Let’s face it, the green community online is a pretty tight-knit group - but we need to bring our message to the mainstream. The vast majority of internet users have never visited TreeHugger, EcoGeek, Green Daily, Inhabitat, Lighter Footstep, Lime, Hugg, Care2, Fivelimes or any other green site, and never will. We need to bring the fight for a greener world to them!
Get Out of Your Niche
The biggest mistake both environmentally conscious web surfers and content creators can make is being overly focussed on the green niche. While sites like those mentioned above are very important to the green community their reach is extremely limited compared to more general interest sites. By ignoring sites like Digg, some in the green community risk preaching to the choir and limiting their impact. This graph comparing the popularity of Digg and it’s eco-savvy twin Hugg illustrates the point:
The top story today in Digg’s environment category has over 1000 votes while the top story ever on Hugg has fewer than 100. Now I don’t mean to disparage Hugg in any way, it’s a great site, but if we fail to bring the wisdom of the green web to popular mainstream sites like Digg, our messages won’t reach mainstream audiences.
Wear Your Green Hat, Everywhere you go
To take environmental values maintstream, members of the green web need to bring along their green hat when they venture outside of green niche sites. My non-green obsession is gadgets, and while sites like EcoGeek help me keep up on green gadgets, I also visit decidedly un-green sites like Gizmodo. When we see things outside our green sphere that are an affront to our values, and trust me gadget sites are especially rife with wasteful or downright stupid products, we need to speak up, comment, suggest alternatives and be the green conscience of the web. No need to be preachy, just engage in the discussion and bring a green perspective to the table. Taking your green hat to social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace is also key to taking green messages viral and bringing friends and acquaintances into the green fold.
Count yourself in!
Part of the reason sites like Digg are so influential is that they attract a tech-savvy audience (Digg started life as a technology news site). This audience is made up of content creators and consumers who know how to leverage their knowledge of internet technology too promote the things they create and care about. Content creators take advantage of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best-practices and list their content on multiple general interest and niche social media and networking sites in order to get their message to a vast, broad audience quickly and effectively. Tech-savvy readers are in turn more likely to vote, submit and comment on social media sites and blogs, and much more likely to use tools like StumbleUpon and Alexa to influence the reach of content they enjoy.
StumbleUpon is an add-on toolbar for your browser that allows you to rate sites you visit with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Sites that receive a lot of positive reviews receive greater exposure. Alexa is another browser add-on that tracks the popularity of websites. The graph above was created using Alexa data which is collected from users who have the toolbar installed. In the example above Digg appears to be disproportionately more popular compared to Hugg because Digg’s audience is more tech-savvy and more of them have these tools installed. People who enjoy green sites and want environmental ideas to reach a wider audience should install these tools.
Don’t Forget Your Roots!
While I am encouraging green web users to participate more in mainstream sites in order to increase the dissemination of green news and views, it’s also important to support the great sites listed above that helped create our amazing online green community. I encourage you to visit any of those listed above that you haven’t seen before. I also encourage you to spread the word about other green sites you like far and wide - both within and green blog-o-sphere and outside of it.
How do you spread the word outside the green web?
Let us know in the comments below!
2 responses so far ↓
1 Kemper Barkhurst // Nov 6, 2007 at 2:53 am
I’ve been digging hard into several social Websites in order to help promote my “Urban Harvesting” project but haven’t really been able to reach many people. I’ve joined Facebook and proceeded to sign up for every environmental group they had. I joined all the email groups on Yahoo and was only able to receive a few messages back. How can we work together to help promote each others green initiatives?
2 Timothy Latz // Nov 14, 2007 at 5:18 pm
As someone who works daily in sorting through the thousands of blogs, websites, articles that deal with green and sustainability issues, let me say there is a bit of a glut of information on the green side of things.
I’m noticing that people will start blogs and then burn out after a few weeks or months . These get added to a forthcoming Green Blog algae pool…
I think green is considered “trendy” right now, but it is difficult to know when the mainstream will finally pick up on it in a larger way. I would imagine now that Discovery Magazine owns Treehugger and a few other mainstream outlets are getting into the green media biz that the message from smaller independent voices will either be crushed or continue to grow as interest grows.
I don’t think it’s a “trend”, but the message of the green movement has to become one of less consumption and buying products whether green or not, not of more..
5% of the worlds population uses more than 25% of the worlds resources….. Less is more…
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