Green Marketing 2.0| SEO SEM Social Media Consulting - Lorna Li» Web 2.0

The State of the Internet

lorna li — Sat, 15 May 2010 22:50:18 +0000

Fantastic video that communicates the explosive grown of the social web.

1.73 Billion Internet users wordwide (2009)
90 Trillion Emails sent in 2009
247 Billion emails sent daily
200 Billion of which are spam emails
234 Million websites
27.3 Million tweets a day
260 Billion Facebook page views a month
1 Billion YouTube videos served a day
126 Million blogs

Jess3 does an amazing job of presenting raw data in an intelligent, engaging way.

The Concise List of Must Have SEO Plugins for WordPress

lorna li — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 07:21:30 +0000

I think I’ve researched every WordPress SEO plugin in existence. The list I amassed was daunting. I had plugin anxiety. All In One SEO Pack or Platinum SEO? Many of them had features that overlapped. The thought of having to install all those plugins and to get them to work with each other was a developer nightmare.

Due to some fortuitous Tweeting, Joost DeValk, the WordPress SEO Guru, picked up on my Tweet and offered to go over my massive list of 30 SEO plugins via Skype, and eliminate the chaff. Granted he wrote many of these – but that’s why he’s the WordPress SEO guru. If you care about WordPress SEO, you oughta mosey on down to Joost’s site and read his WordPress SEO Bible.

Must Have WordPress SEO plugins

The list of plugins below should have your site covered for all things SEO.

HeadSpace2 – HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools. While the name only mentions “Google” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Friendly Images – Yoast is on the fence this. I kind of like it. Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog. You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features. Some of the great things it does includes:

Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.
Prevent indexing of the subpages to your homepage, by adding a noindex,follow.
Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions
And more!

RSS Plugins

MediaRSS – MRSS is an RSS extension used for syndicating multimedia files (audio, video, image) in RSS feeds. MediaRSS is a way of embedding media into your feeds. This plugin is equipped to locate img tags in your posts and generate XML code that can be used by feed readers.
RSS Footer – This very simple plugin let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, which you can edit like this:

Social Media Plugins

Sociable is a social sharing plugin with big, plush social media buttons that you just want to press. It’s much more attractive and noticable than Share This.

Post Ratings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

Twitter Plugins

Choices abound on Twitter plugins. I would do Retweet first and then the Twitter Box once your account is up and running.

Retweet Button – The TweetMeme retweet button is for website and blog publishers who want to encourage their audience to tweet their content on twitter. The button shows a live count of the number of times your webpage or blog post has been tweeted.
Tweetbacks – People are talking about your posts, and not only in the comments to your post. A lot of that conversation is happening on Twitter, and now, you can take that conversation right back to your blog! This plugin imports those tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.
Twitter Box – Provides on how to create a fancy box that displays your latest Twitter rants in your sidebar without having to turn to clunky plug-ins that bog your blog down.

Content / Media

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Key features include:

An advanced and versatile algorithm: Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.
Related posts in RSS feeds: Display related posts in your RSS and Atom feeds with custom display options.

Video Player Quicktags – This plugin adds a button to your editor that allows you to paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more. Your site will even stay (X)HTML valid unlike with the code provided by most video sites.
SlideShare – This plugin allows you to easily add SlideShare presentations to your blog by just copy pasting the default WordPress embed code. It has one (!) setting, “default width”. If you set that setting, it will make all presentations appear at the width you set there, allowing you to easily adapt the width to your theme’s content width.
Smush.it – Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API in WordPress. Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through Smush.it behind the scenes. You don’t have to do anything different. Smush.it optimizes images by:

stripping meta data from JPEGs
optimizing JPEG compression
converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
stripping the un-used colours from indexed images

Commenting

Subscribe to Comments – Subscribe to Comments 2.1 is a plugin that allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there for the simple reason that it helps foster a community around your blog by encouraging commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog

WordPress Maintenance plugins:

W3 Total Cache – W3 Total Cache is a performance optimization plugin for WordPress, in other words, it speeds up the performance of your WordPress site so that you don’t lose traffic and you rank better in Google. Written by Frederick Townes, a social media designer and the CTO of Mashable, W3 Total Cache is designed to include every speed enhancing feature possible, and optimized to handle all hosting environments.
WP Database Backup – Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.
No Self Pings – Some people really like that WordPress sends pings from your own site to your own site when you write posts; it lets them easily leave a trail of related posts. Some people do not like this behavior; it clutters up their comments. So here’s a plugin to disable self pinging.
Other
Zemanta – Zemanta provides contextual content recommendations to you while you write. It enhances your blog post with relevant images, videos, links, and SEO optimized tags. All recommended content is blogger friendly with clearly marked licenses (Creative Commons or similar).

