Food Inc 'Information wants to be free'

Expose on the food industry... Generally in advertising we work on the principle of above and below the line.  A new idea that I have been thinking about is in front of and behind the line.  The vertical line being the inside world and the outside world of the company.  At the moment many companies seem to think its ok to have very different behaviour on the two sides which results in this kind of damaging revelations.  What used to be the exception is now the rule in this area i.e if there is something to be exposed then the chances are that it will - seems like this needs a law to explain it.  I could call it 'Davidslaw'... but then I'd have to spend some time on the maths to actually prove it.  Until then perhaps the 'information wants to be free,' principle will suffice if you use it in the liberty sense rather than the economic one.  Step-up an agency that works in front of and behind the line! 

Employees on the loose…

If you believe the Clue Train Manifesto (which I do) then you could start to think that the established brand marketing methods are a stop-gap.  A space opened up when the actors of the small intimate market places of history were dissipated into different places and even time zones by mass culture.  Advertising filled the void and created a semblance of contact even though it was not the kind of personal interaction that typified the old market place. In the mean time we forgot that market places are always just conversations between people. But now we have the internet to help us remember and recently it seems to be bubbling over a little bit. This spirit is probably most alive through the staff in technology companies where a culture of open hyperlinked conversations based on home made intranets and wikis is the norm. But just recently since twitter has been around and since facebook started being used in a bit more of a blog-like way than a myspace way, I have noticed that quite a few people from the big agency group I work in are connected and exchanging interesting stuff in a new way. Many are even posting stuff about the clients they are working on becoming a bit of a media channel in their own right. Whether companies see this as a scary prospect or an untapped opportunity it’s not going to go away. The employees are on the loose! 

Mapping behaviour change e.g. Zappos

This is a mapping application created by Zappos using google maps.  Every time someone buys a product the model flashes up on the map over the place where it was bought.  Wouldn't it be good to see something similar for carbon savings.  Every time a person or a company manages to reduce their energy use or meets a target they get a little credit through a tag on the map.  Zoom in further and you would be able to see who is making a difference on your street or your highstreet.  If sustainability is about behaviour change its worth remembering that people definitely start to act differently when they are in front of the eyes of the others.  A few people have been suggesting this to google and they have said that people should do it themselves for now.  Lets hope they have something up their sleeve.  After all lets face it the business model couldn't be that hard to crack!  

What would you say to Eric Schmidt?

Google fascinates me and I think they and companies like them could be hugely influential and facilitating the solutions to big issues for lots of reasons...
 
1 - They are listening and have cash to burn  
2- They get seem to get it 
3- They are in future making business 

Also they are responsible for organizing the worlds information and putting people in touch with each other and the things that they need which is an influential position to be in. Plus somebody I know says that they might actually get to speak to the boss man himself so it got me thinking.

Thought 1 - Groogle

The neutrality of Google search results is one of the companies most precious assets but what if users wanted to initiate their own filters so that the results were ordered based on sustainability scores. This is already possible for things like site origins i.e. the 'UK site only' function.  Also though most people do not use it you can filter results by using the - sign which means AND NOT whatever word you want to filter out. What if you could enter -unsustainable. Perhaps even using some kind of lever that could make the criteria stricter when desired. This would obviously only be relevant for company listings within all of the other results. It could also be switched on for the paid links as well so the user can select what kind of ads they wanted to see.  This would be quite a big project and would mean that sites would need to enter the results of some kind of scorecard in a way that could be picked up by the google algorithm. This would need to be supported by some kind of auditing program to ensure that this was being done properly and fairly.  Hopefully then there would come a time when the green filtered search engine overtook the unfiltered search engine and became the new norm.