The latest report from ecoAmerica is titled "up start with people." The report states that the environmental community has not been successful at wining the hearts and minds because they have focusedmostly on government regulation and intervention. The non-profit sees more success being had by those in the movement who are focused on social solutions that are built around people.

ecoAmerica wants to encourage this shift by bringing together NGOs and others for large-scale public engagement programs targeting mainstream Americans with unquestionable benefits. So far, that has been carried out through higher education initiatives like the President's Climate Commitment and green college ratings with the Princeton Review, public outreach like Nature Rocks, along with several others listed in the report and soon will include the Center for Social Solutions on Climate.

Seems like a no-brainer. If you want PEOPLE to care about the environment, you should probably also focus on people, right?

Glowing coverage of corporate greening initiatives is coming to an end, pens Kate Galbraith in the International Herald Tribune. Galbraith, Energy and environment reporter for the Texas Tribune, writes:

Journalists are a little less wide-eyed, and a little more picky. The cutting-edge coverage today does not typically revolve around the greening of fill-in-the-blank company. Instead, topics like “Who’s not going green?” and “What are the difficulties of going green?” are being seen more frequently...Going green, in other words, became so mainstream that it was no longer big news.

Galbraith calls it a "natural evolution" in reporting and my experience in the ethanol industry leads me to concur. As I've said before, journalists' second favorite story goes something like this: "There's this new thing you've never heard of, but it's going to make you healthy, wealthy and wise while saving the economy, the environment and the world." That's often closely followed by their favorite story: "Remember that new thing I told you about? It's actually robbing you blind, making you stupid and ultimately killing you while destroying the economy, the environment and indeed, the world." 

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Nathan is the director of public relations for POET, the largest producer of biofuels in the world. He is also a digital advocate of sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Nathan writes extensively for Greenway Communique.

It's no secret that there has been a decline in the number of reporters in the mainstream media who cover energy and the environment. Thanks to a newsroom leak, we get a rare glimpse at just how bad it is.

The independent Gannett Blog obtained a list of the newsroom journalists from the USA TODAY and posted it. They made the point that there were 5 reporters covering Congress and 27 on entertainment. The number of reporters devoted to the Science/Energy/Environment beat was exactly the same (as Congress, not entertainment).

I've talked to some of those five reporters before and they do excellent work. But the relative number of reporters shows what topics are important to the second largest newspaper in America.

But, as I pointed out in nominating Marc Gunther for recognition as a sustainability leader, we don't necessarily have to fear that decline in mainstream media coverage. Here's are the opening sentences of that nomination in Directions 10:

In an era where declining revenues for mainstream media has led to cutbacks in the number of reporters who cover the environment, Marc Gunther has shown that the internet provides the only forum a good journalist needs to succeed today.

There are others like Gunther out there doing excellent reporting on energy and the environment and the Internet is their printing press. They are the future of reporting on sustainability.

From the Pickens Plan to the American Gas Association, the natural gas industry has invested a lot of money to promote "clean natural gas." But if you're going to advertise something as clean and green (without qualification), you need to make sure it's clean and green all the way through.

One method of extracting natural gas that has led some to dispute natural gas' clean image is hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking,' which has been said to have significant environmental and human health concerns. The issue was front and center this week on the latest episode of CSI. Here's a preview of the November 11, 2010 CSI episode, 'Fracked'.

View here: http://soc.li/YAMBMSO

The synopsis of the episode says: "Two men are murdered right before exposing a natural gas company for poisoning residents in a farming town, and the CSIs must discover who is responsible for their deaths." Watch the full episode here. According to Nielsen, 12-13 million viewers spent an hour hearing that message. It will take a lot of advertising dollars to make up for that, but that's the cost when your actions don't match your ads.

Nathan is the director of public relations for POET, the largest producer of biofuels in the world. He is also a digital advocate of sustainability and corporate social responsibility.He writes exclusively for Greenway Communique

The kerfuffle over Chevron’s ad campaign and the accompanying spoof ad campaign (see my Inspired Economist post) reminded me that I hadn’t posted anything here about my first contribution to the Public Relations The Strategist. Titled Handling a Fake Twitter Account: @BPGlobalPR Leaves Lasting Impression on Crisis Communications, the article talks about the fake Twitter account that parodied BP’s communications response to the Gulf Oil Spill.

The Strategist article draws on the expertise of Shel Holtz and Kevin Dugan to talk about how BP could have better handled the crisis in the gulf and the rise of @BPGlobalPR on Twitter. With another oil company responding to another spoof communications plan from environmental activists, I thought it might be worth the read.

 I was an early one of the 186,000+ followers of @BPGlobalPR on Twitter. How could I not be? In the midst of tragedy in the Gulf, with Jon Stewart enjoying an unfortunately timed vacation, it provided some much-needed comic relief.

How can people be convinced to significantly green their lives? To make the big changes needed to conserve natural resources and decrease energy use?

Robert B. Cialdini may have something to suggest. Cialdini' is the author of Influence and I’ve been reading his follow-up book Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. Each of the 50 ways is given its own chapter in the easy to read book and number 14 is titled: “How can one small step help your influence take a giant leap?”

