Creativity can be a powerful force, particularly in the world of cause-related marketing. But can so-called “good creative” motivate us to change our rigid ways? What if it’s to make the world a better place? Andy Hobsbawm, founder of Do The Green Thing, thinks so. I had the chance to speak to Andy on the sidelines of our Social Media Influence conference (yes, we’ve been promising the publication of this video for some time now; we posted his presentation here a few weeks ago) to ask him about the role of social media in helping companies involve the public in their corporate social responsibility (or, CSR) efforts. Here’s what he had to say:

Do The Green Thing founder Andy Hobsbawm stole the show at our recent SMI10 conference with a talk on creativity and its crucial role in building social media community and currency.

He framed his talk by drawing on the experiences of Do The Green Thing, a very smart (and very creative) sustainability movement co-founded by Andy.

Here is another look at Andy’s presentation. We’ll link to the video of his talk when we publish it on our site later this week.

Activists at Greenpeace have really stepped up their use of social media of late to recruit more and more members of the general public into its various corporate pressure campaigns. Just today, they’ve renewed the fight against BP in its ongoing stop- tar-sands-investment crusade by asking the general public to rebrand BP by redesigning the company’s corporate logo. So far, we’ve seen BP standing for “Bad People“, “Broken Promises” and “Bloody Pillagers“. And those are the tame ones.Already, the “rebrand BP” contest, as it’s being called, is starting to trend on Twitter and it’s getting howls of approvals from Greenpeace International’s 485,000-plus Facebook following.

The main knock on Greenpeace through the years is that its often militant approach to corporate activism has been a big turn-off for mainstream consumers, even the green ones. But Greenpeace has really softened its edges through a more inclusive approach that involves rallying the masses behind various environmental causes. Its deft use of social media is at the heart of this new philosophy. Case in point, Greenpeace is asking the public to tap its creative juices to send BP a blunt message:

BP’s slick green logo doesn’t suit a company that wants to invest in tar sands, the dirtiest oil there currently is.

We’re inviting you to design them a new logo that’s more suitable for their dirty business.

This spring, Greenpeace put its massive online following at the vanguard of a recent campaign against Nestle that saw the massive conglomerate buckle to pressure and issue a rare policy change statement on sourcing palm oil, an important ingredient in its candy bars.

Feeling emboldened, Greenpeace has stepped up its efforts against various corporations, using regular Joe’s to help it fight its fight. Will consumer activism ever be the same?

Editor’s note: Come hear the major brands discuss their successful social media investment strategies at the Social Media Influence conference (June 22nd in London). Speakers include PepsiCo, Starbucks, Dell, Sony, Dachis Group and many others.

PepsiCo continues to bring its do-gooder message to its vast social media following, this time partnering with Waste Management and Keep America Beautiful on a major green effort to help, well, keep America beautiful. Weapon of choice: the “Dream Machine”. Delivery method: blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.

You can read about the details here, but the concept is pretty simple. Pepsi will place specially designed recycling bins in key places like gas stations. The location is chosen by you. And, when you recycle a bottle you will receive points that you can redeem for prizes.

Greenopolis.com is the movement’s primary internet hub. Here you can brows events, check out one of their many YouTube videos, and, most importantly, claim your prizes. Facebook is an important factor, too. You can keep up on the news and share your save-the-planet activity with your friends. In all, they already have over 27,000 Likes between two pages. Here’s just one of their flashy Facebook recruiting messages:

They are taking Twitter seriously, too. They already have over 12,000 Greenopolis followers there, and they are tweeting several eco tweets an hour. Here’s just one of the very many tweets:

All this social media activity doesn’t take us by surprise. Earlier this year the company initiated a major online campaign called the Refresh Project, which was also a civic-minded publicity project. It’s still going strong with over 680,000 “Likes” on their Facebook page, quickly cementing the company’s do-gooder and green reputation with the Facebook generation.

What about Coca-Cola? They are fighting back with their ongoing “Happiness Machine” stunt where Coke vending machines reveal bigger prizes for unsuspecting college kids. Okay, it may be much less virtuous, but just as vital. In just one Youtube video they gathered over 2 million views in a few months.

Nevertheless, Cocal-Coal appears to be losing in the head-to-head social media taste test. The Greenopolis push is Pepsi’s second major advertising campaign that makes full use of social media to spread a worthy message: give your customers (young adults) the chance to save the world, and deliver it to them in the place they hang out most.

