Twist of Lime, with the help of developer Alexis Sarthou and designer Kate Dore of Dore Davis Design, completed and launched the new 1% for the Tetons Web site last Monday, January 25. The new site represents an evolutionary step not only for the online presence of 1% for the Tetons, but for the organization itself.

The site was designed with an eye toward simplicity, ease of updating and with future expansion in mind. The design highlights Members and Grants, and it allows Members to update their own profiles and make offers to Members, Supporters and the public at large. There are now dedicated Members, Grants and News areas, where the proof of this incredible concept are showcased.

The launch of this new site comes just as 1% for the Tetons announced its new granting process. The new process involves two rounds for grant applicants and will feature an as-yet-to-be-released function of the new site that will allow Members and the public to cast their vote for potential grants by making pledges. This new function will be unveiled in the next several months. You can read more about the new grants process here.

I wrote about bottled water early on in this blog. I hate it. Hate the bottles mostly, but the whole concept in a country that has the safest drinking water right from the multitude of faucets in your own home and workplace — yes, even the one in the bathroom — is completely ridiculous on so many levels. Hated it then and still hate it now.

At least some people are starting to wake up the atrocity known as bottled water, including the good folks at Brita who have had growing success with the “Filter For Good” program.

But many, many people still blithely buy into this scourge of the earth. Which is why I’m glad to see this infographic from the good folks at OnlineEducation. Don’t miss this. And you can put the graphic on your site with this code.

Presented by Online Education

"Where to Put it All" opens tonight, Friday, December 11, at 5:30 p.m. in the Center for the Arts in Jackson.

My wife, Miga Rossetti, has been working hard for the past many months on a new body of artwork that is now hanging in the Center for the Arts in Jackson. Please join us tonight, Friday, December 11, at 5:30 p.m. for the opening reception in the Center Theater Gallery for her show, “Where To Put It All.”

Every spring a squadron of robins attempts to build nests between the rafters of our front porch. Some fail and some succeed, but each works frantically, collecting bits of all kinds of grasses and twigs, to build their potential new homes and rear a new brood of chicks. Regardless of their level of success, we’re left with a number of abandoned nests at the end of the summer. These nests have become the inspiration for Miga’s latest body of work, “Where to Put it All.”

There are birds and nests and symbols of all kinds in her new paintings. They reflect her desire to create order from the relative chaos that is the collective life of our family. We are freelancers, entrepreneurs, parents and fun-hogs (not necessarily in that order). We work in graphic design, art, marketing, writing, and we run a greeting card company. We have two beautiful daughters who are wildly active and creative and produce a never-ending stream of drawings, projects and whatnot. And we live in a place that allows us to be active outdoors, skiing, cycling, hiking, paddling and whatever else. How to get it all done and then where to put it all?

Special thanks to the Art Association of Jackson Hole for sponsoring this show and hosting this opening, which is hosted in part by The Liquor Store and The Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund.

Columbia Sportswear has done a great job of incorporating utility into their marketing on Pandora.

I love utility. My dad was very hands-on and could build or fix anything: a car, a plane, a house, whatever. Luckily, I got his knack for being able to fix things, and while I am no longer a “practicing” carpenter, I spent several years doing it, still take on my own home-improvement projects, have a shop full of tools and am a big sucker for hardware stores and Tool Crib catalogs.

I’m also a pragmatist and favor products and services that make my life better or easier, and that translates to marketing. There are all kinds of examples of utilitarian marketing strategies (though still far too many non-utilitarian marketing efforts), and with the interactivity of online marketing, these “utilities” are becoming more prevalent.

That’s why I was pleased to see what Columbia Sportswear has come up with in its marketing on Pandora. First of all, Pandora is a great example of radio letting us drive the bus, to a certain extent. We get to vote up or down songs within a particular strain of a genre, or “station,” in exchange for great free music of almost any type. A compromise for sure, but it is interactive radio at its best.