Other Tips:

Sitemaps are now a part of core WordPress functionality. According to Yoast a traditional sitemap can actually be done within the theme, so there is no need for a plugin.

Breadcrumbs used to once require a plugin but are now incorporated into native WordPress functionality as well.

Social Media Revenge by Viral Video – United Airlines Breaks Guitars

lorna li — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 04:16:14 +0000

Face it, we’ve all been there. You’re a paying customer, you have a legitimate problem that the big, faceless corporation refuses to address. The hours being put on hold, the paperwork, red tape, and maddening bureaucracy, the endless navigation of phone systems, and repeating your story over and over again, only to be told in the end – “Fuck you.” By your airline company, your insurance company, your credit company. What the hell happened to the good old days when the “customer was king”?

Then, the best online reputation attack ever, by singer / songwriter Dave Carroll. After 8 months of stonewalling and passing the buck, United Airlines refusal to pay for the $1200 worth of damages to Dave’s guitar created a worse PR nightmare.

While I can’t say I’m a huge fan of his country style music, Dave Carroll’s YouTube response to United Airlines breaking his guitar is a brilliant example of ordinary people using the power of social media to take back their power in the face of big corporations.

One smashed guitar, one YouTube video; 12 months and 4,467,537 views later, United Airlines is finally listening.

Creating a Blog on WordPress.com – Video Tutorial

lorna li — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 06:03:57 +0000

So I’m in the process of teaching someone how to create her first blog on WordPress.com. This is an eye-opening exercise in working with someone who is not computer literate or Web-savvy. Granted she is a Native American elder, healer, and ceremonial leader. Hey, we all have our gifts, and can’t all be technogeeks!

In trying to find a straightforward way on helping her navigate the WordPress.com UI and figure out how to publish content to the web, I GoogledÂ “WordPress.com video tutorials” and stumbled upon my friend Chris Abraham’s awesome video. This video takes you through the end-to-end process of signing up for a WordPress blog and publishing a post.

Chris Abraham taught me a lot about social media marketing.Â If you want to be a social media expert, I recommend following Chris Abraham on Twitter.

6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan

lorna li — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:42:51 +0000

Recently, Britta Meyer of Eurekster, which makes an embeddable custom social search portal called a “Swicki”, posed a question on LinkedIn about how one would go about defining a social media marketing roadmap, and how you would prioritize each social media channel.

There is no cookie cutter approach to social media marketing. Your strategy will depend on:

1) Your goals – SEO, PR, traffic ( to drive awareness? advertising click-thus? conversions?)
2) Your audience – where does your target demo hang out?
3) Your resources – you, you plus an intern, internal team, agency?

Here are 6 steps to help you design your social media marketing roadmap.

Step 1: Understand What Social Media Is

The best way to look at social media is to view it as one of many Internet marketing channels, one that has the amazing power to go viral. In the very least, it has the awesome ability to engage your audience in meaningful conversations about your product, issue areas, company, and brand.

The social media marketing umbrella includes sites that are both Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 – basically you want to be anywhere that enables discussions, sharing, and user-generated content (UGC), such as:

Blogs and Forums / Discussion Boards
Consumer Review Sites
Social Networks / Online Communities
Social Bookmarking Sites
Social News Sites
Social Music Sites
Video and Photo Sharing Sites
Wikis

Step 2: Understand What Social Media Can & Can’t Do

Social media can engage your audience, encourage online conversations that are user-generated, increase your web presence, expand brand awareness, generate publicity (both good & bad) and provide SEO benefits. It doesn’t convert.

For most marketers, social media has no ROI but is great for:

Brand building
Relationship management
Product development
Reputation management
Customer interaction
Customer feedback
Customer support
Community building
Defensive SEO – Yes! Bury your bad press with positive UGC

In some cases, social media can convert – usually if you own the community, and have the power to strategically capture leads. But that’s like being the D&D Dungeon Master.

Step 3: Determine Where Conversations are Happening

You will need to respond to conversations that are already happening. To determine where conversations are happening about your brand, you will need to have some kind of buzz monitoring or online reputation management system in place.

Prioritize these discussions, then hop in.

