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(from eWEEK Europe UK)

A conference on sustainability in Dubai might sound as sensible as a Gamblers Anonymous convention in Las Vegas. But that is where I found myself last week courtesy of HP.

Unless you’ve been living on Mars – in which case you’d be at home in Dubai – you already know the city is not a very sustainable place. Air-conditioning isn’t so much a luxury as a life-support mechanism given that temperatures in the summer regularly top 40 degrees if not 50 Centigrade.

Gleaming taxis shuttle you between space-station-like hotels,  so walking is not really an option. In fact holding your breath and dashing from vehicle to building is a must to avoid the hostile atmosphere.

And to top it all, Dubai also has a snow dome. Yes, a snow dome in the desert. It doesn’t get much more unsustainable than that.

To be fair, the actual event (entitled the HP Executive Energy Conference) covered energy rather than sustainability, so I suppose Dubai makes sense from that perspective – although since its own reserves of oil have dwindled, Dubai has moved to an obsession with building.

But as I heard from a local, most of the occupants of the myriad skyscrapers are people building other skyscrapers. Draw your own conclusions on sustainability from that one.

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

(From BusinessGreen.com)

Notorious American comedian Bill Hicks once famously invited members of his audience who admitted to working in marketing to kill themselves. Whether the controversial stand-up would have taken a more sympathetic view of marketing professionals who ply their trade pushing sustainable products is doubtful, but maybe he could have been convinced to stop short of advocating suicide.

Extremist comedians aside, it is probably fair to say that the majority of consumers are more well disposed to products or services that hold some societal or environmental worth. A poll by European polling outfit Eurobarometer in 2009 revealed that the majority of Europeans, 83 per cent, said the impact of a product on the environment played an important part in their purchasing decisions. Add in the potential for the marketing team concerned to actually believe in the green product they are selling, and sustainable campaigns should be a doddle.

Unfortunately, sustainability is a uniquely tricky concept to take to market.

As incredible as it sounds, some corporate marketing departments have actually been guilty of making unwarranted and even false green claims. As a result, the public’s positive disposition towards environmental messaging has been hijacked by the spectre of greenwash in recent years. Reacting to this growing tide of exaggeration, and in some cases explicit untruths, bodies such as the Advertising Standards Authority have taken action against numerous companies and even government departments.

The same Eurobarometer survey last year also showed that Europeans were divided about the claims made about sustainable products with about 49 per cent saying they trusted claims but 48 per cent stating the precise opposite.

Ensuring marketing and communication campaigns get the sustainable message across without falling foul of increasingly exasperated regulators means that the whole notion of green messaging has become a veritable minefield for agencies and internal marketeers. It takes a lot of coordination and creativity to make sure that messages remains coherent and punchy, but still within the increasingly stringent guidelines laid down by the ASA, Defra and even the European Commission.

Given this blend of consumer scepticism and vigilant regulators, what are some of the dos and don’ts when it comes to combining the disparate parts of a green marketing campaign?

For more go to BusinessGreen.com

(From Silicon.com)

Instead of cracking down on staff using Twitter and Facebook at work, firms will soon be exploiting social networking’s business potential and drafting policies to control its use. Andrew Donoghue reports.

The days of companies being able to dismiss social networking as a consumer issue are numbered. That’s the outlook from analyst companies including Gartner group, which predicts by 2014 social media will replace email in about 20 per cent of businesses.

Rather than trying to stamp out social media use, companies may actually look to build their own social networking platforms, or at least take greater advantage of existing sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

In a recent research note, Gartner vice president Matt Cain said the rigid distinction between email and social networks will erode. “Email will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering, while social networks will develop richer email capabilities,” he wrote.

Given this outlook, it appears those companies that have dodged making explicit decisions about social network use will soon have to face up to the issue. According to anecdotal evidence from IT consultancy Accenture and technology-specialist law firm Morrison & Foerster, about 50 per cent of companies have a social media policy in place. The rest have some catching up to do.

Most companies will already have policies in place to govern staff use of technology such as email and the web generally. They will also probably have codes of conduct for behaviour both within the company and with external partners and clients. But social media sites have the ability to cross the boundary between what is traditionally deemed business activity and an employee’s personal life.

This blurring of lines creates challenges not only for developing a policy but for which department should be charged with managing it. Is social media use an issue for IT or HR exclusively, or does the new medium cross departmental lines?

silicon.com asked several experts for their perspectives on whether social media policies are really necessary and, if so, how to go about developing them.

For more go to Silicon.com

Conservative-Liberal coalition might look unlikely, but it has nothing on so-called “green” technology.

Left-leaning Liberal Democrats are concerned that their ideas on education, Trident and Europe may not survive an alliance with the Tories – and so they should be. There is a track record of conservative values co-opting and defusing more altruistic attitudes.

