social sustainability Archives - GreenMonk: the blog

TEPCO using realtime information to help reduce energy consumption in Japan

July 29, 2011 by Tom Raftery

TEPCO, the Japanese power company who own the Fukushima nuclear power plant, are in an unenviable position. Their Fukushima nuclear power plant is the site of one of the world’s worst industrial accidents, they have been accused of not just incompetence but of falsifying safety records and yet they have to continue to supply power to Japan.

Japan itself is facing some significant challenges – only 17 of its 54 nuclear power reactors are operational heading into August, traditionally its month of peak demand. Japan needs to try to avoid rolling blackouts, and TEPCO has stepped up to helping out.

TEPCO energy message

On TEPCO’s home page they give top line data for the maximum demand for the day, as well as the maximum amount that will be able to be supplied. As long as the demand doesn’t exceed the supply, no blackouts.

TEPCO have gone further though with a realtime chart of energy demand (updated every five minutes) versus maximum supply and also graphed against the demand on the same day in 2010 (see the chart at the top of this post). We have long argued here on GreenMonk that giving people access to information will help change behaviour. This campaign is a great example of realtime energy information in action and it appears to be helping because electricity consumption is down around 15% on last year.

This information is certainly not the only thing helping people reduce their electricity consumption – TEPCO and others also have energy reduction tips on their website and the tragedy of the Earthquake, followed by the devastating tsunami galvanised a sense of national unity, such that now anyone seen to be wasting scarce electricity is ostracised.

People and companies are turning off lights, removing bulbs, changing the thermostat on air conditioning units in a way that would previously have been thought impossible. In fact a certain pride is creeping into the campaign. Tatsuo Nakahara, administrative manager at Meiwa Rubber, a manufacturer of printing equipment with factories in Tokyo, said in an interview quoted in the New York Times

The government?s figure is 15 percent, but we?re aiming to cut by 25 percent

He added that in the months after the March disaster, the company had already succeeded in conserving 20 percent.

Can this effort be sustained? Only time will tell but if the Japanese can get through August, they’ll have passed through the worst of it. They should consider also giving people individual energy management dashboards and something else that may help maintain the momentum, as I have posited here previously, is the addition of social media and gaming to the effort. Letting people share their energy reduction achievements with their social networks, setting targets for reductions, creating leaderboards and awarding achievement badges etc.

TEPCO may want to seriously consider this. Its reputation, nationally and internationally, is in shreds. If they can be seen now as an agent of good in this crisis, they may be able to resurrect some bit of pride in their brand.

Photo credit Tom Raftery

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The secret to following lots of people on Twitter

February 16, 2011 by Tom Raftery

Continuing my series social media savvy for sustainability, I wrote a post on how to follow large numbers of people on Twitter – this is important to ensure you you get the most up-to-date information on your areas of interest, as quickly as possible:

Twitter is a fantastic tool for disseminating information, and the obvious corollary of that is that Twitter is a superb app for consuming information as well – depending on how you use it.

What is the best way to make sure you get the most information out of Twitter? Follow lots of relevant, interesting people!

It sounds obvious (if you aren’t following people, you won’t see their posts) but I see lots of people on Twitter who are following 100 people or less. Many of those 100 will be friends and family, others will be infrequent posters so out of 100 accounts, you are lucky if 20 are regular sources of good information.

Now, what if you increase the number of people you follow to 200? Or 2,000 (I’m currently following 2778)? Well then, the number of friends/family type accounts you’re following is unlikely to increase proportionally, so as long as you chose the people to follow wisely, you will vastly increase the amount of interesting news you will be receiving from Twitter.

Now, I often hear people say they have difficulty keeping up with the number of people they are following and asking me how I follow over 2,000. The simple answer is I don’t try to keep up with all the people I follow! I dip in and out of Twitter and if the people I follow happen to post, I will likely see the post. If they post when I am not looking at Twitter, I probably won’t see their post.

And that’s fine.

The major limiting factor in trying to follow more people on Twitter is obsessively attempting to catch every tweet. Let go. Learn to live in the now and more than likely if you do miss an important tweet, it will be re-tweeted anyway.

Of course, a flipside to this is that you shouldn’t follow people simply to increase the number of people you are following. Only follow people who will bring you useful/interesting information – otherwise you are reducing the signal-to-noise ratio and similarly if you realise that someone you followed is not bringing you any value, don’t hesitate to unfollow them.

So, how do you find interesting people to follow on Twitter? That’s a topic for another blog post – stay tuned!