Step 4: Divide…

Next, you want to expand into unchartered territory.

Before venturing out into the vast unknown, create your social media road map – a map of the social web as it pertains to your business. Gather all the sites that would be most interested in what you have to say and segment them by type (blogs, social networks, social news sites, forums, etc) and by target audience / topical interest.

Once you’ve done that, it will be more clear to you what your campaign specific marketing strategies and tactics ought to be.

Step 5: …and Conquer

Now comes the tactical deployment. Here are some examples of different kinds of social media engagements.

Blogger outreach & engagement – this is a top down, bottom up approach. To demonstrate a significant impact, this is best handled by a team. You will need to identify the A-List blogs, cultivate a positive relationship with as many as possible, persuade them to blog about your issue, or guest blog for them. You will need a team of conversation agents to fan out into the blogosphere and engage in MEANINGFUL conversations wherever conversations about your topic is happening.

If you have a call to action, relevant product, or web resource you are trying to drive traffic to, drop html links with target anchor text for an additional SEO lift (a % of the sites you will be hitting will be do-follow)

Disclose your identity, be courteous, informed about the subject, or you will be flamed, and that will live forever on the web.

Social networking – only hit the communities relevant to your issue, product, company, topic or you will get poor quality traffic, if any.

Are you infiltrating tight-knit interest-specific online communities? If so, you will need to ingratiate yourself into the pack.

Are you starting your own community on a hosted platform, like a Ning? You can drive conversation and awareness, your revenue options are limited (ad revenue sharing).

Do you own the community? Great – you can drive targeted conversations and include strategically placed calls-to-action, promos, ads, anywhere. If you’ve designed your site with SEO in mind, your users will create the content, and you will had an advantage in the SERPS, especially for long-tail keywords.

Social news marketing – thru social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Newsvine. These sites also have a unique culture and will work for you if your news item relates topics favored by the community. Digg, for example, veers towards the geeky. Write for maximum click thrus – think “linkbait”. Popular stories here can get picked up by bloggers, which will also give you an SEO boost. Traffic can be huge and fickle like a tsunami. Don’t expect it to convert. Avoid marketing here – you will be buried.

Step 6: Trust in the Force

Finally, trust is a huge factor in social engagement. Understand that social media marketing is most effective when users in the community know you. The only way for the community to know you is if you spend a lot of time online and invest managing your social web presence across communities.

Social media builds awareness and drives conversation. It’s a powerful way enable communication between the company & customer. Always remember, selling is a secondary or tertiary benefit of social media.

[tags]social media, social media marketing, seo, social networks, blogging, roi, lorna li[/tags]

Flock Eco-Edition – Social Web Browser Goes Green for Earth Day 2008

lorna li — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:27:57 +0000

Lately I’ve taken to using Flock, the Social Web Browser, because it consolidates and simplifies my social web lifestyle. Today, Flock just got better.

For Earth Day 2008, Flock launched the Eco-Edition of the Flock browser that delivers the latest environmental and sustainable living content to eco-minded social media and web users. The Eco-Edition comes prepopulated with the best news, photos, videos, and feeds from leading eco-content partners on the Web,delivering fresh content from Grist, GroovyGreen, Treehugger, PlanetGreen, Sprig, Current and other top eco brands daily. Furthermore, Flock will donate 10% of the proceeds of the Eco-Edition browser at the end of 2008, and as a recognition of the power of community to create change, will allow users of the Eco-Edition to select the recipient of this donation.

The Flock Eco-Edition Browser, is available as a free software download for Mac, PC and Linux at www.flock.com/eco.

Why Use Flock?

If you are a social media news hound, blogger, Twitterer, are active on multiple social networks, and depend heavily social bookmarking to manage your favorite links, Flock will help you consolidate all your social web activities into a single dashboard.

You can see updates from friend on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter in the Flock people sidebar
You can simultaneously favorite your urls to the Flock browser and to del.icio.us.
You can post to multiple blogs from the same interface
It does Technorati tags for you
You can drag and drop Flickr images & YouTube videos into your blog
Manage your favorite news feeds

[tags]flock eco-edition, flock social web browser, social media, web 2.0, blogging, microblogging, social bookmarking, lorna li[/tags]

Blogged with the Flock Browser

YouTube for Nonprofits: How to Use YouTube to Save the World…And Raise Money

lorna li — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:41:35 +0000

Last week’s Net Tuesday in San Francisco featured Maryrose Dunton, the Head of User Experience at YouTube,, who spoke about YouTube’s Nonprofit Program.The YouTube Nonprofit Program, is an in-kind donation by YouTube to the nonprofit sector that’s worth about $20 million. Currently available to established 501(c)(3)s, YouTube offers participating nonprofits:

A premium branded channel – some environmental nonprofits that have done a good job with this include Friends of the Earth and Defenders of Wildlife. The ability to upload videos of any length. Currently the limit on video length is 10 minutes.

