How Companies Use Blogs

I stumbled across this post on Viridus News today that lists 10 corporate blogs worth reading and it briefly talks about how each of the companies uses the medium. Now I confess I have not read the entirety of each blog but I ran a quick experiment that I would like to share here.

I did a quick Google site search for each blog on the frequency of which the word "profit" or the word "sustainability" showed up. Below is a chart of the results.



It seems there are basically three groups. The first (BofA, LinkedIN, Ebay and GM) ignore sustainability. The second group is Google, Amazon, Whole Foods and Cisco that take a balanced approach. And then the last group (McDonald's and Wal-Mart) that focus the vast majority of their discussion on sustainability (and pretty much ignore profits). By the way I tried the same test with "environment" vs "profit" and got the same results.

I would argue that the perceived leaders in sustainability are the 2nd group (the balanced folks). And in some ways Wal-Mart and McDonald's may be overcompensating.

What do you think? Does this jive with your experience?

When Sustainability Conflicts With Business

What do you do when sustainability conflicts with business objectives? No, I'm not talking about the costs of green initiatives and how to fund them in a bad economic environment. I'm talking about a more fundamental conflict.

A good example is Wal-Mart and their personal sustainability projects ("PSP") officially launched last year. PSPs are individual sustainability projects Wal-Mart employees commit to and are wide ranging including things like exercise, diet, carpooling, community service and, of course, corporate sustainability. All of the projects are voluntary and some of them Wal-Mart compensates for (e.g. $1500 to quit smoking). The New York times wrote last year about some of the PSPs and their impact. So here's the dilemma. What do you do if your PSP is to eat less meat and quit smoking, yet you are the buyer/category manager for tobacco or meat? Your personal goal is to use less, but your job is to sell more. Marc Gunther wrote about this conflict on GreenBiz.

These are interesting conflicts and addressing them head on and appropriately is important. Join the discussion on Viridus to learn more about this issue.