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Online Community Report

A web resource for online community professionals.

Online Communities and Sustainable Development: Supporting "Green" and BeyondNovember 13

Many organizations are involved with online community building activities, but few consider implications of their online communities on making their business more "green", or even better, more sustainable.

The case can be made that online community building activities support the three key areas of Sustainable Development:

From the Wikipedia definition of Sustainable Development:

Sustainable development is a pattern of resource use that aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but in the indefinite future.

... The field of sustainable development can be conceptually broken into three constituent parts: environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and sociopolitical sustainability.

While I don't propose that online communities can magically transform organizations into sustainability superstars, but I do think there is a case to be made that online communities can help support a more sustainable enterprise for many companies. Let's take a look at each constituent category that makes up sustainable development:

1. Environmental

As my colleague Jim Cashel

Marketing & Online Communities 2008: A Report BackNovember 11

The Marketing & Online Communities conference was held last Wednesday at the Tribeca Grand in New York. We had a fantastic lineup of folks representing top agencies, brand marketers and online communities. A few of the organizations that were in attendance:

Fleishman-Hillard, Digitas, Swirl, The Knot, Google, Business Week, BlogHer, iVillage, Trip Adivsor, and American Express.

The venue was fantastic. We were in the Grand Screening room at the Tribeca Grand for most of the day, which is a very posh 100+ person theater. The room was small enough to be comfortable and intimate, and supported the in-depth conversations among participants that strive for at our conferences.


Some of the key takeaways:

The Power of Conversation
Heather Gold kicked off the conference with her session "Designing for Conversation". Heather started the session by holding an informal conversation with a few folks in the front of the room, and scaling the dialog to the whole room in the course of the next 50 minutes. Her intention was to show that conversation leads to connection.