I am on Facebook and Twitter a lot these days and growing my audience on Women Of Green. What fun. We’ll be at 5000 “likes” in no time. Our goal is 10,000+ by the end of the year. I know we’ll be there. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of growing an audience. But remember, when you put your information out there, it’s out there. You may have written the post, or taken the photograph, but your content is now public, and as Mitch Joel of Twist Image says, it’s “shareable forever”. There is no such thing as privacy if you’re online. (I learned that the hard way).

Yes, I know, Facebook has its privacy settings but they can change at any time — and they have. The bottom line is if you are online, you’re public. And if you are public, you’re not private. That’s the truth of the matter. For more truths (brace yourself), here’s an excellent post by Mitch that is straight forward and sums it up nicely. Here are his highlights:

What you need to always remember about the Internet.

• It’s a business. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. are not social organizations created to help the better good. They are businesses and they are corporations. Their main focus is all the same: they are here to make money.
• Terms of service. Before signing up to any service, you have to sign and agree to their terms of services. Simply put, this is a legal document created so that the company can’t be sued… for anything. It’s a document to protect the company (and in doing so, it does not provide that much protection to the consumer – that’s you and the brands you represent).
• Your content is (probably) yours. While you retain the rights to the text, images, audio and video that you post online, always consider that the content is now public and shareable forever.
• Money. Money. Money. While there are many tactics to how online social networks can make money, there are really only two overall strategies. Strategy number one: they sell the value of the network (the size and reach) along with the personalized data (geographic, psychographic, etc…) to advertisers who can then send those users more targeted messages. Strategy number two: they are looking to grow the company to the point where it becomes a valuable acquisition property, and then sell the company (and all of the data that comes with it) to another company.
• It’s out of your hands. There are countless groups of people trying to fight everything I’ve Blogged about above. These people feel like they have rights to the data and information and should have choices in terms of what their data is being used for. In a perfect world, I’d love to agree, but if you go back to point number one above, this is about business.
• There are no “copies”. Thinking about your pictures and videos in terms of someone else having a “copy” is a mistake. This is the same mistake that many traditional organizations have when looking at WikiLeaks. There are no copies.
• You can’t have privacy. If you want privacy in any digital channels (and this includes your own email!), don’t be in a online social network. It’s just that simple.

See how “shareable” that was. Is there something you would like to share about this subject? We’re listening.

Whether or not you believe in global warming, no one can debate that the green movement has taken the planet by storm. What started out as a cause has become a because. Because, in every way from the ecologic to the economic, green is not just a good conscience move, it’s a good business move with direct correlation to the bottom line. It’s the domino effect played backward.

By that we mean if you increase your energy efficiencies, you use less power. If you use less power, not only does your energy bill decrease but your need for power decreases so less energy has to be generated. If less energy is generated, less fuel is burned to create more power, less money is spent building plants, and less land is cleared to build energy producing plants, and so on and so on. In the end, even one energy-efficient LED bulb is one bright idea because it can produce a lot more savings than just on your energy bill.

But where do you begin? For many companies, greening their business might start with purchasing recycled paper or using soy inks. This is a good beginning. However, greening your business needs to begin with defining what green is in the first place. So it’s not merely a checklist but a “checking out” of your company’s social, environmental and economic beliefs and aligning them with your goals in order to meet the needs of the present without comprising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs.

This internal exploration helped our team at Mind Over Markets define what is at the very core of green. We developed several ideas described below.

Green is about first what you believe and second what you buy.

Green is about making decisions, taking the time to decide what you really need, not just what you want. Green people buy from their intellect as well as their values.

Green is about long-term thinking not short-term. It is living as part of something, not apart from everything. It concerns believing in a future for everyone, our kids and their kids.

Green is not about stopping industry or progress. It’s about creating more efficient industry and progress.  It’s about new opportunities and new jobs, new careers and new technology.

Green is education. It is information, making decisions, and knowing that your choices make a difference.  It is about being transparent. Green is not just about the talk, it’s about the walk.

Green is not necessarily about moving off the grid or changing your life. It’s not even about hugging a tree although that would be nice. It’s about trying to walk more softly. It is understanding that we are a species among other species.

It’s about thinking about what you do before you do it. It’s about reusing, recycling, and picking up after yourself, or even after someone else.  It’s about all of us caring about all of us.

Ways to Change

This internal exploration led to an exploration of how we, as a marketing company, can change the way we look at everything in the marketing business and beyond.

Can we host a presentation using Webcams instead of driving to the airport and flying to a meeting?

Can we contribute to the reduction in greenhouse gasses by phone conferencing instead of driving?

Can we send PDF files over the Internet instead of printing brochures?

Can we place our marketing materials and our client’s materials on a flash drive and hand them out at a trade show instead of leaving a paper trail?

Can we allow our employees to telecommute a portion of their workweek?

Can we send our company holiday cards via the Internet instead of using paper and post?

And what about work space health?  Is our flooring off-gassing harmful VOCs (volatile organic compounds) into our workspace air?

Do we use as much natural light as we can?

Do we use nontoxic cleaning products?   All of these things contribute to healthier workspaces, which contribute to greater worker productivity and a better bottom line.

Can we source bleach-free recycled paper and print on both sides?

Can we print on our outgoing e-mails, “Please do not print this e-mail unless you really must?”

Can we encourage our printers to switch to toxic free soy-based inks and recycled paper?

Can we help green industry events by offering organic foods, less paper products, and an acoustic band instead of an electrically powered one?

The answers to these questions for us are yes, and more. Once you start thinking green, green grows all around you. Actually greening our business is an ongoing, highly creative process. It takes a little adjustment to your reflexes to ask yourself questions like, “Do I have to print that e-mail?” What would that little act save when multiplied by 200 e-mails a day, five days a week for a year? A lot of trees and money.

Here’s another good example of green thinking. Simply reducing the margins of our documents to .75” on all sides, results in a total reduction of paper use by 4.75 percent, according to a study by Penn State Green Destiny Conservatree. For one ton of paper, the savings would be 19 reams, which then saves 1.4 trees. Multiplying that by 5.4 million tons of office paper, which is the amount the United States consumed in 2003, saves 6,158,000 trees. Not to mention the energy costs and waste products generated:

1,459,535,366 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to CO2 emissions from 132,528 cars.

584,398,539 pounds of solid waste, equaling 20,871 fully loaded garbage trucks.

4.8 billion gallons of waste water, enough to fill 7,408 Olympic-sized pools.

You see, one margin can go a long way.

Once we recalibrate the decision-making process by thinking of all the ways we can be more efficient and less wasteful, making other adjustments gets easier and easier. Even simple changes like printing our presentation boards on both sides cut our usage in half. It is the domino effect once again. Use less paper, need less paper, need less trees, and less paper manufacturing plants and less energy to run them. By now you get the picture.

How are you greening your business or office? Share it here.