Lorna Li | Green Marketing 2.0

This map made me crack up and I can’t resist posting it, even though I’ve stolen it from my friend’s site (though I’m sure he stole it from someone else).

I discovered it while surfing my friend Greg Narain’s blog Social Twister for social media insights and ideas for a web project I managing for work.

Greg Narain is an incredibly tough, smart, creative, and funny guy. As principal of Blue Whale Labs, he and his partner custom build social media applications, together with a pod of developers based in India.

Greg is definately one of the most interesting people I have met during my Web 2.0 odyssey and has contributed enormously to my understanding of the participatory web.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Map of the World, Map of Online Communities, Blue Whale Labs, Social Twister, Greg Narain, social media, social media applications, participatory web, lorna li

Pete Kazanjy is a Silicon Valley geek with a mission - reducing consumer waste paper through the strategic placement of stickers reminding us that “These Come from Trees.”

The idea behind TCFT is that the right message - a helpful, non-threatening reminder - delivered at the right time can meaningfully reduce consumer waste paper consumption.

What I love about TCFT is that it’s an experiment in viral marketing, using social media apps such as Facebook and Flickr to spread the word about the project and proliferate TCFT stickers everywhere they are needed, such as here:

Place TCFT stickers as a friendly reminder:

• in public bathrooms
• on fast food napkin dispensers
• by your office printer

Check out these stats:

• Testing shows a “These Come From Trees” sticker on a paper towel dispenser reduces paper towel consumption by ~15%
• A typical fast food restaurant with two bathrooms can use up to 2000 pounds of paper towels a year
• The average coffee shop uses 1000 pounds of paper towels a year
• A single tree produces around 100 pounds of paper
• A single “These Come From Trees” sticker can save around a tree’s worth of paper, every year
• Roughly 50,000 fast food restaurants in the US
• 200,00 gas stations in the US
• 14,000 McDonalds’ in the US
• There are 10,000 Starbucks in the US

Can marketing environmental messages through social networking sites work?

Absolutely.

These Come From Trees on Facebook has 300 members and growing. As of today, they’ve been dugg on Digg 84 times. And in less than a year, they’ve sent out over 10,000 stickers. If each sticker saves 100 lbs of paper a year, that’s 1 million lbs of paper, or 10,000 trees.

Great job, Pete!

Technorati Tags: These Come From Trees, TCFT, Pete Kazanjy, green 2.0, green marketing, viral marketing, social media marketing, lorna li

Xin Sarith Azuma Phan Wuku is the Ninja for Hire. In an effort to break into feature films, he created a video highlighting his martial arts skills. He swiftly became a legend of viral video, gathering over 4 million hits on YouTube.What I love about Xin is not only his physical prowess, but his clear determination to break into the movie industry - cheaply, on YouTube. Xin Sarith Azuma Phan Wuku, Ninja for Hire, is an impeccable warrior.

Before the days of Web 2.0., breaking into pictures was hard for your average Joe. With the social media revolution, talented guys like Xin have and deserve a chance to be discovered.

Social media has made it possible for web savvy, self promoting individuals with a penchant for working the participatory web to rocket from anonymity to stardom.

Take the example of Tila Nyguyen, a.k.a. Tila Tequila - queen of MySpace. Tila has over 1.5 million MySpace fans and Tila’s MySpace profile has been viewed over 50 million times.

According to Time Magazine, “Nguyen clearly grasps the logic of Web 2.0 in a way that would make many CEOs weep. She sells Tila posters, calendars, a clothing line of hoodies and shirts. She has been on the cover of British Maxim. She has a single due to be released online. She has a cameo in next summer’s Adam Sandler movie. She has four managers, a publicist and a part-time assistant. It’s hard to know how to read the rise of Tila Tequila. Does she represent the triumph of a new democratic starmaking medium or its crass exploitation for maximum personal gain? It’s not clear that even Tila knows.

But she knows why it works. “There’s a million hot naked chicks on the Internet,” she says. “There’s a difference between those girls and me. Those chicks don’t talk back to you.”"

Sources:

Time Magazine Article on Tila Tequila

Technorati Tags: social media, social media optimization, smo, personal branding, web 2.0, lorna li

One of my favorite places in the Bay Area is community of ecological, sociological, technological, and cultural activists called Solstice Grove. Founded by Jim Fournier, eco-visionary and founder of Planetwork and Biomass Energy & Carbon, Solstice Grove consists of a main community house, swimming pool and several yurts and a redwood grove on several acres of gorgeous land in the community of Nicasio in the Marin Headlands.

Solstice Grove holds a number of sweat lodges, sacred ceremonies and community events, such as the Bioneers After Party, throughout the Year. The Dalai Lama has even visited and blessed the community. Solstice Grove is known for their fabulously fun parties on the Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice, another reason why Solstice Grove is dear to my heart - the Winter Solstice is my birthday.

I had the privilege of spending a weekend there for a sacred music gathering a few weeks ago. I met MJ Greenmountain of Hamsa Lila, and Mariela de la Paz, one of my favorite visionary artists, next to Pablo Amaringo.

The music was incredible, and people were lovely, and I was again reminded of how much I enjoy living in the Bay Area.

Technorati Tags: Solstice Grove, Jim Fournier, Mariela de la Pa, MJ Greenmountain, Hamsa Lila, eco-community, Pablo Amaringo

Last night I was over at a friend’s house and we got into a discussion on one of my favorite topics, “What is reality?”

I encounter a lot of people in the West who have an adamantly, unquestioned belief in certain theories of existence, be it scientific or economic that have really only emerged in Western civilizations within the last 2-300 years. Rationalism, however, is mere blip in in the timeline of human existence on this planet.

Having travelled extensively around the world, I have found that the definition of reality and an individual’s relationship to it varies quite drastically from culture to culture. In Brazil, and many other countries, people wholeheartedly accept and believe in the existence of non-embodied deities, spirits and entities. I know an elderly Ecuadorian shaman, who routinely transforms himself into an 10 foot long anaconda - according to numerous members of his extensive household. Though I have not witnessed this phenomenon with my own eyes, it is a little more my style accept that it is out of my experience that than vehemently insist that physical transformation into another organism is impossible.

The Assumptions of Capitalist Economics

One of the most commonly unquestioned assumptions that I encountered in university and again in graduate school is that of the “truth” or “reality” if you will of capitalist economics, as defined by Adam Smith in the “Wealth of Nations“. The existence of an “invisible hand” that will perpetually adjust prices to a point of equilibrium between supply and demand. The supremacy of free trade economics and the inherent goodness of consumption-fueled, growth-oriented economies.

Bollocks.

While a lot of this rhetoric seems to pervade the political arena, and our educational (more…)