10 ways social media can help achieve MDG's

Tomorrow, I'll be part of a panel presenting on 'Social Media for Youth Leaders' to the International Youth Conference. During this two-day conference at the United Nations, 600+ international participants come together to consider how to best motivate their peers and governments to move towards Millennium Development Goals by 2015. With less than 2 short years, achieving the MDG's will take lots of hard work. However, several believe it's still possible.

To quickly recap what are the Millenium Development Goals are?

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

2. Achieve universal primary education

3. Promote gender equality and empower women

4. Reduce childhood mortality

5. Improve maternal health

6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

7. Ensure environmental sustainability

8. Develop a global partnership for development

There are many ways to achieve each of these goals. Each depends on the country and their political, social and economic structures. However, many nations are interested in improving their reach in the world economy by having better technology infrastructures. How can we use the power of the internet and new technology to help reach the above MDGs?

Here are 8 recommendations:

1. Mobile technologies can help inform citizens of life-saving information

2. Technology and collective knowledge enables communities to build better systems for climate adaptation and mitigation

3. Exchanges of information are essential to all vast social changes. According to the World Association for Christian Communication, "Whatever one thinks of Millennium Development Goals, providing access to information and knowledge helps address issues related to poverty, education, health, politics and environment."

4. Providing a platform for increasing awareness of citizens internationally, especially important to areas like the Asia-Pacific region--where 2/3 of the worlds poorest live (641m people). According to Minar Pimple, Asia's Deputy Director of UN Millennium Campaign, "the media has the power to give voice to the voiceless".

5. Social media can 'crowdsource' petitions quickly and easily (like the USA's ONE campaign)

6. Technology (should) strategically connect constituents and political participants

7. Social media's transparency enables constituents to hold governments accountable

8. Giving women technology and empowering them to be digital citizens, according to UNGAID, empowers everybody

10 ways to implement SEO campaigns for green business

We've been busy at Carbon Outreach. We co-organized the Green Entrepreneur Summit in New York on 22 July, and presented there on Marketing & PR Panel on 'Scaling Up Without Selling Out'. We posted photos to Facebook on the sold-out event, and heard lots of positive feedback from attendees about how this was "the best green event of the summer".

We've also started a new Meetup on Ethical Marketing & PR in New York City (find us on @ethicalPRNYC on Twitter) that's gaining traction from green communicators across the globe! This week, Tim Watson, our CTO, presented on 'Using SEO Effectively' for green business and we wanted to share. His presentation is below, along with 10 recommendations for using SEO in green communications campaigns.

Effectively using SEO for Green Businesses

View more presentations from Carbon Outreach.

Top 10 considerations for Green Businesses implementing SEO

1. Take an integrated approach to marketing
   While SEO can greatly improve your company’s exposure among searches. You should take a broad approach when thinking of how you will market your green products, services or not-for-profit. You need to consider where your consumers spend their time and when are they ready to hear your message. Social media, traditional PR and other marketing tools can be as or more effective than SEO.


2. SEO takes time…it does not work over night
   It can take months to implement an SEO initiative. This is because to properly implement an SEO initiative you need to complete the following steps:
1. Determining your keywords
2. Testing those keywords via Adwords and or AdCenter
3. Optimizing your site for those keywords
4. Promoting your site to get other sites to link to you
5. Submitting your site to search engines
6. Getting your site crawled and properly ranked by the search engines
7. Testing your search ranking and then re-optimizing based off results (repeating steps a-c)


3. Specific Keywords are better than general
   It is nearly impossible to rank the top search results for keywords such as 'Vegan', 'Green' or 'Hybrid'. There is too much competition for these keywords for you to rank high. Anyway, these keywords are too specific. People searching for products or services usually start with a general search and then refine their search as they better know what they want and as they are closer to buying a product or service. This means that specific search terms are more likely to get the sale! A good specific keyword might be 'Vegan caterers in Manhattan'.


4. Test your keywords via Google Adwords or Microsoft AdCenter
   After you come up with what you think are good search terms, test you keywords buy running some Adwords or AdCenter campaigns. This will help you understand really which search terms drive sales and traffic.


5. Use a sitemap
   Crawlers need to be able to crawl all the web pages of your web site. A sitemap is a web page that simply has a link to all the web pages within your site. When a crawler finds this page, they use it to discover and then index all the web pages on your web site.


6. Use standard HTML tags
   Crawlers may use content in the TITLE and H1 tags as identifiers as to what type of content is on the web site….so use these tags.


7. Use Meta Tags
   Crawlers use the meta tags KEYWORD and DESCRIPTION when determining what type of content in on that web page. Use the keyword tag to suggest keywords that are relevant to the web page. Use the description tag to contain a short description of the web page.


8. Rankings change
   Your page rank is determined by how the search algorithm ranks you against your competition. If the search algorithm changes or you get new competition, your ranking might change. Therefore, you should test your search rankings on a regular basis and then based off the results determine if you need to re-optimize your site.


9. Link to high quality sites
   If you link to high quality sites, then the search engine assumes you are also a high quality site.


10. Get high quality sites link to you
    Search is a popularity game. If high quality sites link to you, then the search engine assumes you are a credible site that deserves to be ranked high.


11. BONUS: Avoid looking like a link farm or spam
    Link farms are web sites that just contain links to other sites. Often these sites get paid for every link clicked on their web page. They provide little to no content. Avoid looking like these sites, because search engines (and many searches) see these sites as spam and try to pull those sites from their listings.