You should follow me on Twitter here

15 Twitter tips for beginners – updated

February 10, 2011 by Tom Raftery

I wrote a post a couple of years back called 15 Twitter tips for beginners which, though two years old, still has useful information for Twitter users – especially if you make sure to read all the comments as well.

Needless to say, things have moved on considerably in the intervening period – bear in mind that post was written over a year before the launch of the iPad and seven months before version 1.0 of Android was released!

So here’s a quick updated version of the tips:

Start off easy by posting a few innocuous posts introducing yourself and your interests, “I’m Tom, a Social Media and Sustainability expert”, “I recently moved to Seville, anyone on here from Seville?”, – that kind of thing. Then be sure to mention why you’re using Twitter, e.g. “I hope to learn more about cleantech”, or whatever it is you are hoping to get from it.
Then build up your network. Start with friends who you know to be on Twitter. Start following them. But also look at the list of people they are following. You may know some of them too, if so, follow them as well.
If you precede someone’s username with the @ symbol in a post on Twitter (i.e. “@tomraftery how is it going?”) then your post appears in the @Mentions tab on their Twitter page. This works whether they are following you or not. When you @reply to someone, and they see you appear in their @Mentions tab, they are likely to check out your profile and posts and may decide to follow you. This is a very powerful way to build up your network with people who don’t necessarily know you but with whom you want to connect.
Check out the TwitterGrader page for your area, for instance, if you are based in Andalucia, in the south of Spain, like me, check the TwitterGrader page for Andalucia and you’ll find some interesting people you may want to connect to, to get into the local scene.
Follow some of the people there, check who they are following and talking to (@ replying to) and consider following them too.
Sidenote: if you precede someone’s username with “d ” (i.e. “d tomraftery how is it going?”) this sends a private message only to them – called a direct message or DM. You can only send DMs to people who have chosen to follow you.
Also, don’t be shy about asking your friends to pimp you to their followers!

Then, using Twitter:

On the computer use either Seesmic Desktop or TweetDeck for posting/reading posts. I prefer TweetDeck. Having said that, the Twitter web interface is still prob the best for checking people’s profiles and seeing who they follow.
On the iPad /iPhone I use the Twitter iPhone client; On Android, I’m told Tweetdeck is best; and on Blackberry I hear Seesmic, Tweetcaster and Socialscope are good (though Socialscope is still in private beta) and
On any phone the Twitter mobile interface and dabr – are great web-based mobile Twitter clients
Always remember, if you @reply someone looking to get their attention or hoping they will follow you, they will likely click through to check out your Twitter page. There are many bots on Twitter so to weed out real/interesting users from bots I always look at a persons most recent posts to see what they are talking about (if their posts are all links to one site, forget it!), I look at the number of people they follow vs the number of people following them. If they are following 1,000 say and have very few followers, it is a sure sign that they are a bot who just auto-followed lots of people.
I also check out what the person says about themselves in the bio (so, if you want people to follow you, be sure to fill in your own bio!) and click to view their website site, if they have one .
If you want people to follow you, then ensure your updates are not protected. Someone coming to your Twitter page and seeing Protected Updates is very unlikely to see any reason to follow you.
Purely a personal preference, but I think it is far better to use your own name on your Twitter account than a handle. It is a matter of personal branding but to my mind, a Twitter account called @JohnDoe tells me more about the user than @stargazr49!
Finally, a photo is also very important on your account, be sure to add one to your profile
BONUS EXTRA TIP!!! – Use your Twitter username everywhere – add it to your email sig, put it on your business cards, leave it in blog comments – don’t spam, just do it where appropriate.

FWIW I’ll be writing many more posts about Twitter best practices, with a special emphasis on Twitter for Sustainability obviously, in the coming weeks and months – stay tuned!

Cross posted from my TomRaftery.com blog

You should follow me on Twitter here

Blogging for social sustainability – the why’s and how’s

February 2, 2011 by Tom Raftery

This is another blog post cross-posted from my Social Sustainability blog

In my first post on Social Sustainability, where I talked about the importance of sharing, I mentioned that I had been thinking of writing a post about blogging – well, here it is!

I know this will be the proverbial “teaching granny to suck eggs” posting but seeing as blogs are such a fundamental tool in your social media armoury, I couldn’t leave them unaddressed. In fact, there are so many things to write about blogs and blogging that I can see many more posts on the topic in my future. This brings me to a question – what aspect of blogging would you like me to write about next?

I’m going to start off though with a quick ‘why blog’ and then a discussion of whether to go for a hosted or a self-hosted blog (and the differences between the two).

I won’t spend too much time on the ‘why blog’ question – I’m assuming if you are reading this it is because you are interested in Social Sustainability – if that is the case, then you probably already know that the primary tool of social media is a blog. I wrote a bunch of posts a few years ago on the advantages of blogging for a business – here’s one to have a firkle through if you are still not convinced (read down through the comments as well to get full value).

