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Editor's Notes

• #4: Awareness about C2C is alive and well on the internet, which is great news. We get 25% of the search traffic of the term “sustainability.” Note that sustainability suffers from a “Christmas dip” and we don’t. That means that people aren’t Googling C2C as part of their professional responsibilities.
• #5: Our social media presence is much less impressive. Discussion is low for the amount of search traffic that we receive, and most of it is focused on inspiration, discussion of certified products, and high-level questions. A typical LinkedIn thread asks: “How do I apply C2C to developing countries?“ Other than the current festival in Berlin there appear to be few events for people to plug into. Only two existing meetup groups have tagged themselves with the phrase “Cradle to Cradle”, Fresno Green Drinks and Transition Richmond.
• #6: C2C has built an impressive level of awareness, and the 453 C2C certified products on the market serve as an steady source of community inspiration and aspiration. Unfortunately there’s a massive gap between the millions who have been inspired by C2C and the few products that prove it can be a reality. The goal of C2C’s online community strategy should be to close that gap.
• #7: The red flag for me is in the nature of the chatter we’re seeing on LinkedIn and Twitter. It’s either high-level stuff about how people are inspired by the idea of C2C or about specific products. People love the idea of C2C, but have no idea how to plug it into their professional lives. The result looks less like a community and more like a concert, with a few people on stage end everyone else milling around on the grass and singing along.To kick C2C into gear, we need those people on the grass to start forming their own bands. In order to do that, I propose that C2C focus on creating a clear entry point where communities can learn about integrating C2C into their work, and create a solutions-focused community of practice to support their professional development. C2C should also position itself as the community’s internal media outlet so that it can maintain a lever of control as the community grows.
• #8: Check out Six Sigma’s website, LinkedIn group, and twitter traffic as an example of an interesting direction to head. Like C2C they’re helping organizations go through a fundamental transformation aimed at an audacious goal. They have an extremely active 64,000 member LinkedIn Group, and their search traffic tops that of “Sustainability” (though it appears to be on the decline.)They’ve got a killer orientation layer. People get trained by them and then get badges of professional accomplishment: “Green Belt,” “Black Belt,” etc. They also have an extensive online professional support network. Unlike discussion about C2C, 6S discussion is focused on specific answers to technical questions and on tips about internal sales. 6S went to the trouble of setting up an online forum, but almost no one uses it. All of their users seem to prefer the LinkedIn group. They also don’t have a centralized Q&A knowledgebase, which a tool like Quora could accomplish for them if they used it strategically.
• #9: Right now people are inspired by C2C, the first goal of the online community should be to make that inspiration actionable by helping people understand C2C in the context of their professional roles. On the high end this could look like a revenue-generating professional development track, where individuals can become C2C certified. On the low end this could look like a set of online orientation materials or paid webinars.These orientations should give community members a sense of shared identity which allows them to embody their interest in C2C. These identities should build on members’ existing professional roles, ie “Material Flows Specialist” or “C2C Certified Designer“ and should list specific skills and competencies required to make these professions C2C compliant.
• #10: C2C should build an orientation layer by creating clear points of entry that are consistent with its brand. These can include:A set of online and offline trainings on C2C methodologies using WebEx or GoToMeeting.A facilitated LinkedIn group with a section devoted to orienting new members. See Six Sigma for a good example.Promotion of meetup groups where people interested in C2C can get plugged in. Existing sustainability meetup organizers should be targeted for orientation early on so that their groups can serve as a portal.Specific metrics and goals will require additional baseline research.
• #11: Once community members are oriented, they’ll need to be plugged into a community of practice that can support them in their new professional roles. This community should support them in selling C2C internally, be a resource for selecting C2C compliant materials and share best practices in creating C2C compliant supply chains and product takeback methodologies.
• #12: It’s tempting to want to host this community of practice on the C2C website, but my instincts and research both indicate otherwise. Six Sigma and numerous other examples prove that users prefer interacting in existing social networks such as LinkedIn to interacting on a separate forum, making these forums an unnecessary expense. Instead, C2C should focus on actively facilitating places where community members can find and contribute answers to questions about C2C methodology. The three recommended tools each have a different data structure which supports a different category of dialog.
• #13: As the community’s orientation and professional support mechanisms become self-supporting, C2C should retreat into an internal media role, perhaps supplemented by product certification and paid professional workshops. Owning the eyeballs will allow C2C to strategically direct the community’s attention at solutions that it wants to encourage and problems that are strategic to solve.When building an internal media mechanism, C2C should partner with and build on the work of existing players, such at the creator of C2CPortal. If invited to the able early, these players should be thrilled to become part of defining a larger strategic vision. C2C’s internal media, and community engagement should be driven by someone embedded in the European communities where C2C is discussed most actively.
• #14: Ideally, the C2C website should serve as the community’s media hub. Getting community members to regularly visit the website will open up possibilities for advertising revenues and cement C2C’s position as a central thought leader. Audience can be attracted by regularly cross-posting in major sustainability blogs and publications. The effectiveness of the media apparatus should be tracked with traditional pageview and twitter metrics. Conversion rates should be tracked between these metrics and those mentioned in the previous two sections.
• #15: Hopefully this presentation can serve as a jumping-off point for further discussion. Community management is fundamentally about people, not tools, so this should be estimated as an ongoing expense in people rather than as an up-front investment. That expense could start as low as half a staff person, and feasibly grow quite large depending on what kind of revenues it can generate.I’m not the person to be running this community because I’m not a designer, I don’t speak Dutch, and I don’t live in Europe. However, I’m more than happy to help lead strategic discussion on this topic. My rate is $75/hr.