Taking green digital

Brendan May and James Warren provide tips on how to get your green message across using social media

The digital revolution presents a golden opportunity for any company wanting to engage with consumers about sustainability issues. NGOs are already using the range of available social media – the online technologies (such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter) and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other – to great effect.

As individuals become ever more powerful in ‘streaming’ the information they want and filtering out what they don’t want to hear, any successful green marketing strategy should place digital at its core. But how?

It's not an ad
First, we need a dramatic shift in our appreciation of what ‘marketing’ might be. Social media shouldn’t be ring-fenced as a stand-alone activity.

All communications from companies or brands will be consumed by consumers without them drawing any conscious distinctions between media type, content type or whether the placement was paid-for or ‘earned’. So our activity within social media must be a natural extension of what we do elsewhere: an approach we call ‘inline communications’.

Get in touch
Second, green communicators must create carefully conceived content that resonates with particular communities. We need to craft and deliver credible and interesting stories that are truly compelling to our audiences, so that they are driven to share – or narrate – those stories within their communities. Then we can create and drive advocacy.

We must also bear in mind that carefully created content doesn’t necessarily have to be content in the traditional sense of the word. Content in this instance could just be presence: an individual providing one half of a potential conversation.

Be organised
Third, we must organise internally to maximize the effectiveness of any social media activity. Digital communications are a grey area when it comes to mapping responsibilities according to traditional marketing groups; social media particularly so.

Tight and detailed internal guidelines and procedures are required to ensure social media communications are not duplicated or in conflict with other corporate messages or behaviours. Otherwise, a company risks finding itself in a fine mess in pretty short order.

The golden rules
Based on our experience in creating and managing social media programmes for clients, the critical success factor for any social media marketing activity is for it to be REAL. If it seems or feels inauthentic, it will fail.

Success in the social media environment isn’t about buying digital real estate and using it to shout about how great your products and services are. The guiding principles for any organisation venturing into social media are:

• Be active
• Be everywhere
• Be nice

So what does that mean, in real terms? By ‘be active’ we mean you must participate in genuine conversations. You cannot throw money at social media marketing and expect it to work. The traditional notions of communications planning and deployment are comparatively pre-historic when looked at in the context of the social media environment.

In order to gain momentum and begin shifting perceptions, it isn’t enough to ‘advertise’ what you do or what you think. Rather, it is essential to be you. Don’t just say it, do it. In this sense, digital marketing is no different to authentic green business. It must be core DNA, not a bolt on marketing tool.

Being everywhere means exactly what it says. If your organisation is going to convince its target audience that it is what it purports to be, it must do so everywhere online. Being active everywhere means you are giving itself the best opportunity to provide constant, contextual, responsive and valuable content within each and every available target community.

Finally, 'be nice'. This tells us how we should act while we are active, everywhere. It may sound trite, but businesses that adopt the attributes of ‘niceness’ when communicating online can only succeed.

After all, if you’re generous with your time, are courteous, listen, don’t interrupt, help people achieve what they want to achieve and make people smile – in short, if you’re nice – then people will want to hang out with you and they’ll want to introduce you to their mates. This simple maxim applies as much to digital communications.

Any organisation that demonstrates the core attributes of personal niceness online – those that run online campaigns that are inclusive, non-judgmental, even-handed, polite, respectful, courteous, humorous, empowering, supportive, interesting and engaging – will be infinitely better placed to succeed than an organisation that doesn’t.

Companies that are committed to real, embedded sustainability have already accepted the virtue of being active, everywhere, and nice. They would be missing a trick if they did not deploy the quiet revolution that is changing the way in which audiences receive information, for good.

Brendan May is Managing Director of Planet 2050, Weber Shandwick’s sustainability practice.

James Warren is Weber Shandwick's Chief Digital Creative Officer.