IT as aid to being Carbon Neutral

Because of the work I am doing on promoting the AIB's People's Choice vote for the "Best Coverage of Climate Change" award, I have been looking at many articles and videos on the Internet that cover green and environmental issues.

I have just watched Mike Yourwerth from Meet The Boss TV being interviewed on Tesco's Green IT initiatives. He made two points I found particularly interesting for those of us involved in IT :

• green IT is not just about reducing the carbon impact of the IT itself but how IT can help the whole business to operate in an environmentally better way
• never forget the "I" in "IT". The technology is there as a tool to provide the information for whatever organisation it is serving, turning the raw data into usable, accessible, rapid answers to questions and information for decisions

All Consuming

I am in the middle of work to highlight the AIB's People's Choice award for "Best coverage of climate change". This is an international media award where entries from broadcasters all over the world are put on internet sites where they can freely be viewed - and then the viewers vote for their favourite.

The entries have now closed and lots of well known global organisations have entered. The shortlist is being prepared and will be announced shortly - you can to to theaibs.tv/peoples-choice to register for more information.

Currently I am working on the social media campaign to encourage voting among interested groups. For example, with UltraKnowledge (UKn) we are developing a climate change portal (climate.aib.org.uk) which automatically pulls in and indexes articles and blogs from all over the web.

The work is involving me following lots of websites and groups concerned with climate change and environmental issues. One of them is www.dothegreenthing.com. I really like the short video on their site illustrating the concept of "all consuming" i.e. not wasting things

Hope you enjoy it

Building a website yourself

I have not blogged recently because I have been very busy building a new website for the AIB (Association for International Broadcasting) alongside defining and starting to implement an associated social media campaign. But I realise that I have a lot to say about my experiences of with website and social media tools.

The new website, www.theaibs.tv, is designed to highlight the AIB's international media excellence awards - The 2010 AIBs. The awards are for those in the broadcasting industry : content producers, broadcasting companies, transmission companies, technology providers and others in associated fields.

The idea for a separate website came about only just over a month ago and it needed to be in place for the launch of entries for the awards on the 12th April, so tools that allowed rapid development were vital. There were also limited resources and budget so it seemed an ideal opportunity to try out the seeemingly rich possibilities available with open source software.

I decided to use WordPress for the website, having played around with it a little beforehand. It may seem ironic to use WordPress which is a rival to Blogger, where this blog (currently) resides but WordPress has a few real advantages : firstly, althought it is a blogging platform by origin, it allows you to create a whole series of linked pages, including those without any comments (static pages), so that you can set up a proper website structure; secondly, it has a vibrant community of developers who offer thousands of plugins, widgets and other tools which add to the basic features a vast range of simple and sophisticated add-ons (including different visual appearances, SEO optimisation, links to social media to name just a few); and thirdly, WordPress can be run on your own website and is supported as standard by many hosting companies.

It took a lot of effort, but the site was up and running on time and is being constantly updated. Now I am reasonably technical (I used to do programming 30 years ago) but I think anyone with a modest technical capability could manage the same as I did. To start with, I bought the book WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. I did not read it all but as I started using WordPress, I dipped into it to understand particular concepts or for tips on how to make the best use of certain features. I still do use it and can recommend it.

A basic Wordpress site is easily recognised by the format of the pages (top title block, right or left hand column with list of entries, categories, favourite blogs, links etc). But there are thousands of "themes" available, which provide different visual identities that you can apply to your site. I chose the Sliding Doors theme by Wayne Connor because I really like the way the images expand to show the menu option chosen. Since installing it, I have found that I will need to do some more work to show sub-menu options in an attractive way. That is on my to-do list.

The last add-on that I want to talk about at the moment, is cForms II which is a powerful plugin that allows you to design forms for site visitors to fill in. It is very powerful but be aware that it takes some time to master. Currently I have a simple form on the website homepage for visitors to register for further news. But I plan to have more complicated forms for registration particularly for the People's Choice award and to gather feedback.