Editor’s Note: PepsiCo’s B. Bonin Bough, global director of digital and social media, will be detailing at the Social Media Influence conference on June 22 how PepsiCo is using social media to create a more meaningful dialogue with the public. Register before May 1 and you can qualify for the early bird rate.

You may not agree with Don Blankenship’s politics, nor with the Massey Energy CEO’s dim view of climate change science. You may find that his coal mining operation’s practice of detonating mountain tops to get at the coal inside shocking and destructive. And you may question the coal baron’s sincerity in mourning the deaths of 25 of his coal miners as evidence mounts that Massey Energy is one of the biggest safety scofflaws in the industry. But you have to hand it to Blankenship: he certainly isn’t backing down from his biggest critics in this, his most vulnerable hour.

Blankenship, one of the few CEOs in the energy industry that avidly tweets, has taken to his favorite forum to praise rescue workers, solicit prayers for the victims’ families and for the rescue workers and to demonize “much of the media.” The effect has been impressive. Blankenship’s Twitter following has soared since the tragedy first came to light on Monday morning. He’s gained 387 followers this week (bringing his total follower count to 1,347 as of me writing this column), no doubt all of them anxious to hear Blankenship’s version of what’s going on above and below the earth’s surface. Here’s what his surge in Twitter popularity looks like, courtesy of TwitterCounter’s handy graphing technology:

Over the previous three weeks, Blankenship was lucky to gain a few followers over the course of a week. Since the April 5 tragedy, he’s on track to double his follower ranks in the next seven days,TwitterCounter projects.

But if Blankenship thought he was going to be able to use Twitter to broadcast an unfiltered corporate response to the tragedy and to evoke sympathy fromTwitter’s 75 million users, he’s sadly mistaken. Coinciding with the surge in his personal followers is an outbreak of hostility towards him and towards Massey Energy on Twitter and elsewhere. His critics are giving him an ear-full, posting details of his pay check and calling for his arrest. The union, the Sheet Metal Workers International, has re-tweeted to its 1,000 followers a call for eternal damnation upon Blankenship’s soul. The acrimony will only grow louder until Blankenship answers his accusers and addresses the company’s safety track record, plus explain how it is that the Upper Big Branch Mine, the site of this week’s tragedy, has been hit with so many safety violations over the years.

On these points, the Blankenship Twitter feed is conspicuously silent.

In the past, Massey used Twitter to attack his biggest enemies: Al Gore, green energy proponents, the Democratic Congress and the Sierra Club are all favorite targets. Now, he needs the Twitter feed to fend off an attack against him in the hopes of preserving some semblance of his personal reputation and that of his company’s. It doesn’t work that way. TheTwitterverse has a long-term memory. It will use your words against you, as Blankenship can see for himself, one re-tweet at a time. As Patti Digh, a blogger with an impressive Twitter following, tweets: “Dear Sir – I pray you learn something from this tragedy. RT @ DonBlankenship: Pray for the families and the rescue workers.”

Great work by Scott Douglas, who puts together this presentation on what could be the most successful social media pressure campaign yet: Greenpeace’s hijacking in recent days of Nestlé’s Facebook page on the way to getting the confectioner to drop its ties to an Indonesian palm oil supplier.

It’s not every day that a brand turns its most loyal followers into angry protesters. But Nestlé has done just that, taking flak today for its commitment to environmental sustainability and then for its heavy-handed response to all protesters: a full Facebook clampdown on personal expression. Not surprisingly, the two issues are merging into one angry discussion thread where it’s hard to distinguish the angry activists from the angry chocolate lovers.

Here’s how it started: Greenpeace is attacking Nestlé for its “unsustainable palm oil” policy. No news there. They’ve even released a scathing attack ad about Kit Kat in recent days entitled “Need a break? So does the rainforest?” Meanwhile, perhaps in response, the company’s Facebook minders this morning issued a killjoy edict to its 90,000-plus fan base that says anybody showing their loyalty to the brand by using the logo will be, ominously, “deleted.”

Not surprisingly, the response has been hostile (Nestlé appears to be deleting regularly the most angry comments, including the one shown here by “Jugular Bean”) and can-you-believe-what-Nestlé-has-done? blog posts are already trending so that they appear prominently on Google search page results for “Facebook Nestle.”

