Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability, and Cause Marketing News.

3BL Media Acquires Justmeans - Combining Multi-Channel Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Sustainability News and Distribution Networks

3BL Media announced today it has completed the acquisition of Justmeans, an established CSR news distribution platform and online community of sustainable business practitioners. The combination of these two services will result in unrivaled distribution and syndication of CSR blogs, press releases, videos, reports and other content. In conjunction with advanced CSR social media management and measurement tools and an influential network of sustainable business practitioners, the company will offer unparalleled exposure for CSR, sustainability and cause news and content.

Founded in 2008, Justmeans’ early success came from having built the largest online community of sustainable business practitioners worldwide. Its focus on technology development has resulted in a platform that enables the dissemination and sharing of a variety of CSR and sustainability messages with comprehensive analytics.

Martin Smith, 3BL Media’s newly appointed Chairman stated, “As the CSR and sustainability market space is maturing, it is natural for consolidation to occur. This acquisition is one of a number of partnership and acquisitions that 3BL Media will be announcing.” Mr. Smith is also the Founder of StartingBloc, a social enterprise that educates and connects emerging leaders to drive social innovation across sectors.

3BL Media, founded in 2009 by former executive management from press release distribution company CSRwire, provides a platform and service for organizations to better reach and engage with stakeholders.

“The advent of social media and Web 2.0 provided new challenges to traditional distribution services. 3BL Media’s model of unlimited distribution of blogs, press releases, videos and other content, through both traditional and social media channels provides the best opportunity for impact, influence and reach,” says Greg Schneider, CEO of 3BL Media.

Some highlights from the combined company include:

More than 200,000 email news subscribers
Integration with affiliates, aggregators, research databases and news portals
Social media management, distribution and measurement tools
Comparative, quantitative, and influence analytics

The increase in the number of organizations reporting about CSR and sustainability initiatives and performance has resulted in the rapid growth of CSR and sustainability-focused content. The acquisition of Justmeans by 3BL Media will provide companies and organizations with the most advanced tools to strategically package, distribute and measure their CSR news and content.

Follow 3BL Media on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin

Follow Justmeans on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin

New York-based NGO, Media Impact is pleased to announce the launch of its Entertainment-Education Fellows program.

New York-based NGO, Media Impact is pleased to announce the launch of its Entertainment-Education Fellows program. This program, established in association with the Social Justice Initiative (SJI), Department of Communication, University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), is designed to provide communications students in the United States hands on experience while assisting in the development and implementation of Entertainment-Education programs in communities around the world. Entertainment-Education (E-E) is the incorporation of critical social messaging into entertaining media formats that simultaneously educate and amuse audiences.

In May, 2011, Hilary Trudell, a Master’s student at the Clinton School of Public Service (CSPS) at the University of Arkansas, became the program’s third official fellow, following in the footsteps of CSPC students, Judy Watts and Sarah Leer. Trudell is spending the summer integrating a school-based curriculum into the 12-country My Island-My Community program, scheduled to launch across the Caribbean this summer, as part of her summer International Public Service Projects (IPSP). She was officially inducted in a ceremony in New York on May 10, 2011.

Media Impact broached the idea of the E-E Fellows program with E-E scholar and professor, Arvind Singhal, who directs UTEP’s SJI, is appointed as William J. Clinton Distinguished Fellow at CSPS, and is a Media Impact Board Member. The E-E fellows program began last summer with two other CSPS students, Sarah Leer and Judy Watts, who spent ten weeks in St. Lucia assisting with the development of a theater component and program evaluation plan for the initial stages of the My Island-My Community program.

My Island – My Community was launched by more than 30 regional and national partners, including PCI-Media Impact, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, GEF SGP, implemented by UNDP, USAID and The Nature Conservancy in 2010. This regional initiative will employ a multi-pronged communication approach – regional radio serial drama, national talk shows and local My Community Campaigns – to mobilize communities around the Caribbean to improve community-based adaptation to climate change, biodiversity conservation, population, social and health priorities.

Last summer, an initial two-week regional workshop and the ten week service project provided Sarah and Judy the opportunity to apply E-E, social change communications to on-the-ground programs effecting wide-spread social change. For Judy, the project reinvigorated her belief that “It’s not just the great stories that entertain us…we learn a lot about ourselves as well. Great story tellers offer us the freedom to think about concepts and norms and allow us to rewrite our own norms.”

In addition to enjoying their summer in the Caribbean, Sarah and Judy learned valuable lessons about their future work in public service. Sarah summarized their learning concisely in her reflection for other students: “Do what you can, serve while you can, but know that you can only do so much. Take your knowledge of Year One in the Clinton School and put it into practice, the best you know how. Then take the local knowledge and let it revise, sharpen, and improve your knowledge.”