The green movement is a classic example. Its roots go back decades to the 1960s when books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring were more than just flower power. Over the last ten years, green has been taken up – or hijacked – by politicians and corporate marketing departments, and has become a different animal altogether. Instead of saving Pandas, green means hoarding pounds.

More Is Now Less

Right-leaning capitalist theory has encroached on lefty green-thinking very heavily in the realm of IT. It might seem obvious that we need less production, less consumption, and less technology, to conserve natural resources and protect the planet. Instead, tech companies and governments argue that what we need is more.

Clean and sustainable technologies should replace their polluting predecessors but it should occur at the natural rate of attrition. The car scrappage scheme is a clear example of how the green message has been muddied to serve economic needs. Yes an old clunker might be more polluting but crucially the environmental cost of keeping it on the road is significantly less than the total cost of its shiny new replacement, which comes with a huge carbon debt thanks to the raw materials needed to make it.

The same carbon and materials debt theory applies to computing. According to a 2003 academic study, Computers and the Environment: Understanding and Managing Their Impacts, 75 percent of the environmental harm caused by PC use occurs in the extraction and manufacture phases of the life-cycle – before a PC is used for the first time. So it makes sense to hang onto old kit longer rather than rushing out to replace it with a supposedly more efficient machine.

The marketing departments of tech companies have seized on the efficiency message and quietly stifled the issue of material consumption and carbon debt. There have been moves to remove some toxic compounds from PCs, and even some push towards the use of lower impact materials for packaging and casings, but the fundamental message of consumption and upgrading remains. Just as the Tories have chosen to embrace elements of the Liberal Democrats’ policies which they find conducive, tech companies have coopted the parts of the green movement which serve their purposes.

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

It’s fair to say HR departments have been more focused on dealing with redundancies than new hires in the last couple of years.

But as the economy begin to emerge from recession and businesses look to the recovery, the challenge of dealing with new employees will return. And this next generation of workers will be more demanding than any of their predecessors, especially in terms of technology.

Unprecedented levels of technical literacy, the rise of remote working and focus on sustainability mean younger workers will have very definite ideas on how they’re expected to be treated by potential employers.

Projecting ahead to what businesses and HR departments will face in the Britain of 2020, insurance company Friends Provident expects to see the emergence of demanding “elite workers”.

“By 2020, the balance of power between employees and employers will have shifted in favour of elite workers. This means employers will require more robust and rigorous HR strategies to shape the future success of the business,” says Friends Provident human resources director Gillian Fox.

And it will be the job of HR departments to put the policies in place to attract these elite workers and retain them: “Only by fostering a culture that truly allows talented employees to prosper will employers be able to attract, recruit and, more importantly, retain this powerful band of employees,” she said.

Consultant Accenture has been analysing the emergence of this new generation, also dubbed “Millennials” – and companies that fail to tune their corporate culture to meet the needs of these future workers, aged between 14 and 27, will suffer in the long run, it predicts.

For more go to Silicon.com

Cynics might argue that the raison d’etre of the advertising industry is to distort the truth. Ad agencies would say they are simply ” enhancing paradigms”.

This grey area between the positive portrayal of what you are selling and outright lying was undeniably exploited during the early days of the environmental boom, as company after company sought to promote their newly minted green credentials. But the proliferation of so-called “greenwash” over the last five years has only served to alienate consumers and prompted governments and industry regulators to take increasingly tough action against those firms that overstate their green credentials.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has wrapped a lot of knuckles in recent years over green advertising claims which do not stand up to scrutiny. For example, Renault recently fell foul of the ASA after viewer’s complained about its use of “zero emissions” in an ad for an electric car, while the long running campaign for a third runway at Heathrow has been pulled up for an ad which stated that the expansion would not “make Heathrow any noisier or dirtier”.

Even the government has not escaped scrutiny and was rebuked for a series of controversial ads calling on people to curb their carbon emissions.

According to the Greenwash Guide from sustainable marketing consultancy Futerra, utilities have traditionally been hit with most reprimands by the ASA with car companies and holiday firms also consistently guilty of violating green ad guidelines.

But ultimately the report identifies the advertising industry and the newspapers and TV stations carry their ads as lying at the root of the problem. “None of the UK’s biggest advertising agencies claim to have training or guidelines for their staff on what is a justified green claim,” it states. “And none of the main publications in the UK who sell advertising space have their own standard.”

For more go to: BusinessGreen

The head of an influential US think-tank has warned that the failure of countries to cooperate on cybercrime is harming efforts to combat the problem.

Speaking to eWEEK Europe UK at the Infosecurity Europe 2010 conference, Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the IT think-tank the Ponemon Institute, warned that the fight against cybercrime requires international cooperation, but that the process was failing currently.

Specifically, Ponemon said that most countries were failing to even bridge the divide between business and government on cybercrime issues – let alone talk to one another about the problem.

“Basically what we are finding is that the business government cooperartion is nearly non-existent,” he said. “It does vary from country to country but it is nearly non-existent.”

