Lorna Li | Green Marketing 2.0

TreeHugger moves one step closer to its mission of greening the mainstream. Last week, Treehugger, the stylish, Webby Award-winning eco-blog, was acquired by Discovery for, rumors say, approximately $10M.

Discovery Communications, owners of the Discovery Channel, boasts a large network of online and television properties. Its acquisition of TreeHugger allows it to buy a piece of Web 2.0 cool. However, Discovery intends to look to TreeHugger for strategic direction on its Green initiatives, allowing this social media success story to reach the non-tech savvy masses in unprecendented ways.

TreeHugger is an award-winning blog whose mission is to make the mainstream sustainable. TreeHugger, currently ranked 16 on Technorati, serves more than 1.5 million unique visitors a month and has attained 50 million page views since its humble beginning as a MBA class project, nearly 4 years ago.

Other TreeHugger initiatives, like TreeHugger.tv, and Hugg - the eco-Digg are immensely popular within the Green community.

Discovery is TreeHugger’s Perfect Partner

While TreeHugger was courted by 15 large companies over the past year, the partnership with Discovery was a match made in Green heaven. In spite of interest by a number of compelling parties, TreeHugger did not compromise on its values and its original vision… and waited until the perfect partner came along.

“We had many conversations and concluded that we needed a partner with a sizeable, international audience, a kindred brand and a high level commitment philosophically and financially to green, “said TreeHugger Founder, Graham Hill.

Discovery, which reaches 1.5 billion subscribers around the world, with, primarily, high-quality, nature-related content, was a perfect fit. Furthermore, Discovery has committed over $50M towards the development of Green content and programming for its various online and offline channels, including a portfolio of leading Green web sites.

TreeHugger will play an active role in defining Discovery’s Green initiatives, such as its global multiplatform initiative, Planet Green, which includes the first 24/7 eco-lifestyle TV network, which will be launching in 50 million homes in 2008.

I had the pleasure of meeting Nick Aster, a San Francisco web developer and one of the founding members of TreeHugger, in October 2006. During this time, I was in deep in the throes of launching Mariri Magazine, a rainforest webzine powered by Joomla! Nick graciously agreed to an informational interview on the art of online publishing. After an hour-long conversation, I realized my tiny rainforest webzine had a long, long way to go.

I was, and still am, obsessed with understanding the secret to launching a successful online magazine, how to develop develop a never-ending flow of compelling content, create community, and monetize traffic all on a shoe-string budget. TreeHugger began with far bigger budget than I - seed funding from Graham Hill, eco-design entrepreneur, which was enough to support a team of 4-5 Presidio World College Sustainable MBAs to develop and the launch the site full time.

TreeHugger’s content is excellent, thanks to its ability to pay writers around the world for blog posts. Its highly engaged community generates new content daily. It has great ads, and is able to earn enough revenue from sponsorships and ad placements to provide each of its team members with a modest income.

TreeHugger is the “hip” in the “hippy”. Rather than bombard the masses with the unpalatable, guilt-ridden message of most conservation activists, TreeHugger succeeds because it appeals to the consumer in all of us.

Graham states, “99.9% of us are not going to wear loincloths and live in a commune. They are going to continue to buy things, so why not have them buy good things?”

Sources:

This Week’s Podcast with Treehugger by Heather Green

TreeHugger Acquired by Discovery Communications for $10M

TreeHugger Acquires Discovery Communications

Technorati Tags: discovery, treehugger, discovery acquires treehugger, green planet, graham hill, nick aster, lorna li

I have to admit, as much as I preach about the environment, I harbor an awful, nagging sensation deep down inside that I am not as sustainable as I’d like to be.

I routinely leave my home in a mad morning rush for work, forgetting to shut off the ceiling fan. I agonize over which is worse, tossing out clear plastic bags, or using water to wash them. My laptop is on 24/7. The microwave I never use is perpetually plugged in. In fact, every single electronic item I own seems to be plugged in, always. I realize I have too many electronic gadgets that I dread to imagine buried in a landfill. I also happen to love international travel - and I know that no matter how eco I am, the jet fuel gets me every time.

I hope and pray to meet someone who can take me by the hand and Make Me Sustainable.

Fortunately, there’s now a Web 2.0 application that can help make us all be sustainable. Make Me Sustainable is a Web site that calculates your carbon footprint and allows you to set goals and take actions that will reduce your ecological impact.

You start off by selecting some basic indicators about your home and transportation. It then calculates your carbon footprint and energy costs.

What’s interesting is that its calculator, or Carbon and Energy Portfolio Manager (CEPM), will track monetary savings incurred through footprint reducing actions, as well as calculate your carbon reduction per year in tons. Even niftier, to highlight your real-world impact, it translates your reductions into estimated number of trees saved and number of cars taken off the road.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the average American’s carbon emission is 20 tons. In order to offset 20 tons of carbon, 1,263 American motorists would have to stop driving for one day.

Even with 3 long international flights a year, at 7.9 tons, perhaps I’m not so bad after all.

Technorati Tags: make me sustainable, carbon and energy portfolio manager, sustainability, ecological footprint reduction, carbon footprint, 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

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…)