Rotation into the “Promoted Videos” section on YouTube’s homepage.
Listing in the Nonprofit Channels and Nonprofit Video areas
The ability to collect donations using Google Checkout (with no processing fee).
The option to participate in the user partner program, which allows you to show partner ads on video – and share the ad revenue. However, there is currently no way to filter ads, which may not work for some organizations.

YouTube has 30 million visitors daily and over 100 million videos are viewed each day. By connecting nonprofits to the world’s largest online video community, the YouTube Nonprofit program will allow these organizations tap into a significant pool of potential small donors. While large nonprofits are able to receive 10-15% of donations from online fundraising, smaller organizations have the most difficulty establishing a web presence. By offering a dedicated channel on YouTube, YouTube’s Nonprofit Program hopes to empower smaller organizations to significantly expand their reach. Now its just the matter of these, often, short-staffed nonprofits finding the manpower to manage their YouTube presence.

YouTube Best Practices for Nonprofits

Maryrose recommended these tips to help nonprofits engage successfully with the YouTube community:

1. Keep it fresh, keep it short. Best not longer than 10 minutes

2. Be genuine, no public service announcements (PSAs)

3. Engage and interact with the community – have a dialogue, allow people to post video comments, be sure to respond to comments
4. Create a call to action

5. Invest in your channel – update content, make sure links and videos work

7. Do not fear comments, ratings, related videos – while you can moderate user engagement, do not disable the commenting or rating features as this tends to upset the community

New Plans for Nonprofits on YouTube

New developments coming down the pipeline include:

1. Extending the program to include international nonprofits.

2. Incorporating more calls to action that are important to nonprofits, petitions, signup forms.

3. Improving nonprofit discovery on YouTube’s website.

[tags]maryrose dunton, net tuesday, net2, youtube nonprofit program, youtube nonprofit channel, lorna li[/tags]

Search Marketing Salon “Wear Your Favorite Hat” Pictures

lorna li — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 06:30:39 +0000

by Lorna Li

Search engine marketers, bloggers, and social media fanatics wore their favorite hats at Search Marketing Salon’s “Wear Your Favorite Hat” Launch party at the chic and intimate Otis Lounge in San Francisco. Tips were swapped, secrets were traded, and product ideas were bounced around that would take search marketing to the next level.

Forest Kolb, Sharon Lin, and Julie Blaustein.

“We need a Google Adwords Editor that also includes Yahoo and MSN on a single UI,” stated Clay Schulenburg, Interactive Marketing Manager for Healthline. “This will take search to a whole new level.”

F*ck the Yahoo bulk upload, is what I say to that!

Hear that, web entrepreneurs? That’s big bucks for you!

Jacob Morgan, Search Marketing Alchemist and Nicolette Toussaint

Search-obsessed bloggers that dropped by included Michael Brito, who writes a fantastic blog about Social Media & Conversation Marketing, Lisa Whelan social media queen on Vox, Jim Yu on how to be a Search Marketing and SEO Maven, and Andy Kaufman, the real estate blogger and Twitter king.

William Gauthier, Alicia Lin, Damon White, and Lorna Li.

e-Storm’s William Gauthier, Lisa McGuire, and Daniel Riveong

Leon Krishayana and lovely lady in black beret

Leon Krishnayana of iSpionage, offers a technology platform that helps search engine marketers track competitors’ PPC ads on Google, Yahoo, and MSN ads daily. It allows you to see the ad copy, keywords, and average rank on the major search engines side by side. Very handy indeed.