Now, because the reality of all this online content is that it actually costs money to produce (as much as we want to be in denial about that), Pandora has had to explore a few monetization schemes, and I give them kudos for introducing advertising in a way that isn’t too obtrusive.

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Welcome to the newly redesigned MarketGreener and Twist of Lime sites. Or is it the newly redesigned Twist of Lime and MarketGreener sites? Whichever it is, they’re now joined at the hip!

I launched MarketGreener just over two years ago as a way to dip my toe into the world of blogging. Since then I have learned a lot about blogging — including what it is and isn’t for me — and I’ve garnered a decent audience along the way. While not a huge following, there are some regular readers among you and a lot of others who have simply stumbled across this site. And since my focus from the beginning  has been to write about what I find interesting or helpful in the world of marketing and sustainable business practices, I’ve tried not to use it as a soapbox for my business.

But then, about six months after establishing this blog, I left the world of the gainfully employed to start Twist of Lime, a marketing and content services agency. My first site was built by me using Dreamweaver. And while I was confident with my DW skills and proud to have successfully built my own site, I have always known that design is not my forté and that the previous site was not the strongest calling card for someone trying to make a sizable chunk of  his income from building Web sites.

I’ve learned a lot in the past year-and-a-half, both from my clients and my teammates. The result of some of that knowledge is here in this redesigned site. Design was done by my wonderful wife Miga, who’s own skills in Web design are growing, and the development was handled by Alexis Sarthou, whom I have known and worked with since my Circumerro days and is very talented in the ways of building WordPress templates (yes, this site is powered by WordPress!), among other fine development skills. And, from time to time, some of what I do on the business side does and will continue to show up here on MarketGreener.

Please take some time to check out the new site. There are still a few tweaks to make and I welcome any and all (constructive) feedback. And I hope you continue to read the blog, and that you enjoy it enough to share it with others. Please bookmark it, join our email list or subscribe in a reader. And as always, enjoy!

There’s no doubt that if you want to engage people in your cause you need to not only answer the question, “What’s in it for me?”, but you have to make sure what’s in it for people is something they’ll enjoy getting out of it. This video by Volkswagen’s ad agency in Sweden, DDB Stockholm, is apparently going viral because it demonstrates just that.

You want me to take the stairs instead of the escalator because it’s good for me and saves energy? No thanks. You want me to take the stairs instead of the escalator because it’s fun? Sure! These people aren’t saving energy and burning a few extra calories. They’re having fun! And never mind the fact that there’s no car in the video. You’ll enjoy it so much that you’ll hardly notice. But then that’s part of the point. This is one of a series of videos in a new initiative by Volkswagen to try to get people to change their old ways by making the new way fun.

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I’m finally getting caught up on things after last week’s Wyoming Business Council Idea Expo. While attendance was down some from previous years, I felt the program was very worth while. Of course, my completely biased opinion is based on the fact that I gave two very well-received seminars. I had gone prepared to present only my search engine optimization seminar but was asked at the last minute to talk also about social media marketing. This seminar turned out to be one of the best-attended of all during the Idea Expo.

Social media marketing is obviously very hot right now, and the interest Wyoming businesses are taking in this topic is understandably high.
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Well folks, it’s official: I’ll be speaking at the Wyoming Business Council’s Idea Expo the end of this month. The Conference runs Monday and Tuesday, September 28 and 29. Specifically, I will be giving my seminar on The Basics of Search Engine Optimization on Monday afternoon at 4 pm. Before that I will be either participating in a panel discussion on using social media for business or giving my own presentation on the same subject. Haven’t heard yet which it will be, but I’m going prepared.

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In the past couple of weeks, two seemingly opposite articles about packaging have piqued my interest.

First it was this one from Fast Company: “Will ‘Active Packaging’ Undermine Apple’s Quest for Sustainability?”

Then it was this week’s Marketing: Green column from MediaPost: “When It Comes To Packaging, Less Is More.”

