, stable societies and economies in the process. In part 2 of his 3 part series, he focuses on the organizations currently happening to help support that.

I mentioned Michael Shuman's book Going Local in the first post of this series, and for those interested in exploring ways to localize their economies, it’s a good resource.  Civic Economics, with staff in both Austin, TX and Chicago, IL is another organization providing innovative consulting services for local economic development efforts.

 

On Michael Shuman’s Small-mart website, there are additional resources available to local economy advocates and defenders.  In the Small-mart blog, he announced the combination of Small-mart and The Business Alliance for local Living Economies "BALLE”.  BALLE formed out of a fortuitous meeting between Laury Hammel and Judy Wicks, both board members of the Social Venture Network and has been focusing on helping build resilient local economies since 2001.

 

The organization has grown to include 75 community networks with over 20,000 entrepreneurs & members across the US & Canada.  Look for “Sustainable Business Networks” in your area to connect with interesting and creative people working in the local economic development space.

Developing local currencies are a way to keep capital in communities and build stronger connections between people and businesses. Famous examples are Ithaca HOURs, from Ithaca, NY and BerkShares from Berkshire County in Western Massachusetts (forgive my Northeast focus; I am sure there are more successful examples out there, and I’d love to hear about them, below in the comments).  The IthacaHOURs site offers resources for communities interested in developing local currencies of their own.  It’s worth checking out.

Of recent interest in the conversation about alternative economic models is the rise of the "slowmoney" investment philosophy through the Slow Money Alliance; “patient capital" seeking to provide investors financial payback as well as social and environmental capital appreciation through agricultural investment.  They seek to bring money back down to earth. The effort is something of an off-shoot (or maybe a continuation) of the thinking around Slowfood, seeking to reconnect eaters with their food sources. The key questions asked by the Slow Money Alliance, and ones that I feel generate some interesting ideas are:

• What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live?
• What if there was a new generation of companies that gave away 50% of their profits?
• What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now?

 

The first Slow Money Conference occurred in Sante Fe, NM and received quite a bit of press, with articles in the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and Business Week. Is there a market for "patient capital"?

Time to Stop Talking About Going Local, and Doing It. Here's How. (pt 1 of 3)

With gold reaching all time highs in value, and other indicators that our global economy is in serious trouble (or seen more positively, ripe for a reset) money as we know it, and commerce as we know it may well vanish, or drastically change in the not too distant future. So perhaps, now more then ever, it’s time to look at how to build and maintain robust local economies.  

This week’s guest writer Wayne Maceyka takes an interesting, inspiring look at how that can happen. Part 1 of a 2 part series, we encourage your thoughts, ideas, and questions in the comments below.

  Considering the seismic activity that's been rumbling through the global economy over the past few years (it's not over, unemployment here in the United States is over 10%, the highest since 1983 and there are fears that commercial property loans, additional residential mortgages, and energy prices will squash a full-fledged recovery - in the traditional sense of the word), perhaps looking at our economy through a different lens would be interesting.

 For me, that lens has been building local and regional economies as a way to buffer regions from the winds of globalization and perhaps address some of our environmental challenges as well.

Why import items that meet basic human needs (food for instance) when much of it can be supplied from nearby? Of course, “nearby”, “local”, and “regional” are relative terms, the definitions of which are up for debate, but lets leave that discussion for another day Why is “going local” a good idea? It reduces our dependence on long distribution chains that are vulnerable to energy price fluctuations, reduces environmental impact, and perhaps most importantly helps keep financial capital circulating within the region.

 This recirculation of financial capital supports regional businesses and the jobs and value they create, further increasing the region’s resilience in the face of large-scale economic challenges.  Will every city, county or state be self-sufficient in the next 20 years? Probably not, though depending upon your beliefs around peak oil (see Jeff Rubin below) perhaps they’ll have to be.  The point is not to seek protectionist self-sufficiency, but cooperative interdependence on a scale consistent with human needs and natural resources.

U2, Oxfam America, New York MTA: Green Hypocrites?

If you're looking for an example of someone who walks their talk, Mike Lieberman would be your man. Best known as CanarsieBK on the web, this Brooklyn man is a living, breathing demonstration of how one can live sustainably, anywhere. He proves anything is possible, growing a thriving vegetable garden on his fire escape, and demonstrating actionable steps, daily, on how to be personally sustainable. And he's definitely not afraid to speak his mind.

Today Lieberman takes aim at those who don't seem to be walking the talk, balanced with options they could choose to align their actions better with their words. Do you agree with what he says? Have other views? Have other creative solutions for these and other organizations and globe trotting bands? Chime in, below.

With the green movement becoming more trendy, there are lots of high profile companies, organizations and individuals that claim to be green, but are they green hypocrites?



They talk the green talk, but they don't walk the green walk. Since they are in high profile positions they have the ear of people and are saying one thing, but their actions say otherwise.



U2


Arguably the biggest rock band of the past three decades, U2 has been vocal over the years about their stance on the climate and social injustice.



