B2B Web Strategy Blog – eMagine

Greener than Thou: Fad or Fiction?

May 29th, 2008 Posted by: Bill Gadless

You can’t turn on the TV or read the newspaper (and never mind the blogosphere!) these days without someone berating you for being insufficiently green or having too big an environmental footprint. It’s as though Al Gore and Kermit had suddenly been crowned kings of all media.

The result of all the hype – so far – has been to make greenness yet another metric being increasingly applied to individuals and businesses …including your B2B. It’s no longer enough to be merely compliant with the Clean Air and Rivers & Streams Acts (which is a snap for most tech companies, anyway); now you’ve got to be on the bleeding edge of lowering CO2 emissions, reducing power consumption, recycling heat, and a host of other items that weren’t even on the radar screen 10 years ago. (It’s almost like winning the Nobel Prize really does focus people’s attention …who knew?) And you’ve got to do some chest-thumping about it too, or your silence could create an unjustified presumption of guilt in the court of buyer opinion.

Obviously there’s a lot your B2B can do company-wide to earn green points, but what can you as a lone marketer do? Well, actually… a couple of things, at least:

• You can shift more and more of your promotional mix to online media, because online marketing is the greenest marketing you can do …certainly as compared to print media, which produce mounds of paper waste; and tradeshows, which cause people to turn dwindling fossil fuel stocks into greenhouse gases by flying. Not that you can ever eliminate the traditional vehicles… but the more you can substitute, the greener your marketing will get. (And the more profitable, too, since online also usually has the greater ROI.)
• You can be the focal point for telling your company’s green story …through PR, the website, and arming all of your customer-facing troops with a “green” slide for inclusion in their “Company Overview” pitches. It’s really prospective customers – and investors – that need to hear the story, since they could be using greenness as one of their purchase or investment criteria without your ever knowing it.

Target: the green datacenter
As you cast about for elements of that story, your focus will inevitably land on the datacenter. For the many tech-flavored B2Bs that inhabit only office space, the datacenter – whether centralized or distributed – ends up being the biggest single power consumer and heat producer in the company …and hence the first place to look for major green point gains.

Unfortunately, there are as yet no industry standards for green datacenters. (The US Green Building Council, which administers the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system for green buildings, is rumored to be working on one specifically for datacenters.) Meanwhile, there are actions that can be taken today that clearly will move your datacenter in a greener direction: see for example Amy Hengst’s 10 Simple Steps to a Green Datacenter, or The Green Data Center Blog.

Clearly, this is an extended journey that all of us will be undertaking …preferably together. And hopefully, the planet will thank us all for it later.

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy,Internet Marketing