Meet the sustainability process Walmart is experiencing from the inside out through this encouraging video with its employees and how they are succeeding at getting everyone involved, not just treehuggers.

It’s been awhile! In these past few months we’ve been devoting our time to a new initiative concerning environment and sustainability: the Global Observatory.

The Global Observatory is an initiative that seeks to provide insights around COP15 to bring the public in, to involve them in guiding their governments towards agreement on a roadmap that will prevent dangerous climate change. We want everyone on this planet to witness the progress of the negotiations and to demand a fair and binding climate agreement for the following years. We need you to become a Global Observer for the Earth.

A couple of weeks ago we had the opportunity of attending the Climate Week NY°C, which allowed us to interview world leaders, campaign activists and climate change benchmarks. We invite you to follow all of our news, the progress of COP15 negotiations and the implications communicated by our team of experts and ambassadors in our blog: www.global-observatory.org

Watch our official video presentation here:

You can also join us in Facebook at www.facebook.com/GlobalObservatory or follow us at www.twitter.com/WeAreGo

Stay tuned with the Observatory!

Recently, the Guardian presented a new corporate initiative to spread the word about their sustainable practices and how they aim at changing society as a company recognized by its voice: Living our Values.

The goal of this report is for their many stakeholders to get to know what they stand for and how they are moving forward on sustainability. Living our Values is an annual audit on social, ethical and environmental attitudes and actions, and they declare themselves as the first media company to do something of these proportions.

Jo Confino, Executive Editor of the Guardian and Head of Sustainable Development for Guardian News and Media described it better:
“The Guardian has a clear purpose to deliver high quality independent liberal journalism in the pursuit of social justice. This website seeks to show our stakeholders how we live up to our core values, and particularly our commitment to sustainable development and responsible business practice.”

What’s more, they are ready to go further with Web 2.0 technology, to keep their readers updated and to open up the dialogue about it all through an online community that invites you to discuss what values are they (and we) living in guardian.co.uk/sustainability.

Could there be that a media voicing sustainability 2.0 is just what we need to take best practices, new technologies and collective intelligence to more companies and more people?

Source:
Walk the talk

During this time we mapped the web to find relevant conversations on these same topics, looking to start interacting with those who were also talking about combining sustainable development practices with social media possibilities. We got to know blogs, groups, websites, forums and people that would help us continue down this way. And we started talking with all of them, in some sort of wide network about sustainability 2.0.

This gave us the opportunity to start our own conversation – mainly through this blog -, seeing where that would lead us.

Our next steps will be to follow our research: have you heard of companies pulling an enterprise 2.0? Do you have ideas on what sustainability 2.0 should represent? Do you think of ways social networking, citizen participation and sustainable practices could join? We want to know, and make of this blog an online hub where all things “sus2.0″ will be discussed.

And we want the conversation to happen in an active, dynamic and participative manner. So we will be giving you opportunities to speak and do. Thanks for joining us!

Reading this article on brands that use Twitter to promote their products and launch an ongoing conversation with their customers, we got inspired to do a bit of research.

Charles Redell wonders if sustainable brands should tweet, on the basis of a study by Nielsen & Co. that concludes “the average time per person spent on soclail networking sites increased 67 percent from May 2008 to May 2009″.

David Raycroft, vice president of product strategy at San Francisco-based startup Milyoni, seems to agree: “If you are not engaging in these member communities, you’ve already lost control of the conversation,” .

The article mentions Ford tweets, a giant corporation that spends a great deal of time replying to other users’ comments about their cars and new releases:

@Dragonbelly1 Whoa, whoa, whoa. What you mean “don’t like Ford”? Are we really that bad? ^SM

You may also have heard of Zappo’s case. This shoes brand started tweeting collectively through more than 400 employees. With thousands of followers, this social media initiative helped the company increase their sales in a 20%.

Dell is a corporation learning from its mistakes. After Dell Hell, they seem to have understood the power of costumer influence, and besides creating Direct 2 Dell and Ideastorm, Dell now tweets. They let you know about offers and discounts and get to hear your opinions and ideas live.

Another brand that is listening to their clients’ ideas is Starbucks, though their story is much different. Here it’s a company that aimed at complying with different sustainability standards from the get-go and one that might be consider a clear example of enterprise 2.0. They use Twitter to boost the impact of My Starbucks Idea, a community where you can suggest your own idea to improve the coffee experience.

here’s a list of some of the ideas we launched in the past week – look for them at your local Starbucks! http://bit.ly/Haveu

And even Kogi Korean, a Korean-bbq-tacos truck company is using Twitter to let its followers know where they can buy cheap dishes in every corner of Los Angeles they stop by.

What about your brand? Are you already twitting?
It certainly is an opportunity to take the first steps towards becoming enterprise 2.0, and even to test the power of some of your sustainable development actions. But as they quote on the article by Redell, remember: “You can develop an audience through transparent communities, but you still have to have a good product.”

“Social media and sustainability are both about cultural change”, said Justin Yuen, founder of FMYI (For MY Innovation) when asked to explained why his online workspace was being used to leverage sustainable initiatives inside big companies like Sony and Nike.

BusinessWeek published an article about this revolutionary application (they say it beats Basecamp, Facebook and FriendFeed) where your team can store and share information in a secure but transparent and collaborative way.

He came up with the idea while working in CSR for Nike: he noted that while many people had good ideas concerning sustainable development, putting those efforts in conversation was more than just launching a series of corporative workshops.

In FMYI “each person gets their own social networking-style profile page, and each team can have a page too. Then, anyone can create a workspace page to post messages, share files, add links, set tasks, and more”.

The initiative has succeeded in encouraging companies of different sizes and colors to open an account and start harnessing the power behind their own stakeholders. And enterprise 2.0 gets another nudge forward.