Cooperation Non-Existent

According to Ponemon – also professor for ethics and privacy at Carnegie Mellon University’s CIO Institute – while no country had a good record on sharing cybercrime information between the public and private sector, the UK faired better than some.

“In the UK for example you will find that at least the various commercial organisations will let businesses know when they have evidence of a threat but that doesn’t happen in the US,” he said. “What we find in the US is government handling their problems and business handling their problems. We have models of collaboration such as CERT but that only deals with a certain type of issue.”

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has claimed that new powers mean it is no longer a “toothless tiger”, and is pushing for prison sentences to be introduced for professional data thieves.

Speaking on the first day of the Infosecurity Europe conference in London on Tuesday, David Smith, ICO deputy commissioner, said that although the organisation had been granted new powers recently, it was keen for persistent and professional data thieves to be punished with jail sentences.

Smith identified groups including private investigators and internal employees who sell company data as targets for prison time. “Those who con information out of you, who work for you and/or sell information on the black market … all these are are criminal offences already but we argue they should be prison offences,” said Smith.

The ICO recently took part in a government consultation on the issue of prison sentences but said that the issue would have to be resolved by the new government.

“The government consulted us on this. That consultation finished in January and the government is still analysing the response to that consultation. Nothing will happen before the election and we will wait and see what happens,” he said.

No New Prisons

However, the ICO’s plans to impose jail time on data thieves could face problems from potential cuts to public sector spending, with some of the parties hoping to scale back prison time for so-called minor crimes. The Liberal Democrats in particular oppose the building of new prisons. Writing in the Guardian last month, Liberal [3] Democrat Shadow Home Secretary Chris Huhne said that prison was not the answer to curbing crime.

“Tories and Labour are pledging to send more people to prison for longer just because it sounds tough. Liberal Democrats would not build more prisons,” he wrote. “We are the only party brave enough to suggest that rigorous community sentences are more effective than short prison sentences.”

On the issue of the election and working with the future government, Smith said [4] that data protection would continue to be a major issue for whichever party or parties got into power.

“We have a new government and I am a public servant so am not going to make any comment on that, “ he said. “All the parties mention things on information rights within their proposals and this will be an issue and is relevant to all parties whatever colour the government is – or if we have a multi-coloured government.”

For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK

Latest for BusinessGreen.com

A long-standing centre-left government has been ousted by centre-right opposition. No, it’s not a flash forward to May 7, but the result of last week’s Hungarian election, which saw Viktor Orban yesterday declare victory for his centre-right Fidesz party.

Close to the geographic centre of Europe, the politics played out in the central European state of Hungary could be seen as a good barometer for the political fortunes across the region – and further afield. And that also goes for environmental policies.

Indeed, the role of the Hungarian government in the recent carbon credit recycling scandal has put an international spotlight on the country’s environmental policies – the ramifications of which have shaken carbon markets around the world.

Hungary, like many of its neighbours, has been hit especially hard by the global recession, and was forced to accept a £15.6bn loan from the IMF in October 2008 – the first EU country to do so. The financial conditions imposed by the IMF have further curtailed whatever wiggle room was left to the socialist government given the crippling effects of the financial crisis.

However, carbon recycling aside, cash-strapped Hungary has a pretty good stance on environmental policies and might provide some valuable guidance on how to develop environmental policies when you really can’t afford to.

For example, Hungary recently became the first country in the world to appoint an environmental ombudsman. Sworn in just over a year ago, Dr Sandor Fulop is the Hungarian Parliamentary Commissioner For Future Generations. A former public prosecutor, Fulop also served as the director of a not-for-profit environmental law firm, the Environmental Management and Law Association (EMLA), and has lectured in environmental law since 1997.

For more go to: BusinessGreen.com

Latest feature for Silicon.com

The last 18 months have no doubt been challenging for sales and marketing pros, with customers reluctant to spend during the economic downturn.

Yet advances in technology mean there are now many new, effective ways to connect with customers and partners.

Here we look at the tech trends taking hold in sales and marketing departments.

All eyes on social networking
The rise of social networking has provided a new channel for innovative companies to reach their customers. Some of the more traditionally minded marketing departments may have struggled to understand how social tools mesh with their existing web plans but others have been happy to experiment.

“Facebook is central to our social media strategy,” says Robin Auld, marketing director of Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland.

The latest addition to this strategy is a Superfans application on the company’s Facebook profile page. Loyal fans of Domino’s on Facebook are rewarded with a promotional code which can be used to get discounts on pizza deliveries. “This application will enable us to leverage the importance of brand advocates in growing our customer base,” explains Auld.

According to recent research from analyst Forrester, use of social networking tools by marketing departments is set to increase throughout 2010 and beyond as companies search for ways to reach out to, and extend, their customer base.

“Social technologies allow for accessible innovation where the risks and costs are not as high, but the return is significant,” says Forrester Research vice president and research director Christine Overby.

For more go to Silicon.com