If the original Nestlé policy wasn’t bad enough – what’s the harm anyhow if Facebook users are using the logo in a benign way? – it’s arrogant no-excuses response has community members reeling, not to mention creating a firestorm on Twitter. Just look at this snippy exchange:

Ok, Nestlé is feeling under attack from eco-warriors who regularly use and abuse its trademarks, logos and brands to illustrate the unsavory side of the business. And it’s not too happy that they’ve dragged this mud onto the Facebook fan page. But firing the heavy artillery at everyone, fans and activists alike, is bound to do far more damage than anything Greenpeace and Oxfam can say, not to mention lend further support to their cause.

As one fan writes on the Nestlé wall:

I was a big fan of your products, but now, when I saw what you guys wrote, I think I’m gonna stop buying them.

I’m typing this post from Rome, a city where most everyone heads to the bar multiple times a day to consume a shot of caffè, leaving the cup behind for the barista to wash and re-use. The ritual produces a jolt of energy and little stress on the local landfills. Italy is the exception, apparently. Elsewhere, non-recyclable paper coffee cups are the norm and their environmental impact is pretty steep: forcing the felling of 20 million trees and the consumption of 12 billion gallons of water, says Betacup, an awareness group that is trying to eliminate the far-from-harmless paper coffee cup.

Formed last May, Betacup has been trying to get the public to take up the cause too, with limited effect. Its Facebook page counts 220 fans and just over 300 Twitter followers. But this week it scored a major coups, getting Starbucks to sponsor its “Betacup Challenge,” an ambitious crowd-sourcing attempt to get the wired world to tackle the problem of paper cup consumption.

Judging from the early response, the Betacup Challenge is getting a nice buzz from eco-minded coffee lovers. We wish them luck!

How to build a online community that is more than just the sum of its numbers?

That’s the quandary facing so many companies and brands as they try and make sense of what value or benefit they can take from the 200,000 Facebook fans or half a million Twitter followers who have clicked a button of support.

So it was with the aim of gaining some enlightenment on community and movement building that I attended the third annual Alliance for Youth Movement (AYM) Summit, currently being held in London.

AYM describes itself as a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting, connecting, and supporting digital activists from around the world. The London summit gathered together some of the smartest digital activists and movement builders promoting peace and democracy from the Middle East to Colombia and beyond. And its keynote speaker was Joe Rospars, the digital campaign brain behind the Barack Obama presidential campaign and founder of Blue State Digital.

Of course in some ways I had sent myself on a bit of a fool’s errand. After all no-one would argue that online fans of Coca-Cola would be as passionate about that brand as peace activists would be for halting the Middle East conflict, (would they?) And while every marketing manager has been demanding that agencies capture the “Obama effect” since Rospars’ digital grassroots campaign swept Obama into the White House, few believe that any company could ever tap into the passion for change and then network and enable it with the efficiency of the ’08 campaign.

Yet spending an afternoon listening to smart young digitally savvy people compare notes on the best practice of building digital networks the challenges these NGOs face are not dissimilar to the dilemma faced by most of Fortune 500 companies that are attempting to build a genuine social media relationship with their customers and employees.

Central to that dilemma are two key issues: First, how to employ the new social tools so that community can better connect and build together. Second, how to measure the success of a movement beyond counting the numbers.

Rospars highlighted how technology and data mining needs to be employed in subtle and social manner if it is to motivate and mobilize. He highlighted how the Obama campaign had been able, through grassroots community data gathering, to take a hyperlocal approach to voter registration by giving activists accurate data on Obama supporters in their neighborhoods who could be asked to vote. And he stressed how treating voters as real people not names on a list was the first, respectful, stage of running an email or text campaign. How many direct marketers could benefit from taking that advice?

Then there was what we might call the million member question: Is there a best practice guide to building an online movement asked Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net during one session titled “Turning Social Networks into Real Community.” He and other participants of course realize the massive potential of mobilizing through social networks yet they bemoaned how social media has exacerbated so-called slacktivism (where it’s easy to support a good cause by becoming a Facebook fan and then do nothing tangible to follow through that commitment).