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Editor’s note: MarketGreener has accepted some guest posts by the good folks at uSwitch, a utilities price comparison Web site aimed exclusively at businesses to help them save money on electricity. This and the last post are from uSwitch.

Areas to investigate
These are three areas which are worth looking at, because they can be simple to organise, can save money and don’t require much effort to operate as schemes.

1. Energy use

A few simple procedures can make a significant difference to how much energy the business uses and so pays for.  If it’s possible to introduce an energy monitor, it will be easy to show this.

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Editor’s note: MarketGreener has accepted some guest posts by the good folks at uSwitch, a utilities price comparison Web site aimed exclusively at businesses to help them save money on electricity. The next two posts are from uSwitch.

No-one can ignore environmental issues.  Most of us are becoming used to recycling at home and many consider ethical sources for food, clothing and other goods.  But business has been slower to catch on.  Is there anything you can do, as an individual employee, to make your workplace more environmentally friendly?  This practical guide gives you some ideas to make a difference at work.

Be practical
In the current economic climate, many people are more worried about their immediate financial position than the future of the planet.  If you want to make changes, you’ll need to offer practical reasons and plans.

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"Wydotanatah": my phrase; my territory.

When I conducted my first marketing seminar I was merely looking for a way to reach a captive audience of potential clients among businesses here in Jackson Hole. Now that I’ve reached that audience, I’m continuing to look for ways to reach others here locally in Jackson Hole and in the region beyond.

Jackson Hole as a business community is unique in many ways, some of which include:

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Facebook Connect is the latest gem to make a difference in social networking.

There’s been a fair bit of speculation about just how much more sociability and interactivity the new Facebook Connect application will have around ye ole Internets since its announcement last year and now quite a bit more since its launch in December. Well, here at MarketGreener we’ve been playing around with it and finally got it to work across multiple platforms. It seems there are some extra special complexities in Internet Explorer (no surprise there), but I’m no programmer and even I got it working.

After digging around a bit, I found and implemented two different fb Connect plugins for WordPress. The one I’m employing here is Sociable’s Facebook Connect Plugin I’m not going to walk you through installation ’cause you can do that there. But I’m pretty excited about the social and marketing implications of this type of interconnectivity.

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David Gonzales of The Snaz gets a photo op in this week's Planet JH.

Planet Jackson Hole, one of our local newspapers here in Jackson, published an article today about the state of blogging and “new media” in the Hole. The timing was quite coincidental, as a group of us local bloggers (two of whom were interviewed for the Planet article) met last night at the South Side for pizza and beer and to discuss, among many other things, blogging in Jackson Hole, the state of this media format, and of course the Planet article.

I had difficulty pinning down the explicit point Ben Cannon was trying to make in his article (I think it had to do with money), but, having some insight into the local blogging community in general and blogging in particular, I thought I’d share what I got out of it.

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I’ve been on a social media marketing kick lately and this little gem caught my eye.

If you’re not already familiar with it, 1% for the Planet is a non-profit organization that encourages businesses to give one percent of their gross income (yep, that’s right, “gross” — give ’til it hurts, baby!) to environmental causes. It was started by Yvon Chouinard, founder Patagonia, and Craig Mathews, owner of Blue Ribbon Flies, and is in the process of becoming a force of its own.

Well, to make a long story short (so you can get on with the video), my business, Twist of Lime, is a member of 1% for the Tetons, based here in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the only “regional” 1% chapter in the country. As it happens, 1% for the Tetons members are also 1% for the Planet members, and I’ve been doing some marketing work for 1% for the Tetons so I’ve been paying attention to what the Planet folks are doing these days. And they’re doing some pretty cool stuff. So, take a moment to check out this video and then share it with others. They’ve done a smash-up job offering lots of ways for you to share in hopes this baby will go viral. Click the link below to see the video and enjoy!

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Are these people in your social network or just from another bad Web site template?

But how many social networks should you be a part of? Experts agree on a few rules of thumb when it comes to online social networking.

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