FabianPattberg.com

I guess most of you are also members of Facebook and I assume you are also interested in Sustainability and CSR.  The question I have pondered on during the last few weeks is whether Facebook is actually a good platform for the Sustainability / CSR field. I am convinced that LinkedIn and Twitter are but what about Facebook?

These are the positives, negatives and the unknown aspects of Facebook and Sustainability/CSR from my point of view.

Positives

• Facebook is a huge platform. Here are some stats on Facebook’s reach. What an amazing place for potentially promoting Sustainability / CSR. A recent example is the Robin Hood Tax group which has amassed over 70.000+ members within days.
• Facebook offers an amazing potential reach for causes or people with common interests. This is the a link to a recent success story of a London Group. Really interesting. Imagine this could be a Sustainability / CSR group next time.
• It is free of charge with all sorts of ways to connect to friends, family, likeminded people and interesting Sustainability / CSR information.
• Important discussions and topics are being shared and discussed. A very promising breeding ground for potential new ways of stakeholder engagement, etc.
• Great technology and amazing interactivity features that can only help visualize and expose certain aspects of Sustainability / CSR in a positive way.

Negatives

• What about my privacy? Are the new privacy settings really working? Will these new rules be enough for everyone to feel safe while sharing something on Facebook?
• From a company point of view it can be said that the barriers of entry for companies on Facebook are still to high (Just look at the revenues Facebook is making from ads…not much in comparison to how big they are). Could this be a sign that the consumer is disinterested in the corporate world on Facebook? How can a company run a Facebook campaign and properly tap into the vast stakeholder feedback that it could offer?

The unknown Facebook factor for Sustainability / CSR

Will Facebook also be a platform for promoting Sustainability / CSR or help us be more sustainable? Sometimes it seems to me that the things we do on Facebook such as joining a group or becoming a fan of something/ omeone is just too superficial. Where is the use in it?

In summary
I do not think we could imagine a world without Facebook now but this is not true for the Sustainability / CSR field. Currently there are different platforms that are more significant. And not Facebook.

So the questions is: Isn’t Facebook really just a platform for connecting with your friends and family or will it transform into something different over time? Something more complex….. Mark Zuckerberg definitely things so.
For the Sustainability / CSR field, Facebook still needs to evolve in order to be more accessible. Maybe is this something the Facebook teams are currently working on. Who knows…………

This post is intended to provide you with some background on how I work in my business. In my business I am focusing on three communication places to build my business network, stay in touch with friends and to gather and share information. This is what I call my Sustainability Communication Triangle.

My Sustainability Communication Triangle

Twitter
My Twitter user account (twitter.com/FabianPattberg) is important to me because it is a very simple but effective tool to share and gather interesting information on sustainability topics. It will also enable you or your organization to connect to a large audience of likeminded people from across the globe interested in sustainability topics. This is the key tool for information for me at the moment.

FabianPattberg.com
This is my blog (Where you are currently reading this post). I use this blog to share my thoughts, expertise and some interesting news and information on Sustainability topics. It is important to me that my posts are helpful and interesting to read. Another purpose of the website is to provide interesting resources on Sustainability / CSR topics and for everyone to have a first impression of who I am, what I am doing and how I work.

SustainabilityForum.com
The SustainabilityForum.com is the place where the current 3500+ members are sharing information on a wide range of sustainability topics. We have a place for discussion, Sustainability news, blogs and the events. I am personally using this website to build a global community and information resource for Sustainability professionals and all people interested in Sustainability. This is the website I started out with and I will continue to expand the range of information presented on the website.

All three Websites Serve a Clear Purpose
It is also important to state that all three places are equally important to me. All serve a specific and clear purpose that in the end reinforce each other so that I can be sure to know what is happening in the Sustainability world and that I am providing the relevant and important information for all that are interested in Sustainability.

Getting to your sustainability business triangle
So how do you get to your business triangle? This is a crucial aspect to your productivity on the net and it very much depends where your individual focus in the sustainability field lies. I am using this triangle approach but you will be focusing on different ways of connecting to people, your business and anyone else really.

For you it might be just one network or as many as ten networks. It all depends on how you are able to be present in these networks to participate and make a contribution.

Just ask yourself this simple question: “What networks are important to me?” The answer should come very natural to you. Then you will know what you need to focus on and where to put your effort into 100%.

So let me know whether you have a „business triangle“ as well or whether this is something new to you? All feedback is as always very welcome.

Social Media is redefining the way everyone engages with his or her friends, colleagues, family or stakeholders in general. It is revolutionary really. This is a great video with some interesting facts and figures to back this up.

Thanks Josh for pointing me to this video.

This is a great video from TED again. This time on Twitter and social media in general.

Definitely worth a look that is why I wanted to share this with everyone. And a big thank you for David and Perrine for pointing me to this very interesting video.

The conference „The Responsible Business Summit“ is currently happening in London (Today and tomorrow).

Why is that of interest?

Well because a lot of people from all across the globe have a chance to meet up, network, do/participate in workshops and give/listen to interesting speeches. All in all very useful. But the problem with this is that the admission fees are very high and for people without a large corporate background (like most people) not affordable.

The new development in my opinion is that non participants of the conference (such as myself) now can get a good insight of what is going on by following updates of conference participants via Twitter.

Here are two people and the events organizer that are well worth following to get interesting updates from this conference today and tomorrow:

David: http://twitter.com/davidcoethica

Aaron: http://twitter.com/AaronQFu

Ethical Corporation: http://twitter.com/ethical_corp

This is the new age of Sustainability conferences and technology and social media can help bring Sustainability to the next level by bringing more and more people together. This is a good sign.