On the question of whether to go for a hosted or self-hosted blog, I’m not going to make a recommendation either way – rather, I’ll list their relative advantages and let you decide which is more appropriate for you:

Hosted blogs (like WordPress.com which this blog runs on, and Blogger.com) advantages:

Speed – a hosted blog can be setup in a matter of seconds

Reliability – hosted blogs are very rarely offline (the last time WordPress.com had an outage was in June 2010)

Simplicity – hosted blog providers generally look after hosting, updating, security, spam and malware protection

Branding – hosted blogs now allow you to brand your blog with your own domain name (e.g. no longer tomraftery.wordpress.com, now simply tomraftery.com) and

Price – most hosted blog platforms are free

On the other hand Self-hosted blogs (such as GreenMonk.net)have these advantages:

Flexibility – With your self-hosted blog you can extend the functionality of the blog with themes and plug-ins

Ad free – most hosted blogs will display ads in your blog – with self-hosted, you can go Ad-free, or roll out Ads and benefit from the revenue yourself!

Cheap – although you have to pay for the hosting – there are free blog platforms (such as WordPress.org) you can download to run your blog and

Security – if you can control the country and hoster your blog is hosted with, you run far less risk of falling foul of spurious (or otherwise) take-down notices

One possible suggestion, if you are still undecided, is to start off with a hosted blog. If, after a while, you find the limitations of your hosted blog too frustrating, you can always export all your blog posts and comments and import them into a self-hosted one and go from there.

Either way, happy blogging.

You should follow me on Twitter here:
Photo credit Tom Raftery

Social Sustainability and the importance of sharing – updated

January 31, 2011 by Tom Raftery

I recently resurrected my old Tom Raftery’s Social Media blog and re-branded it Tom Raftery’s Social Sustainability. I will be blogging there from time to time on the intersection of my two passions, Social Media and Sustainability. I’ll cross-post my blog posts from there on this site as well so you can read them on either site.

Here’s my first post from earlier today, titled Social Sustainability and the importance of sharing:

I wondered for a while what to post on first here after the re-branding of the site and the new focus on Social Sustainability.

First I thought about doing a post about blogging seeing as it is one of the most basic building blocks of social media but then I took a step further back and decided to talk about Social Media and Sharing!

Why? Well, sharing of content is essentially the raison d’?tre of Social Media, whether it is sharing it privately behind your corporate firewall, or sharing it with as many people as possible on the public Internet. And that’s really the key thing, isn’t it – you generally want your social media generated content to reach as large an audience, as possible.

So, how do you do this?

There are many strategies you can rollout to try to maximise the reach of your sustainability message – everything from ad campaigns to search engine optimisation – however, one of the less discussed ones that I wanted to mention is the use of Creative Commons licensing.

Flickr All Rights Reserved notice

What is a Creative Commons license?

These are like the opposite of the “All Rights Reserved” notice you often see associated with works online – it is the default copyright on a lot of online content and it means that the owner of the copyright reserves all rights around distribution of the content. Obviously, if you want to get your message to the widest possible audience, you want to be sure it is not licensed as All Rights Reserved.

There are different forms of Creative Commons license – from the Creative Commons 0 – which is the least restrictive and is basically a legal tool for giving content into the public domain, through to the most restrictive Creative Commons license which says people are free to re-distribute your works as long as they 1) give you attribution, 2) share the content under a similar license and 3) do not use it for commercial purposes, and various shades of licenses in between.

So, any sites you are creating content on, be sure that you have made it clear to people that they are free to re-distribute your content for you on other sites by displaying the Creative Commons logo along with your content.

So, why the Flickr Advanced Search screenshot above?

Well, when I’m writing blog posts I like to include images to make them look more presentable, however, I don’t want to potentially fall foul of copyright restrictions. Luckily the Flickr Advance Search page allows you to restrict your search to only Creative Commons licensed images. The obvious corollary of this is that if you want to increase the viewership of your images (or any other content, including blog posts, videos, audio, etc.), apply a Creative Commons license to it.

By the way, if you are wondering how to go about getting a Creative Commons License for your content – head on over to the License Your Work page on the Creative Commons site and follow the instructions there.

And if you are looking for the Creative Commons license associated with this article, see the bottom of the right-hand side sidebar.

UPDATE – Al Jazeera created a Creative Commons site for distribution of their news. When the uprising broke out in Egypt recently, traffic on Al Jazeera’s site went up by 2,500%

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Photo credit Tom Raftery