On their current "No Line on the Horizon" tour, their acts have demonstrated the opposite of what they've been saying. Due to the extravagant stage set, requiring 100 trucks, there is a massive crew (200 people) that need to travel with the band.



Carbonfootprint.com has said the tour's carbon emissions are equal to "the four band members travelling the 34.125 million miles from Earth to Mars in a passenger plane".



10 Ways to Support Charity Through Social Media

This guest post is a collaboration between Mashable's Summer of Social Good charitable fundraiser and Max Gladwell's "10 Ways" series. The post is being simultaneously published across more than 100 blogs. Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That's one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.

Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you'd like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Write a Blog Post

Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days -- whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you're passionate about, you're helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.

Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results here. You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.

2. Share Stories with Friends

Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you've gathered a social network. You'll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.

10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media

We are honored to have our friend and fellow traveler of the intersection of social media and green, Max Gladwell grace our blog with a host of innovative ways for each of us, as individuals and collectively to make an impact. Citizen journalism, open government, status updates, community building, information sharing, crowdsourcing, and the election of a President are in the mix here. 

Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They'll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They'll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they'll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.

What's most profound is that these represent parts of a greater whole. They represent a shift in power from centralized institutions and organizations to the People they represent. It is the evolution of democracy by way of technology, and we are all better for it. For most of us, social media has changed our lives in some meaningful way. Collectively it is changing the world for good.

Given the pace of innovation and adoption, change has become a constant. Every so often we find the need to stop and reflect on its most recent and noteworthy developments, hence the following list. Please note this is not a top-10 list, nor are these listed in any particular order. It's also incomplete. So we ask that you add to this conversation in the comments. If you'd like to Retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

An Ode to Ode Magazine

Ode magazine saved my life.

Well ok, pointed it in a new direction, more like.

Let me back up.

Four years ago I got West Nile virus. It nearly killed me. After a lengthy recovery period, I found myself in a restaurant with my wife, pondering what to do next. It was clear I was given a second chance, and I wanted to make the most of it. Always a strongly intuitive woman, I asked her what she saw as the next way to go with my life, my work.

She got a distant look in her eyes, then returned my gaze. "Sustainability. And Utne Magazine. And...", she paused, "The orange and green on the walls here."

The next day I found myself experiencing what I call Yellow Karmann Ghia Syndrome: The experience of suddenly seeing everywhere something that wasn't previously on your radar. At first it seems unusual, but it's just you deciding to notice what's all around you, all the time.

 

It was that way with sustainability. It seemed to show up in every facet of my life, overnight. Honestly, it had not been something I had a strong awareness of...or so I thought. It wasn't until my wife pointed out how often I relayed with great excitement stories from Ode Magazine, that they all had a common thread of sustainability in them.

Enter The GreenSmith...

Greetings, and welcome to the first entry of the GreenSmith blog. You have Chris Brogan and Max Gladwell to blame  for this.

Well not entirely.                

I've been wearing the green business blogger hat for the past few years as a weekly contributor to Triple Pundit and Ecopreneurist, in addition to being a green/sustainable business consultant here at GreenSmith. And having a grand time at it. So why start my own? Why now? Great question, and it's one I'm going to answer for myself as I write here.

I'd have to say it's because I see things. No not ghosts and goblins (though those were quite prevalent a few days ago, to be sure!) No, I have a set of eyes and brain that sees things out there in the world, perhaps with a slightly different lens than most. I consider this an asset, as I find possibility and promise in what others may miss, a benefit to both myself and my clients.

And I want you to see it too.

But before I dive into the innovation that comes across my radar, what GreenSmith Consulting is up to, promising future scenarios that I'd like to see realized, and interesting people, I want to stop and ask:

What do you want to see me write about? What's not being covered out there these days that you'd like to see more of? What gems are underneath the muck, waiting to be discovered? Many of you reading this are probably somehow connected to me via Twitter, and you've watched what I've shared on there. What do you imagine me writing about? 

I have many ideas in the cooker ready to be written about, but I want to hear from you first. It's how I work as a consultant, listening carefully to my clients so I can best help them. Now I'm listening to you here. I can't promise I'll write about everything you suggest. But I do promise to listen to what you have to say, and to be grateful for all suggestions.

Some boundaries: I'm not interested in writing straight up environmental pieces. I'm interested in the intersection of commerce and consideration (of environment,  resources, and people). Solutions being created for supposedly intractable problems.  Exuberance over despair.

I'm not interested in polarizing people, or emphasizing what's wrong. I want to shine a light on what's being done to create a more positive, supportive, healthy, and yes profitable world for all. And I reserve the right to go completely off topic, should it have a useful insight or lesson for you and I.

So, what's it going to be? I look forward to your thoughts, below.

Paul Smith is a sustainable business innovator, the founder of GreenSmith Consulting, blogs weekly on green start ups of note at Triple Pundit and has an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco. He creates interest in, conversations about, and business for green (and greening) companies, via social media marketing.