In the past several weeks, I have mainly been focusing on how environmentalists have been using the digital medium to promote awareness and action. There are always two sides to a coin however. Do a search today on the environment or global warming, and websites like Climate Depot or CFact, claiming to provide a “balanced view” on the hype of environmentalism, will pop up as well. Perhaps environmentalists have been doing such a great job with promoting their cause through online petitions, social media, and mass e-mailings to promote changes in attitudes and even governmental policies that many businesses feel threatened and are forced into action using the very same online techniques to promote environmental awareness.
Thanks to the Internet, a quick search will reveal that I am not jumping to conclusions on who the real sponsors of such sites trivializing the environment are. According to Wikipedia, ClimatDepot.com is funded largely by the “Committee for a Better Tomorrow, a nonprofit in Washington that advocates for free-market solutions to environmental issues,” which in turn receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from oil giant ExxonMobil. About a third of their funding comes from other sources which they will not reveal (See Wikipedia article).
At any rate, the aim of such sites like ClimateDepot.com or CFact.org, to put it frankly, is to neutralize the efforts of green groups, often by making them sound like cult groups or freaky religious movements. ClimateDepot.com's online campaign for example, involves a Facebook page with almost 500 fans, a twitter feed to over 800 followers, and a website with over 168,000 visitors monthly. Their Facebook and website pages aggregate news stories, pictures, charts and graphs, links, exchanges of opinions from members, and other call-to-action features like e-mail sign-up and an online petition to provide “evidence” and a compelling narrative in the case against environmentalism. With the viral effect of social media and the ease with which provocative new stories and videos can be emailed and shared online, I have no doubt their statistics and fan base are growing rapidly.
Another interesting case I want to point out today is the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf area. According to This article from Social Media for Life, BP’s PR department has bought up keywords in both Google and Yahoo for dummy profiles in social media like Facebook and other online sites to “diffuse” the magnitude of their catastrophic errors that led to the massive spill. See this picture to get a better idea of their shenanigans. George from Social Media for Life however, has a fabulously easy solution for us to mitigate this problem. He suggests in the video posted below, that concerned citizens can create a social media “bait ball” – essentially making use of social media like Youtube, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. to create as many blogs, videos, and pictures with strategic headings and titles similar to BP’s dummy sites to impact search engine searches. The end result is if someone searches in Google for something like “BP Oil Spill” – they won’t just get positive PR dummy sites from BP; the searches will be “balanced out” with search results to blogs, pictures, and videos that give the other side of the story as well.
While the digital media have largely been helpful for the environmental cause, it is most unfortunate that “the other side” can so easily harness its power for their own agendas. While some of us might see through their motives, many might find their messages both easy and tempting to believe. After all, who wants to change our habits? It takes effort to recycle and watch what we do and use. For those of us running businesses, going green involves being more vigilant about our business practices, and sometimes perhaps even not selling certain lucrative products that are environmental hazards. In the short run, we might make fewer profits, but are the repercussions in the long run worth the small profits we save today?
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