For 25 years, Media Impact has trained partners around the world to use Entertainment-Education to address critical social and environmental issues in their communities. Entertainment-Education (E-E) incorporates vital information into entertaining media programs to simultaneously educate and amuse audiences. The non-profit organization has helped produce more than 100 such programs to address critical health and environmental issues and empower communities.

For more information on UTEP’s Social Justice Initiative:

http://academics.utep.edu/Default.aspx?tabid=63068

To read more about Judy Watt’s experience with Media Impact, read her blog at:http://judysaysnowomanisanisland.blogspot.com/

To read more about Sarah Leer’s experience with Media Impact, read her blog at:http://sarahisonthelucia.blogspot.com/

Causecast Nonprofit Newsletter: Win an iPad 2 & $250

Causecast Nonprofit Referral Sweepstakes

Participate in Causecast’s summer nonprofit membership drive! Refer a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization to Causecast and you could be the lucky winner of an iPad 2 and $250 American Express gift card. Two runners up will receive $100 and $50 American Express gift cards.

Generate your personal referral link through Causecast's referral page and send out an email, tweet or post to your contacts. Once a nonprofit organization signs up via your link, you will be credited for this referral!

The sweepstakes has begun and ends on July 29th.

Enter the Sweepstakes Now! >>

3BL Media and Triple Pundit announce "Podium"

3BL Media, the leading distributor of corporate social responsibility, sustainability and cause marketing news and content and Triple Pundit (3P) the leading online conversation on sustainable business announced a new distribution service and partnership to provide greater exposure to CSR press releases, news and content.

Podium, created by Triple Pundit, provides organizations with an opportunity to bring exposure to their press releases, blogs, multimedia and other content through presentation to the Triple Pundit audience of over 160,000 sustainability decision makers on TriplePundit.com and through components of 3BL Media’s distribution network. The service is designed for organizations with periodic CSR messaging that are looking for an alternative to traditional press release distribution services. Existing and new 3BL Media and Triple Pundit users will also benefit from this partnership and additional exposure it provides.

Let's Use Social Media to Demand that Funds be Reallocated from War to Saving the Planet

Filmmaker Robert Greenwald estimates that we're currently "wasting $2 billion a week on a senseless war' in Afghanistan. And that doesn't include the billions still being spent to maintain a "noncombatant' force in Iraq, or those million-dollar missiles we've been firing at targets in Libya.

Original Article: http://3blmedia.com/theCSRfeed/Sustainable-Brands-2011-conference-Monterey-CA

CSR Minute: The 50 Top Socially Responsible Corporations in Canada

Corporate Social Responsibility News: Maclean's and Jantzi-Sustainalytics Present "50 Top Socially Responsible Corporations in Canada" List; Just Cause Awards Given Out at Promax BDA Summit.

This CSR Minute is brought to you by Media Impact. Empowering communities worldwide to inspire enduring change through creative storytelling. For more information visit: http://mediaimpact.org/

Watch this and other CSR Minute podcasts: http://3blmedia.com/3bltv

“We Spend 19% of Our Money On Cars”

Get your attention? I know it got mine.

That is the beauty of Pechakucha: 20 seconds per slide and only 20 slides is just 400 seconds to tell your story. Grab the audience’s attention early, move quickly, and be concise, and you will be successful.

Brian Malarkey, author of the “We spend 19% of our money on cars” quote, spent 400 seconds (6:40) making the case for a better approach to energy consumption. He feels that the future will require us to explore and support alternative transportation options, not just rely on cars.

Brian was among eight presenters who answered the question, “What does it mean to be a sustainable city?” as part of a themed Pechakucha (PK) event held in Herman Miller’s Houston showroom. From the built environment, to conserving the natural environment, to sustainability as a public-policy issue, everyone delivered a unique perspective on the theme

Sustainability is an important topic for Houston as it challenges itself to become a truly sustainable city. And for Herman Miller as well, as we move closer to our goal of zero waste by 2020.

Checkout Pechakucha’s website to find a PK near you, and for information on starting your own event.

Photo: Ian Johnston

The Top 10 Cause Marketing Tweeters You Should Follow

A group of us from Waggener Edstrom Worldwide are attending the Cause Marketing Forum’s annualconference this week in Chicago. This is my fifth year attending this fantastic conference and I am really excited to connect with friends, former colleagues and the many industry experts that are always in attendance. I will be representing the WE Social Innovation Practice and at 3pm CT on Thursday June 2^nd, my colleague, Suzanne Zurn and I will be hosting a session called “Cause Attention: Using Social Media to Identify, Influence and Engage.” Suzanne is a digital advocacy expert and has tons of awesome experience and best practices to share on how to engage audiences online to take action. If you are at the conference, we hope you will join us. If you can’t make it, we will be posting our presentation on the Waggener EdstromSlideshare channel after the session.