This chapter tells the story of two social science researchers posing as the Road Traffic Safety Committee and their quest to get homeowners to place “a large, unsightly sign measuring six feet by three feet and stating DRIVE CAREFULLY on [their] front lawn.” Unsurprisingly, only 17 percent in the “posh neighborhood” agreed to place the sign in their yard. But what was astonishing was that the researchers were able to increase that rate to 76 percent among a similar group “simply by making one seemingly insignificant addition to their request.” From page 65 of the book:

A different research assistant approached this separate group of residents two weeks prior to this burdensome request and asked them if they’d be willing to display a very small, relatively inconspicuous sign in their window that read BE A SAFE DRIVER. Because it was such a small request, almost all of these residents agreed. Two weeks later, when someone else came to their home and asked them if they’d be willing to place the large billboard on their otherwise perfectly manicured lawn, they were much more inclined to agree.

In their Harvard Business Review article, The Sustainability Imperative, David A. Lubin and Daniel C. Esty say that companies need to get better at communicating sustainability. In the article, the authors identify sustainability as an emerging megatrend, similar to quality in the 1970's and IT in the 1980's.

In order for companies to gain advantage from this megatrend, they need to execute in five critical areas, one of which is reporting and communication. They write:

We see substantial room for improved sustainability communications, particularly among companies with a strong commitment to lead in this arena. Our firm has conducted evaluations of dozens of companies along 35 dimensions of sustainability management. When the assessments were based only on publicly available information and a company's external reporting, we got scores that were almost always lower, and often significantly so, than scores developed in consultation with the company and with full inside information.

In other words, companies aren't getting enough credit for their sustainability work because they aren't being effective communicators. The authors point to the sustainability reports of Timberland as an example of what they expect to be commonplace in the future.

The need for companies to improve green communications is a big reason why I started this blog. I knew it was an area that I needed to improve and I quickly saw that others needed it as well. My hope is that the interactions that start here, can help drive that improvement. What do you think companies need to do to better communicate their sustainability?

One of the biggest networks of green blogs is dropping the word "green" from its name. Green Options Media, the former home of Sustainablog, Gas 2.0 and Cleantechnica, and current home to ten blogs, has been renamed Important Media. Now, GreenOptions.com is a full fledged community, running on Huddler’s innovative forum/wiki/product platform.

I recently spoke with David Anderson, the founder and publisher of Important Media about what was behind the change and what we can expect from them in the future. And the reason for the rebrand was interesting.

Anderson saw the word 'green' as a limiting factor on their ability to reach their target audience. "If you're trying to reach people who like cars, it's easier to talk about the cars of the future rather than trying to convert them to be interested in green cars," Anderson said. "You don’t have to fight as hard to overcome people’s previous misconceptions with the word green."

But it wasn't just about the current audience. "We also felt that having the word 'green' in our name was a limitation if you want to expand the topics you are talking about," Anderson said. "This is a way for us to start talking about topics beyond just environmentalism. Things like social justice."

Cliff Burrows, President of Starbucks Coffee U.S., spoke about their efforts to limit the environmental impact of coffee consumption at Fortune Magazine's Brainstorm Green conference. According to Burrows, they have made big strides in how coffee is grown and now one of their largest impacts is the coffee cups. Out of the millions of coffees they sell every day, only one percent are served in reusable mugs.
 
Starbucks wants to increase that number, but according to Burrows, the incentive of saving a dime is not enough. So, for today only, they are giving free coffee to anyone who brings their own reusable coffee to a Starbucks. I got mine this morning on the way to the office.
 
Here's the video that Burrows showed at the conference and is prominently posted on their web site today.

I first heard about the event through a Facebook ad that led me to their event page, where I am one of almost 250,000 attendees as of this blog post. I also came across a paid tweet that said " and linked to a page on their web site called The Big Picture. Far from being an intrusive Twitter ad, it had already been retweeted more than 100 times.
 
This is a great campaign where Starbucks is very openly owning up to their biggest environmental weakness and inviting their customers to address it with them. So, what are you waiting for? Go get your free coffee without hurting the planet!
 
Nathan Schock's personal blog, Greenway Communique,  is the primary hub for communicating sustainability and bringing people together who do the same.

Consumers have very little understanding of which companies trying to be more sustainable and which ones are not. Duh, you say? Well, that conclusion was driven home by reading MapChange 2010 from the brand agency Change.

This sustainability brand map study looked at the perceived and actual sustainability scores for 97 companies in 10 sectors and found that they didn't exactly always mesh. Some companies that were highly sustainable were not perceived as such while some of the less responsible companies were perceived to be more sustainable. Depending on who you talk to, that is another example of a communications failure or an opportunity (or both).

Some of the results were quite eye-opening. In the food and beverage sector, Organic Yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm had the highest actual sustainability score but a below-average perception, which was inverse that of Kraft, Kellogg and General Mills.

In the household sector, the perception of Clorox far exceeded their actual sustainability score (perhaps because of their recently launched Green Works brand endorsed by the Sierra Club?) while L'Oreal didn't get the acknowledgement they deserved.

But perhaps the most interesting to me was the Internet/Software/Media sector brand scores. In this sector, the perceptions of net giants Google, Yahoo and Amazon all exceeded their actual scores, while the perceptions of General Electric and News Corporation were much worse than their actual scores. GE was surprising considering their highly visible ecomagination brand and their high ranking in other surveys. And News Corp's well-publicized goal of making their operations carbon neutral appears not to have helped their public perception (perhaps they need to use language the public understands, rather than "carbon neutral").