Archive for September, 2010

We are very excited to announce the launch of Sustainabletrip.org. For the last four months, we’ve been working with our partner, the Rainforest Alliance, to develop this new website and a marketing strategy for it too. Businesses listed on Sustainabletrip.org are verified by the Rainforest Alliance and it’s a great way to support businesses that care about the environment. And as our founder James Boyce writes in his blog post on The Huffington Post, by choosing a hotel that’s “committed to sustainability, we’re doing more than taking a break from life, we’re helping to sustain it.”

The Senate may be dragging it’s feet when it comes to climate change, but you don’t have to. The Marion Institute’s Connecting for Change conference in New Bedford, MA on October 22-24 is the perfect opportunity for people to come together and make a difference in this world. Read Common Sense NMS founder James Boyce’s newest blog here about the conference, and how you can save $75 by purchasing your tickets before Saturday.

Our friend at (RED) Chrysi Philalithes, has a great new post up over at Huffington Post today on today being Social Good Day so read, learn more and do some good today. Here’s a quote from her post. “Today, Thursday September 23rd is #SocialGood Day. (RED) has partnered with Mashable to encourage people to meet up and discuss how social media can be used for social good. We’re interested in unleashing fresh thinking around how social media can raise awareness and create solutions for the social issues they care about. And we’re also asking people to think about how social media can be used to help spread the message that we can eliminate mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS.” Read the rest at Huffington Post here.

Ever start doing a jigsaw puzzle, know you have all the pieces but can’t quite seem to get them to look like the quaint, snow covered cottage photo on the box? This is how Nathan Havey describes the process to creating a more sustainable world in his newest Huffington Post blog, You Are The Key Puzzle Piece. The Marion Institute’s Connecting for Change conference is a place where all of those pieces come together. Be sure to check out Nathan’s blog here, and learn more about the Connecting for Change conference here.

Our partners at NRDC Action Fund are always on top of what’s happening in Washington with the latest news on climate change and environmental politics. In this new piece they report on what the GOP has in store for the environment if they take back the House this November.

As part of UN Week our friends (and client) over at Product (RED) are teaming up with Mashable to bring the world the first ever Social Good Day. This isn’t just your run of the mill do-gooder event either. All over the world people are encouraged to come together and share ideas, collaborate, and put into action ways that we can all make the world a better place using the tools of social media. Have some great ideas? Want to change the world? Then this event is for you. Check out the events in your city and if there isn’t an event already planned this is your time to step up to the plate and get one started. Happy Social Gooding!

Today, while New Hampshire (among other states) holds their primary election, the Live Free or Die Alliance is working hard to provide people with all-natural election information that is essential to consume regularly for a well-balanced perspective at the polls. The secret ingredient to this “Democracy Diet” is the Live Free or Die Alliance’s Election Central, where they have dug up non-partisan information on ALL of New Hampshire’s candidates. Read more about this cleanse in Common Sense NMS founder, James Boyce’s newest blog, The Democracy Diet.

Our partner Vanity Fair is reporting in from the Toronto Film Festival on all the amazing movies that are being screened there and continually posting on VF.com and on Facebook with reviews of movies ranging from “Buried” to “Black Swan.” If you are a movie buff, we’d highly suggest you ‘like’ Vanity Fair on Facebook and stay on top of the reviews (there are already some great ones up and more to come.)

Since 2006, we have been advising our partners on how to use Facebook. Back then, one of the first things we discovered working on Bill Richardson’s Presidential Campaign was we could use the targeting on the ads to try and build crowds in say Waterloo Iowa for events. It was a lot of work, but we were either the first, or one of the first groups, to use Facebook social ads for political campaigns in that manner. (For the record, today, there are over 40,000 people over the age of 18 who live within 50 miles of Waterloo who are on Facebook. We think that’s a lot.) Today, as we start to work with two new partners, Vanity Fair and Gay Men’s Health Crisis,  our partners have just under 1,000,000 fans that we work with (or techically ‘likers’ which we don’t know what that means either.) So it’s amazing to think that while our partners are touching almost 1,000,000 people, there are now over 139,000,000 more Americans on Facebook we have yet to catch up with. Time to get back to work.

Common Sense NMS is currently working with the Marion Institute’s Executive Director, Desa VanLaarhoven on a new blogging strategy that began today. For her first venture into the blogosphere, Desa has written a piece highlighting the Marion Institute’s upcoming Connecting for Change conference that seeks to spread awareness of the event as well as educate on the need to come together for a promising future. Check out her blog on the Connecting for Change website here.