In his discussion of the verbal challenges in communicating sustainability and describing people who practice it (are they sustainers? sustainabilitists?) Joel Makower addresses something we’ve discussed before here on Shiny Green Button: You can only use the word sustainability so many times before it starts to feel hollow.
Anyone who writes about corporate sustainability can feel the pain here. There just aren’t a lot of solid synonyms for the word. Sure, you can sprinkle in a few references to corporate responsibility, but that gets tired pretty quickly too, especially when you have to broaden it to corporate social responsibility. If only there were another single word that communicates the broader-than-the-environment spirit of sustainability.
Makower suggests we take another look at green. We’ve all heard warnings to steer clear of the term, for fear it will be met with greenfatigue or, even worse, carry the stink of greenwashing.
But, isn’t that the term everyone is using anyway? Makower argues that green is commonplace in the business world and that it’s not much of a stretch to broaden its meaning to include more than environmentalism. That’s already happening in the political arena—the most obvious example being the U.S. Green Party, whose platform includes democracy, social justice and economic sustainability along with ecological sustainability.
So, what say you? Can we embrace green and broaden its scope? Or, are there still valid reasons to resist a meme that seems so firmly established?
About six minutes into his TED talk, Carl Safina takes confusing complexities about the use of dispersants to clean up the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico (Is it toxic? Does it work?)—and makes the whole thing crystal clear.
How? By comparing it to something we can all relate to: a sink full of greasy dishes. We all know that oil and water don’t mix, he says. Until you add a dispersant—a common form of which just happens to be soap. Add the soap, and what happens? The oil breaks up into little drops and mixes with the water, turning it into a cloudy soup.
He uses the simple comparison to wage a pretty serious accusation: that BP is using dispersant to cover up—not clean up—the oil spill. After all, there’s no drain in the bottom of the ocean ready to whisk that mix of oily water away.
It’s so hard for me to know what to believe. BP’s site dedicates an entire page to arguing the use of dispersants is effective in controlling oil spills, and it offers even more detailed FAQ. But—especially after seeing Safina’s example—I can’t help but notice that just a click away, BP also claims skimming is highly effective—a process by which oil floating on the surface of the water is collected. You can’t skim if oil is dispersed, right? So which is it, BP? (Plus, check out the BP’s odd use of a snake analogy to describe how dispersant works. How many times do you have to read the description to understand it?)
In the battle for hearts and minds, it seems simpler is better. Safina’s example is not only relatable, it’s memorable, and more important—it’s something I can see with my own eyes.
This week, something I thought would never happen did. My email was hacked! Everyone in my contacts list received a stilted, poorly written message raving about the new iPad and pointing them to a website where they could get one on the cheap. The email appeared to come directly from me and even included my name at the end.
Almost everyone who received this message knew right away that it wasn’t really me. For most people, the spammy nature of the message itself was a dead giveaway. Others, mostly people I haven’t written or spoken to in months or even years, wrote back to say it didn’t “sound” like me, but they weren’t positive. Incredibly, a few people—all of them contacts I very rarely email—actually believed I sent it.
There’s a lesson here, well, a couple of them. For me: come up with a better password. For communicators: voice matters.
Even though you may have different individuals crafting communications for your business, they should be able to speak with one clear, consistent voice. If the voice is off, readers you’ve worked hard to build a relationship with will know. At best, they’ll be distracted by the dissonance. At worst, you’ll lose credibility.
Writers and editors have been salivating over this one for a while now, and the big day is almost here. On July 6, The Yahoo! Style Guide—billed as the style guide for the Internet age—will be available. For now, you can read bits and pieces online, including articles about writing for the web, optimizing for SEO and basic web coding. My favorite part so far is a helpful word list, with terms you probably won’t find in your standard Webster’s or American Heritage dictionary: mouse over, schwag and geolocation, for example.
Plenty of editors will turn their noses up and say they’re happy with their Chicago, and their AP, and their Strunk and White, and their Bryan Garner, thank you very much. But, there’s no denying that it’s high time for a resource like this. The time we spend trying to figure out if dropdown should be one word or two or hyphenated (Y! says none of it. Use pull-down menu instead) could certainly be better spent.
In poking around the word list, I already see a couple spots in which Yahoo! is diverging from my precious dictionary (AmHer says username; Y! says user name) and even Mr. Garner himself (he says no hyphens in up to date when it’s used as an adverb; Y! says put ‘em in). We’ll all have to decide whether to go all in or use the guide selectively, but none of us who write or edit for the web will be able to ignore it altogether.
Nor should we. Our beloved style guides will always be relevant and useful because the rules of good writing and grammar are solid. But, they don’t tell us how to woo search engines or how to avoid bias when writing for an international audience. My guess is this new style guide (all 528 pages of it!) will take its rightful place next to all of our others, and it will still be up to us to decide when and how to apply which style guidelines. It’s always nice to have one more tool in the little writing shed.
Those of you who read Shiny Green Button regularly know that one of our favorite subjects is the corporate social responsibility or sustainability report. If you ask us, these documents can—and should—do more than compile data.