Vera Belenky and Alex Gamburg

Other attendees included Mark Fiske, Senior Online Marketing Manager at Gap, Pete Park of web advertising agency Vectorhaus, Yan Rozovsky VP of LeadClick Media, Jason Hart of the search-focused Online Marketing agency Domain Methods, Jeff Rohrs, VP of search marketing agency ExactTarget, Leo Haryono, Head of Natural Search of Shopping.com, Josh Pierry and Clay Shulenburg of Healthline, Biren Talati, of Sandalstore.com, Peter Koontz, Founder and CTO of Sprenzy, Vera Belenky of Walmart.com, Alex Gamburg Search Marketing Director of Trulia, specializing in real estate search, Gabriel Carrejo, the original sinner, Forest Kolb of BizzFlip who has cracked the secret of the Digg first page, Sharon Lin, Online Marketer for Web 2.0 companies, Irina Greenman, and Danny Cheung, who is about to revolutionize the world of WordPress publishing the Good Magazine way.

More pictures can be viewed on the Search Marketing Salon Flickr album.

Join Search Marketing Salon on Facebook!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: searchmarketing salon, e-Storm, iSpionage, Domain Methods, Good Magazine, Sandalstore.com, Michael Brito, Andy Kaufman, Jim Yu, Lisa Whelan, Sharon Lin, Josh Pierry, Clay Shulenburg, Peter Koontz, Jeff Rohrs, Biren Talati, Jason Hart, Gabriel Carrejo, Pete Park, Mark Fiske, Yan Rozovsky, Leo Haryono, Leon Krishnayana, Vera Belenky, Nicolette Toussaint, Lorna Li, Jacob Morgan

Starbucks Green Idea – Consumers Vote to Make Starbucks More Environmentally-Friendly

lorna li — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 07:41:16 +0000

Starbucks Ideas has been live for about 2 weeks and already customers have had plenty to say about what they expect from the world’s largest chain of coffee shops.

The move to launch a website that allows anyone to post ideas about how Starbucks can improve its service offering is part of an increasing trend by companies to use social networking applications to better improve communication with their customers. This move may be the best way for the struggling coffee maker to quickly turn its business around.

Starbucks Ideas is not a true social network play, rather is an an interactive forum where people can vet their best ideas in a manner much like Digg. Starbucks Ideas is powered by Salesforce.com and is the same social platform that powers Dell’s Ideastorm which won PR Innovation of the Year 2008.

Already, Starbucks has moved to implement the top two customer requests: free coffee for frequent buyers and universal free wi-fi, which is finally (woot, woot!) coming soon in Spring 2008. The thought that a multinational global corporation like Starbucks would be so responsive to the voice of its customers is encouraging indeed.

Can Customers Make Starbucks Become More Environmentally Responsible?

As I surfed through several pages of Starbucks Ideas I was struck by the number of requests for a Greener Starbucks. Below is a list of suggestions and comments that would Starbucks make a better environmental citizen, all of which I voted on:

Stop Trashing Empty Cards

We don’t need any more plastic in the trash. Rather than suggesting trashing an empty starbucks card, give people a 25 cent credit…for refilling it. To make it affordable, how about….

Re-fill your card…at $20 level…get $20.25 on the card.

Re fill at the $50 level…get $51.00 on the card.

Re fill at the $100 level…get $103.oo on the card, or get the $100…and your current single drink order free.

More on the plastic…less plastic in the trash.

Sell Reusable Sleeves

I have recently had customers who come in with their own rubber sleeves for their cups. They tell me they purchased them from Bed Bath and Beyond. They prefer to use them as the grip is more secure and they are helping preserve the trees. Starbucks should have these manufatured with the company logo and sell them for a really reasonable price point so we could also help save the trees etc

Recycle!

Recycle! Become greener!

Recycle In Stores

It concerns me that we do not have recycle bins in our stores. In Seattle, and in most large cities the opportunity to help the environment by recycling is readily available in our homes and many business. I would like to see Starbucks stores embrace this as well by providing Glass, plastice and compost waste in containers in all stores.

Recycle the Waste in the Back of Your Stores

I don’t think Starbucks has shown a real connection between environmental health and human health. Here is why: My local Starbucks produces a tremendous amount of garbage everyday and nearly none of it is recycled. Nearly all the store waste is thrown out and put in the garbage and taken to the landfill. Recycle the waste in the back end of ALL your stores. It goes beyond the polish of the front end and sales. Make it a real effort to connect environmental health and human health. Thank you.

Reusable Cups

I use my Starbucks reusable travel mug almost every time I order and this is what I often see:

- 99% of the time I don’t get the mug discount,

- some baristas have no real clue what to do with it,

- they stick a disposable cup inside it to take down the order and then throw the disposable cup away (I’ve seen stickers but they seem to be out of them a lot).

