HY-brid/

After my last blog titled One Green Message, Many Green Voices, I received a great comment from Keith P. His comment is:

Good starting points to take under consideration for establishing the green message within the proper conversations. The only thing I might challenge is how you reply within the social settings of facebook, twitter, tumblr, linkedin, myspace and brighkite when you are not the company spokesperson. Do you empower your employees to talk openly about how they view your green initiatives? Do you allow your employees to express their opinions and how they are helping the company be green? And do you engage people that discuss your company’s attempts at being green?

If the company has answered yes to this then you are a social business going green, if not your a company with a veil of secrecy of your green efforts and that is where you need help encouraging the conversation, because most likely you have bigger cultural issues.

Now if yes how can the EcoMap process help give the employees the framework of communication without sounding like they are talking points? How does the EcoMap process address when your Vendors and Consumers talk about your company? (Personal opinion on the last one–if you are embracing your Vendors and Consumers in a social context the conversation is more constructive, collborative, and innovative, which helps everyone in process make a difference.)

Looking forward to answers to these questions and follow-up blog posts on the process.

Thanks for the feedback Keith. HY-brid works with our clients to establish their environmental (green) platform and it’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach. To that end, it is much more than the green conversation(s) we address in our EcoMap process. We take into consideration such things as type of business, audience set(s), and messages that are not only pertinent to, but resonate with those audiences. This holistic approach to defining green for clients ladders up to the overall business goals and objectives and thus acts as an extension of the corporate mission.

In your comment you reference many of the social outlets being used today. We certainly address these in our communications planning, but it is again very different by client. One important thing to keep in mind is that not all businesses are marching to the same beat on social. We’ve found social marketing and social media are very new to a number of businesses, no matter their size and standing within their industry, and in fact we have visited with some very large corporations whose marketing teams are blocked from social sites. While we certainly encourage our clients to be as transparent as possible on their environmental stance, if they do not have the social tools in their arsenal (yet) we can only counsel them to use the tools they do have to promote their efforts.

But in our overall approach to social for those clients who have access to it, we look at it as a means of brand building. It is an extension of what can be done through traditional ads and PR but puts the brand building experience in the hands of the customer. That’s where being truly transparent plays a key role in how a business uses social in its integrated communications planning. The EcoMap process determines the audiences and messages for each, and from the Map, the tactics that make the most sense for those messages to be disseminated are determined. Social is a key ingredient in that tactical mix.

To answer your question about how we help manage messages when the people in the social space are not the spokespersons, we do give message points with hopes those socially communicating stay to them, but we also counsel our clients to develop social guidelines for employees to adhere to.

Thanks again for the great comment Keith.

Do you have questions about your environmental platform? Have comments on our process or HY-brid’s vision of green messaging and marketing? Let us know– it’s why we’re here.

Categories: Environmental Communications, Green, Green Communications, Green Social Marketing, Marketing, Tim Wirtz, environmental marketing, green advertising, green at work, green marketing, green messaging, workplace energy efficiency