To get you excited about the content we are going to cover in our presentation, we want to share with you a sneak preview of the top ten Twitter influencers in the cause marketing landscape. The reason we are sharing this is because I am always aggressively looking for new people to follow on Twitter as I head to events. I want to find people who I can learn from who are connected to even more people I can learn from. That is one of the great powers of Twitter.

With a specific subject matter like Cause Marketing, however, people who write on the subject typically don’t have the mass following of a celebrity like Ashton Kutcher. On Twitter, I find time and time again, that the number of followers someone has collected does not always have a direct correlation to their ability to create thought provoking content (no offense to AshtonJ). For this reason, I turned to Waggener Edstrom’s proprietary Influence Ranking tool that helps organizations learn which media and individuals exert the greatest influence on their brand or cause. The tool rates Twitter handles against five important variables:

Reach is an indicator of the size of the audience for a particular influencer, outlet or content producer. Measures of reach might include: circulation, unique visitors per month, followers, friends or views.
Amplification measures the amount of sharing of an influencer or outlet’s content via social media channels. Measures might include: linking to blogs, Twitter or Facebook, retweets or presence on Digg, Reddit, Delicious or other social bookmarking tools.
The amount of dialogue with the audience is shown through the Engagement score. Measures for Engagement might include: on-site comments, comments on social bookmarking sites, and replies.
The relevance of the influencer or outlet’s content is captured in Content Relevance. Measures might include: frequency of category or brand mentions, depth of category or brand mentions.
The Audience score measures relevance to a list of target audiences for the particular brand or campaign. Primary research results or content analysis are used to rate audience relevance.

So…without further ado, we present to you the Top 10 Twitter handles in the Cause Marketing landscape you should be following to stay abreast of the latest industry news and best practices:

Beth Kanter - @kanter
Cindy Esposito – @CJ_Esposito
Causecast.org – @CAUSECAST
AOL 365 – @AOL365
Joe Waters – @joewaters
Noland Hoshino – @NolandHoshino
Kids in a Groove – @KidsGroove
David Hessekiel – @DaveCause
Seema Bhende – @seemabhende
CSIC at Georgetown – @GeorgetownCSIC

I must confess that I was incredibly humbled to be a part of this amazing list of cause marketing influencers and made our Insight and Analytics team conduct the research two times to confirm the data was accurate! They were able to explain to me that my score was strong given the engagement, content relevance, and amplification of my tweets in cause marketing.

I look forward to seeing many of the folks on this list at the conference! And for those of you not attending, be sure to follow the handles above and #CMF11 to keep abreast of the dialogue from the event.

Volcom and Kid Creature Team Up to Support Great Strides Walk

(download)

Volcom and Kid Creature were on hand to give away goodies and sign custom, hand-screened posters and limited edition, event tees. The effort was a launch of the upcoming collaboration between Kid Creature and Volcom's Give Back Series to support CF's Pipeline to a Cure; a program where patients with cystic fibrosis are taken surfing.

Visit Volcom's New Future Blog at www.volcom.com/newfuture to learn more.

Live Concerts Get Greener

I try to avoid hyperbole, but I truly believe music is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. It touches people on a deep, emotional level transcending differences in language, culture, political views and socio-economic status.

Even with his scientifically-focused mind, Albert Einstein understood and appreciated the value music brings to our lives when he observed, “If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. … I get most joy in life out of music.”

Throughout the ages, music has helped humankind express our passions, hopes and dreams. On occasion, music has even caused us to act on a particular issue, with those in the industry often leading the charge. Remember 1985’s “We Are the World?”

In the 1970s, we began to hear more songs about the environment like “Mercy, Mercy Me” by Marvin Gaye and “Don’t Go Near the Water” by Johnny Cash. Fast forward to 2011 and it seems the number of recording artists who have jumped on the eco-friendly band wagon has grown considerably.

Live Nation Entertainment, the world’s leading live entertainment company representing more than 250 artists, has taken note, which is why they contacted UPS to help their artists find more environmentally responsible ways to manage their concert tours. After several discussions betweenLive Nation and our operations, customer solutions and sustainability teams, the UPS sustainable touring logistics program was born.

As part of the program, UPS will work with each artist to measure their existing transportation CO2 output. We’ll then take that data to develop a comprehensive, customized plan outlining specific strategies to reduce emissions and waste while also providing the speed and reliability they need.

This is not unlike what UPS already is doing for other high-stakes customers that require complex logistical solutions, such as the healthcare and high-tech industries. While transportation is the foundation of logistics, it’s more than just moving things from one place to another. Ultimately, it’s about providing the right solutions for our customers so they can focus on what they do best – in this case, bringing live music to the world.

You can read more about this partnership from Billboard, Digital Music News and GreenBiz.