They should engage consumers and employees. They should inspire action among business partners and competitors. They should bolster brands and show value to investors.
But, just like any other kind of writing, CSR reports can only accomplish these goals if people read them. And that means the information in them should be clear, compelling, relevant and interesting.
If you’ve been following Pamela’s series on our company green team, you know that in 2009, we began looking at how we could make our own business more sustainable.
We’re a small business, but we found big ways to make a difference, and we learned some valuable lessons as we went along. When it came time to share our results, we saw a chance to rethink the standard corporate responsibility report and stretch our creative muscles.
The result is an interactive, data-rich, narrative-driven story that not only reveals what we did, but addresses the challenges we faced in getting there.
We may be a bunch of creative types who spend most of the day at our desks, but we know we can make our world better. Here’s proof.
I had the pleasure of sitting next to Scot Case from TerraChoice at dinner a few nights ago. Scot is one of the authors of “The Six Sins of Greenwashing” (now seven). He told the story of the happy accident that led to the report. Apparently, TerraChoice had a few summer interns collect all the “green” products they could find at the local grocery store, and then they analyzed the facts behind the claims and published their results. TerraChoice had no idea it was releasing something that would become THE guide for all marketing and communications folks working in the green space.
It’s been three years since the study came out, and it has made an impact in two totally opposite ways. In many cases, the report has kept companies honest. It has raised awareness of the issue and given marketers a standard set of rules to follow. But it has also kept some companies from saying anything at all—even if their product or service has a credible green story—because they are fearful of being labeled a greenwasher. Even Scot admitted that the “Sins of Greenwashing” report may have gone too far, paralyzing companies and keeping consumers from learning about really good products.
What do you think? Has the fear of greenwashing gone too far? Has it kept your company from talking to your customers about your green product?
It was a powerful and surprising statement. It showed how far sustainability has come from the days when environmentalists were labeled “tree huggers.” Today, it’s become another part of the business landscape. Companies aren’t demonstrating social and environmental responsibility because it’s nice. They’re doing it because it gives them a competitive advantage.
Friend’s statement also emphasized the urgency and complexity of our challenge. You just can’t afford to be nice when climate change threatens to turn our home into a blistering, sooty rock. You can’t afford to be nice when you are reinventing the industrial engine of the economy.
Still, change is hard. Bruce McGregor from IDEO told us yesterday that only 10 percent of people are successful in making a change when faced with a life-or-death situation. There are an awful lot of smokers out there who can’t kick the habit after a diagnosis of cancer, and plenty of people fail to exercise and eat better even after developing type I diabetes. Just telling someone to change because it’s good for them doesn’t mean they will do it.
Now, here we all are—facing a life-or-death situation—and still drinking water out of plastic bottles, flushing bleach down the drain, driving our cars.
As marketers and communicators, the lesson is to stop talking to consumers about how they can feel good about their more eco-friendly purchase or their microloan. Only a handful of consumers buy because they want to do good for the planet, and recent research by Fruitful Strategy shows that 24 percent of people are “rejecters” of green products, purposefully avoiding products with green messages on the label. Most people are not buying or behaving green out of altruism, but because it also makes them feel more secure, comfortable or attractive—or it saves them money.
So it’s time for sustainability to stop being so nice. We have to be sustainable and beautiful. Sustainable and healthy. Sustainable and simple. Sustainable and affordable. Our future depends on it.
AHA! is heading to the Sustainable Brands conference next week, for four days packed full of CSR goodness. We’ll be reporting back throughout the week, right here on Shiny Green Button, or you can follow our tweets at http://twitter.com/AHAwriters.
In those first few days of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, many in the communications industry criticized BP for its lack of a cohesive crisis communications plan. First they said it wasn’t their fault. Then, they accepted responsibility. And how much oil is gushing out? The numbers have been fuzzy.
But lately, critics have eased up, thanks in part to what many are calling BP’s effective use of online tools and social media. The company is getting the word out about cleanup efforts via Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and a dedicated website, www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com. It’s also front and center on the main BP website.
Of course, no matter how effective the company is with these venues, the pitfalls of social media still apply. Social media, by its nature, puts a brand in the people’s hands, and that includes disgruntled consumers and activists.
When I did a Google search for “BP Facebook,” the first item was a link to a “Boycott BP” Facebook page. A fake Twitter account mocking the company, @BPGlobalPR, launched May 19 and already has twice as many followers as BP’s official account. Despite some obviously snarky tweets, some readers have confused the fake account for BP’s official voice.
The actual crisis BP is communicating about is obviously much larger and graver than the recent palm-oil problem Nestle faced, or yesterday’s Intel Facebook snafu, both of which have been held up as examples of what not to do with social media. Rather than getting defensive or trying to stop the vitriol, BP seems to be moving forward with its own message while letting the critics move forward with theirs.
This seems like the right approach for now, but unfortunately, the environmental crisis and the communications crisis that goes with it are both far from over.