For big brands, harnessing social networks offer similar tantalizing, mobilizing rewards in terms of learning from customer experiences and opinions, yet social media and brand managers across the land ask themselves the same questions as Banks as they evaluate what those Facebook fan stats really mean. At least the brands can run competitions and give away free stuff in a way to build “customer loyalty”. Though if your best way of winning “friends” is to keep giving them gifts them maybe they’re not as loyal as you’d hope them to be!

The truth is that, whether it be in business or social change, everyone is experimenting with how best to build upon social capital and no-one yet has all the answers. But as these two seemingly polarized and often antagonistic sectors seek to navigate a disruptive media landscape that puts human interaction to the fore, the methods and strategy they use to attract new customers and build social movements may end up being very similar.

In 2006, Wal-Mart’s then-CEO Lee Scott delivered a speech to employees asking them to think big and ponder, “What would it take for Wal-Mart to be that company, at our best, all the time?” He then went on to rattle off a series of sustainability objectives that included powering the entire company solely with renewable energy sources and to “sell products that sustain our resources and environment.”

Treehugger.com, for one, was dubious. In a seminal editorial entitled “It’s Getting Harder to Hate Wal-Mart“, Lloyd Alter wrote, “That it comes from Wal-Mart? We will wait and see.”

Fast-forward to Thursday, and Wal-Mart and Treehugger met again, this time as allies to explain to the masses Wal-Mart’s latest green pledge, slashing 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from its supply chain within the next five years. In a sign of just how far-reaching this detente between one of the business world’s biggest polluters and the eco activist press has evolved, Treehugger even agreed to dedicate part of its site to host the official Q&A about the Wal-Mart announcement, which Wal-Mart itself plugged repeatedly during yesterday’s webcast. On the forum, the questions from greens were well-informed and blunt, but the tone was respectful and even hopeful. One commenter, for example, wanted to know where Wal-Mart could expect to “find big, quick wins” to meet its sustainability pledge. The old hippies must have been shaking their heads wondering, “Where’s the hate, man?”

For good measure, fellow collaborators on Wal-Mart’s ambitious carbon-cutting pledge include Environmental Defense Fund, ClearCarbon and the Carbon Disclosure Project. Wal-Mart’s transformation from mom-and-pop-store killer to model of corporate sustainability seems complete this morning. It’s even won over the most skeptical parts of the blogosphere. As the sustainable design blog, Inhabitat, wrote, “While we’ve explored our qualms about Walmart’s vast operations all over the world before on Inhabitat we applaud their decision to try to bring their sustainability to the next level, as well as set an example for other large retailers.”

Mission accomplished? Not exactly. There’s an equally dubious public to convince, though their skepticism about Wal-Mart’s sustainability commitment may prove more intractable.

Wal-Mart (with its British subsidiary, Asda) knew it had to involve the public on all communications social media channels at its disposal if it was going to get them on board. The message on Wal-Mart’s YouTube channel, for example, is that you, the conscientious consumer, can do your part by running the washer machine with cold water and only choosing the most energy efficient appliances. The response? Crickets. Just 110 people have bothered logging on to view the video and the lone viewer comment starts off, “I don’t believe in man-caused global warming or climate change or whatever they’re calling it this week. It’s a crock…a fraud.”

The message resonates a bit further on Wal-Mart’s Facebook page; there, 325 people click they “like” the news. It’s the comment section just below though that makes you wonder which planet Wal-Mart is trying to save. A cacophony of Climate Change naysayers, Winn Dixie patrons and oddball Wal-Mart watchers all but drown out any chance of an intelligent debate on the merits of adopting a carbon-neutral lifestyle. Case in point? One woman uses the crowded forum to campaign for a few pet causes. “Lower yours prices!!!! BRING BACK LAYAWAY!!!!!,” she bellows. Four minutes later she is back in the comments section, informing us, “my kids just made me toast from walmart.”

When Lee Scott asked the troops back in 2006 to consider what it would take to make Wal-Mart run “at our best, all the time,” he no doubt hoped his radical ideas to transform the way the company operates — from not just a sustainability standpoint, but from a much more open corporate communications philosophy, one that encourages public feedback through its social media channels — would win the favor of the organization, the activists who had it in its cross-hairs and the public. It’s been a remarkable achievement to win over the first two. Now, the hard part comes: to win over the crowds on Facebook.