This is the third part of our domain name series started two weeks ago.

Today I would like to provide an overview of the different domain extensions one can choose from, what I believe are the best uses of these domain extensions and what domain extensions should be important to you if you want to start a website.

The Leader Of The Pack “.com”
This is by far the most popular extension and was originally intended to be the domain extension for commercial business in the US. The .com is now the ultimate extension to have and is worth considerably more then others. If you have the choice always choose a .com.

The Second Tier. The “.net” and “.org”
.net and .org are at the moment really secondary domain extensions unfortunately. This is due to the .com boom over the last 10 years. The .net was intended to be a domain extension for networks and is often used by IT people. The .org was intended for an organisation is general. The .org is now mostly preferred by charitable organisations, NGOs and websites with a community flair and purpose. I really like the .net and .org and have a lot of these names in my portfolio but these extensions will never be as popular as the .com unfortunately.

The Newcomers’ .info, .biz and many others
These are the up and coming extensions that are meant to be making it easier for the ever growing internet community to be to more topic specific. .info is meant to be for information websites, .biz for businesses and their corporate websites. There are a lot more of these new extensions out there but I believe only the .info and .biz will be popular in the next 5-10 years time.

Country Specific Domain Extensions
Then there are the country specific extensions like .us, .co.uk and .de only to name three of them. These are domain extensions that are great if you have a German only website (.de) for example or if you are primarily doing business in the UK (co.uk). The only danger with these country specific domain extensions is that they are not very likely to have a global appeal and therefore will in the long run limit your general brandability across the web. This is my opinion only of course and I am sure that there are examples that can prove me wrong.

All in all it fair to say that the internet user now has a lot of different domain extensions to choose from.
My advice is this. If you have .com name then this should be your first choice. The .net is great for social media and technology. The .org is great for the whole business around green topics and sustainability. If you have not been able to get the name you wish as a .com, .net or .org then I would go with an .info or .biz. If you choose to be country specific in terms of your business outreach then a country specific extension as mentioned above might suit you.

But stay away from all the others. All of these new extensions are just ways to get your money out of he pockets nothing more.

Well here we are with the August and wedding mania finished. We had a great wedding on Friday but I am very happy that the weddings are over now. Here are some pictures. The one on the right titled “The Fabulous Four” includes and three of my best friends. From the left, Mathias, Stefan (the groom), Torsten and myself.

Is she really coming?  The Fabulous Four  The Party

But now it is back to work and I have a busy week ahead. This week I have the luxury to have 5 full working days with no real travelling involved.  I will have blog posts on Social Media and CSR coming up this week. So stay tuned for updates.

One of the lasting trends in social media in my opinion is the use of Twitter as a networking tool. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Why is that? Well because through Twitter you can easily build and increase your network, connect to friends and colleagues and last but not least drive visitors to your site. Here are some tips on how I use Twitter.

This is how I use Twitter.

• I provide useful and short information on the profile page. Do not write more then 4 lines in the profile. Be short and sweet.
• Have a nice and friendly picture of you. Comic avatars are nice but you need to do all you can to bridge the gap of anonymity as best as possible. So use a picture of yourself if possible.
• Either be totally professional or crazy in the look and feel of your Twitter profile. In my opinion nothing in between works. I have chosen to focus on the professional look. Meaning nothing fancy and information first. Some others like the cool look like Jake Marsh and others. You decide.
• Always provide daily updates on what you are doing. Twitter is all about continuous updates. No matter how unimportant for you. Your followers want to know what you are up to. So let them participate.
• Try to provide something that is of value to your followers. Provide a comment ot a news story, news links, etc. But make sure to always include a link to the story you comment on.
• Use the TinyURL format for links. This makes it easier for readers to follow you links and it is a lot better to look at.
• When you are starting of try to find Twitter users that are in the similar area of work as you. Then follow them. This will help you to get noticed and get more
• If you are looking to for users that have updates that include the topics you are interested then the best way to go forward would be to use the Twitter search function at http://search.twitter.com. This is a really useful tool. I use it a lot.

That is it for now. Please let me know whether you have any other ways on how to use Twitter. I am open to all further ideas.

Fabian on Twitter

Today I am starting a new topic area called „Social Media“. I have also added a new category with the same title. The term and concept of social media is becoming more and more popular month by month it seems and I have been caught by the bug I guess as well.
This is what Wikipedia has to say about social media: “Social Media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio”.
Social media can take many different forms. The most known I guess are forums, blogs, wikis, pictures, videos and podcasts. These are all very important but different communication tools for an individual and organisations.

Today I would like to provide with a little bit more information on the so called microblogs.

I have only used microblogs  or did microblogging for 3 months now but I am really fascinated by it. Here are the microblogging websites I have come across so far (There are more so please fell free to suggest others):

Twitter – The current market leader in microblogging
Jaiku – Bought by Goggle and will make a big impact once registrations are open again.
Pownce – Similar to Twitter but with the main difference that you are able to show your other profiles from Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and can upload files as attachments.
Plurk – The new kid on the block. We will see how it develops.

I just signed up for Pownce and currently testing it whether this is a useful application or not. My experience so far has clearly favoured Twitter due to its simplicity, overfriendliness and ability to easily connect with likeminded people from across the globe.

I will keep everyone updated on the Pownce adventure.

Fabian