The People's Choice award will be decided by votes from those viewing online shortlisted programmes on the subject of Climate Change. Between now and September, the challenge is to build up an audience of tens of thousands who are interested and will vote. This is where the social media campaign is planned and starting to take effect. I will talk more about other WordPress tools and the social media ones in future posts.

C2B Marketing: Yesterday's tomorrow

Whatever happened to C2B marketing? That is the marketing of individuals and their services to businesses, rather than the other way round. There was some debate on the subject a while ago (see the 2005 article http://c2b.typepad.com/c2b/2005/08/the_c2b_revolut.html or http://www.magicomm.biz/blog/is-“b-to-c”-direct-marketing-being-replaced-by-“c-to-b”-social-media-marketing from 2008) but it does not seem to have taken off.

The articles talk about various drivers for C2B
- social networking sites and their use by businesses
- technology available to consumers (especially for production of digital content)
- open source software
All of these are driving C2B, even if there has not been enough awareness of the topic to make this yet a well known phrase.

For example, in social networking, increasingly brands are communicating online with customers and prospects, using Facebook, Twitter and other sites to ask for comments, monitor feedback and reply to issues raised. Meanwhile, individuals are posting their videos to YouTube hoping to create viral hits and monetise them with advertising, while news stories from "citizen reporters" are being posted to sites like Citizenspace and the best ones sold to traditional media outlets (an area I am particularly interested in due to the work I do for the AIB,the Association for International Broadcasting). As for open source software, I have lost count of the number of utilities I have downloaded recently, and I have even donated money to the most useful of them.

But there is one other trend that I have not seen mentioned in this context and which I think is an important factor in driving the true marketing side of C2B. This is the increasing number of people who are freelancing, working for themselves or in small companies or loose associations and who need to sell their services to larger organisations. Current economic conditions are forcing this on many and no doubt there will be a significant return to salaried jobs once the economies of the world pick up. But there is a young generation coming up who have seen the pitfalls of corporate life with job cuts and pension reductions (and will soon see deep cuts in public service as well). These will fuel a continued increase in freelance working, which will match corporations increasing reluctance to grow headcount and to move outside their core business.

These are people who need to take advantage of the marketing techniques that are now so readily available and which are cheap, in terms of the monetary cost, to use. They need to sell their services and to convince companies to retain them rather than all their rivals. What most of them do not know how to manage, however, is how to manage their individual marketing, which can be extremely expensive in terms of time unless you have a proper strategy to use the tools available. The tools are either expensive because you put in a modest amount of time, but obtain no results by failing to stand out from the crowd; or you do manage to stand out, but only by huge amounts of work to constantly blog, Tweet, post and comment.

But it does not have to be like that. Successful C2B marketing requires only three things:
- an expertise: good experience in a particular niche which you can demonstrate and talk about. Never mind if it is a very narrow niche, the key is to be seen as a knowledgeable resource.
- finding the right places to talk about your expertise
- regular communication

C2B marketing is key for more and more people today and I will blog more about the keys to success shortly.

2 Cheers for Microsoft

I am usually wary of Microsoft because they seem to have dominant power, but I do use their OS and Office apps and appreciate the functionality they give - 1 cheer.

Today I realised just how useful it was to have one company providing all my office apps - and in the place of an internationally defined standard for these apps, how valuable it is to have a de-facto standard.

I am going to the Media140 event today (microblogging and impact of Twitter on news) with my AIB (Association for International Broadcasting) hat on. As I wanted to sign up for their Flickr group, I used my Yahoo account. But I also use Google (for Maps, Mail, Blogger etc) and so I have to scratch my head and see if I want to link data from the different apps and if so how. Lack of standards means more work - and everytime I try out a new app which needs a new user name and password, often with different conventions, the confusion increases.

At least I never have to wonder how to transfer Excel data into Word, or Word into Powerpoint. So a second cheer for Microsoft.

If I think hard, I expect I could even find a reason for a third cheer.