We need more people to use the mugs and reduce the number of disposable cups used. Push the sale of them (make them cheaper – why not just $5?) and then train staff on how to handle the cups!

Locally sourced (organic) baked goods

Offer locally sourced (organic or not) high quality baked goods similar to some of the baked goods Whole Foods offers, instead of the nationally consistent scones, cookies, pastries, cakes, and breads offered now. This sacrifices some of the national consistency now in place (though there is some variance already) but brings better quality, better tasting food to Starbucks, supports the local community, and elevates Starbucks above other coffee outlets (national outlets now also serving coffee) by cranking up the quality level and local community/local business tie ins. As a result, Starbucks will feel more like a local coffee store again rather than some big national chain.

Biodegradable drink and food containers – Yeah!

Replace plastic containers for cold drinks, straws, salads etc. with those made of biodegradable polylactic acid or polylactide (PLA). These are readily available and currently in use by forward-thinking entities like Paul Newman’s “Newman’s Own” products.

Fair Trade Coffee

I think that Starbucks should switch to only selling and brewing coffee, lattes … with only fair trade coffee. Fair trade coffee costs the consumer no more than regular coffee and still gives the coffee grower a fair price for their coffee. In return these coffee growers use organic means to grow their coffee making it environmentally friendly. That is why I would like to see Starbucks switch to only selling fair trade coffee.

Real Fruit Smoothies

real fruit smoothies

Porcelain Cups

When I first started going to Starbucks, they used to ask here or to go, and if “here” you’d get a porcelain mug of various sizes. Would that be cheaper than buying all those paper cups. Too much washing dishes?

Corporate Social Responsibility at Starbucks

I’ve seen Starbucks come a long way. Since 1999, when it was assailed by numerous activist groups upset with the company’s fair-trade policies, labor relations, and environmental impact during the WTO talks in Seattle, Starbucks has evolved with a commendable corporate social responsibility program.

The mission of Starbucks’ CSR program is to work daily with partners (employees), suppliers and farmers to help create a more sustainable approach to high-quality coffee production, to help build stronger local communities, to minimize their environmental footprint and to be responsive to customers health and wellness needs.

In 2005, Starbucks received The World Environment Center’s 21st Annual Gold Medal for International Corporate Achievement in Sustainable Development, where it was recognized for its leadership in sustainable development within the specialty coffee industry.

In particular, WEC commends the company’s development of Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E.) Practices, a set of environmentally, socially and economically responsible coffee buying guidelines created in conjunction with Conservation International that are designed to contribute positively to the livelihoods of coffee farmers while placing an emphasis on environmental conservation and supply chain transparency.

According to Calvert Funds’ December 2007 edition of Socially Responsible Investing News, in “Calvert’s view, Starbucks Corp. remains an industry leader with significant and progressive programs on renewable energy and the environment as well as workplace diversity and safety.”

While many love to hate Starbucks, I would point out that, over the past decade, Starbucks has proved to be more socially responsible than many other multinational corporations of equal reach and caliber. My Starbucks Idea is simply another way in which the company has demonstrated a willingness to address public opinion, even if its primary motivation is maintaining competitive advantage.

The power of social media for social innovation is evident. If consumers are vocal enough about Starbucks’ environmental impact, Starbucks Ideas may indeed be the catalyst to a Greener, more earth-friendly Starbucks.

[tags]starbucks, starbucks ideas, web 2.0, salesforce.com, corporate social responsibility, csr, social innovation, social media, social networking, green business, environmental sustainability, lorna li[/tags]

Search Marketing Salon’s Wear Your Favorite Hat Launch Party on Thursday March 27 at Otis Lounge

lorna li — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:54:44 +0000

It’s time to wear your favorite hat, because Search Marketing Salon launches this Thursday. White hats, grey hats, and black hats are welcome – we do not discriminate.

If you are obsessed about search engine rankings, gaga about the SEO benefits of social media, and have a tale or two to tell about how you dominated the SERPs, have a drink with us!

When:

Thursday March 27 6:00pm – 9:00pm

Where:

Otis Lounge

25 Maiden Lane (b/w Grant & Kearny )

San Francisco, CA 94108

Join Us!

RSVP via Eventbrite for Search Marketing Salon’s Wear Your Favorite Hat Launch Party.

To become an official member of Search Marketing Salon, join Search Marketing Salon on LinkedIn.

You can also connect with Search Marketing Salon on Facebook.

[tags]search marketing salon, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, seo, ppc, social seo, web 2.0 marketing[/tags]