Source:
BusinessWeek
FMYI

In our quest to find everything that helps join the keywords of sustainable development and Web 2.0, we couldn’t help but drawing our heads towards the recently launched “Sustainability 2.0 Award”.

The initiative is a product of Justmeans, a development that lets you promote your company’s good work through an online community of targeted audiences and their one-stop online distribution technology.

The Award reads as follows:

“Is your company using social media to engage with stakeholders on sustainability issues? Are you using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging or other social tools to engage with stakeholders? Tell us your story and your company may be eligible for the Sustainability 2.0 Award, honouring the most innovative use of social media for corporate sustainability stakeholder engagement. The winner will be selected by a prestigious group of social media and sustainability experts participating in our Stakeholder Sustainability Engagement event on September 14-15 in NYC. The award will be presented at the event’s drinks’ reception on September 14 and our three finalists will be invited to present their stories at this exciting event examining best practice in corporate sustainability engagement”.

The initiative is as fresh, yound and unpredictable as it is challenging, just as the concept of sustainability 2.0 itself, but we definitely want to follow its progress.

To learn more, submit your idea or get in touch with people from Justmeans, click here.

The planet, the economy, technology & energy, learning & education
and governance & security are the five main focus dimensions that occupy the participants of the Tällberg Forum, which takes place every year since 2005.

This year Ernesto van Peborgh, founder of El Viaje de Odiseo consultancy firm, had the chance to attend the event and participate of the debates.

So what is the forum about anyway?

“The Tällberg Forum is an arena for reflection, conversations and the search for creative solutions, integrating both nature and the arts, where people feel free to step outside of their professional identity, to share doubts and new ideas, and search for ways forward outside of established frameworks. It acts to stimulate the conversation on, and design solutions to the problems of our times in order to foster new thinking and solutions”.

The Forum included a variety of programs and workshops that happened during five days (June 24 – 28) and gave the participants the opportunity to meet colleagues and like-minded people to brainstorm and conversate on ideas, initiatives, actions that can better the world.

We’re very excited to have been part of this year edition, and hopefully we’ll be able to bring new ideas to this table.

To get started, we recommend these videos of some of the most amazing talks:

Gro Harlem Brundtland
Session IV: The task ahead. Keynote address by the former Prime Minister of Norway.

Amory Lovins
Session V: Copenhagen – five months to go.
The Fossil-Fuel End-game

Paul Gilding
Session III – The diverging interests.
Final reflections by the CEO and Founding Partner of Ecos Corporation, Australia.

The photo belongs to the workshop Ernesto participated in. From left to right: Leif Utne (Utne Reader), Antonella Battaglini (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research), Felix Finkbeiner (Plant for the Planet), Guido Axmann, Frithjof Finkbeiner, our very own Ernesto van Peborgh (El Viaje de Odiseo), Jose Maria Figueres (www.josemariafigueres.org) and Aimee Christensen (Christensen Global).

Every day, often more than once we get involved in a certain type of activity that requires our time and money, but no so frequently our thoughts and reflection.

Yes, we’re talking about buying and consumption. How much thinking did you invest the last time you purchased something?

From Sustainability 2.0, the book:

Over the course of the 1990s, in line with the growth of the participative media and the responsible consumer and free trade movements, a new type of customer began to emerge, the most distinctive trait of whom was an awareness of the impact of his/her actions on the environment and society.

A minority within the world population began to gather at the front doors of companies and say, “Enough! Down with pollution, down with destruction, down with slave labor, child exploitation, pauper’s wages, unfair rules and productive models that are non-sustainable in the long term.”

Satellites, camcorders, blogs, Web 2.0 and cell phones all served to facilitate communications among these different groups and to the chagrined surprise of companies, different forms of interaction came into play and consumers grabbed control like never before, organizing themselves into a variety of movements.

This is the new consumer, the prosumer.

To further this topic, we suggest reading this article on consumers choosing to buy green.

In brief, it is suggested that the main objective of a 2.0 business is to generate spaces in which people can realize their personal projects on a collective basis: a distributive network that encourages new relations without being bound by centralized decision-making and in which those on the periphery are just as important as those in the middle.

Some time ago we designed this chart to make a diagnosis for an Argentinian top telecommunications company, in which we aimed to survey 400 top managers about this topic, and we share our conclusions with you.

The axis “Technology” measures the level of adoption of hardware and modernization of the organization.

The axis “Adoption of tools and philosophy of the web 2.0″ intends to evaluate the level of understanding of this new way of thinking, the behavior of the people within the organization and the adoption of social software that fosters collaboration, openness and transparency.

Bottom left are all the traditional enterprises in any part of the world. Vertical hierarchies dominate the process of decision making. There are low levels of modernization and technology adoption.

Top left are all the modern and hype enterprises that invest heavily in technology. Their human resources have the knowledge but fail to understand the philosophy of this new paradigm: networking, collaboration and collective intelligence. These are the kind of companies that ban the use of MSN and other 2.0 tools during workhours.

“Social Enterprise” includes academic institutions and NGOs where the people want to open themselves and share, but they still have not learned to use the tools and face the digital gap.

Top right is what many of us have defined as enterprise 2.0.

Our main hypothesis is that in order to achieve this, first of all we need to change people’s values and every day attitudes. It is not so much how many new media tools they accumulate as how much they change their mindsets.

It is not just a question of joining Facebook or Twitter or persuading the CEO to open a blog. Instead, it means putting into practice what we define as “key attitudes”: collaborate, render control, create and share.

What for?

The company should resemble a pond, where ideas emerge as bubbles from the bottom, go up without obstacles and reach the surface. In this model, ideas are visible and get done, attracting new ideas on their way.

What about your own company? What is your current enterprise 2.0 status?

Source: ernestovanpeborgh.com