Odd question isn’t it?

I mean, surely Social Media is doing a lot for the cause, helping people spread the word via blogs, organize efforts and make everyone aware of our global climate crisis. Sarah Perez (love her stuff) even has a great post just today on How to Use Social Media for Social Change. Of course I agree, as evidenced by my early post on the Importance of Social Media and Amanda Chapel’s constant attacks against me (which I gleefully laugh at as he continues to give me more attention).

So what made me stop trying to fight my insomnia and get out of bed to write such a seemingly silly blog post at 430am this morning?

During the course of the work I have been doing with Intel lately, I have been researching the enterprise IT market and learning a lot about what they have been doing to reduce power consumption while maintaining performance across all there product lines. This CIO survey from March has some interesting details on “The Greening of IT”. It’s a very big and important topic for the industry and each of us. My friend Bill Kircos from Intel tells me that Intel is the largest buyer of reusable/renewable energy as ranked by the EPA (story on Treehugger.com). They are also extending their Greening Efforts across their operations in other important ways such as removing lead from their chips. Even my wife (Kristie Wells) is researching carbon offsets for her company Joyent.

At the same time, I have been thinking a lot about the big data portability issue (which I fully support) and whether or not the recent Facebook/Google challenge over Friend Connect might mean that we are seeing “The Twilight of the Open Web” (a topic of discussion for next months Social Media Club meeting in San Francisco - details to come).

In talking with some folks at the Executing Social Media conference last night, I mentioned this event idea and Nathan Gilliatt remarked we will always have some walled gardens and I replied with my standard “we can’t have walls, we need semi-permeable membranes”, meaning there needs to be some trust filter to keep the bad actors out and the good actors safe - which is the role Facebook claims to be playing in safegauding its users privacy from Friend Connect sites.

This is similar to the debate around Flickr and Zoomr and an open API for user portability which was basically about (paraphrasing) not allowing people to have all their data and photos transferred to a site where they may not be able to take it somewhere else in the future. As Stuart Butterfield said “we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same … fair’s fair”. Or as Marc Canter infamously said at BloggerCon IV, “If you’re gonna suck, you gotta spit“.

Now look at the great and hugely popular service that FriendFeed and SocialThing are providing, a true value for sure, but it is duplicating, and in some cases tripling the amount of storage used for the same content.

Was also thinking about TubeMogul, which Tim Street mentioned during a session yesterday and which I also happen to love. It allows you to send your video to any and all of the video sharing sites you want all at once, saving us a great deal of time in distributing our video. Of course, there are also the people who take copies of it and upload it to other servers and other sites…

So these thoughts and discussions lead to me wondering about the impact that all of this data duplication we are creating with our Social Media is creating. Multiple hard drives, redundant systems, ultimately needing to head to a landfill or get partially recycled and replaced. Perhaps it is merely distributing the consumption we would have had anyway, but I have over 8,000 photos on Flickr and if I put them on Zoomr too that would be (@3MB each) 24 GB of extra storage space I am taking up on primary systems, plus backups - then the electricity to run it all.

Jake McKee talks about how he and his wife upload the same photos to their different Flickr accounts, what if they switched and then switched again. Of course, we also have a ton of different equipment we are using for creating and consuming media. Just today I had my M-Audio podcast rig, my Flip video camera, my phone and my iPod sitting in front of me next to my 3rd iBook/MacBook. The impact of manufacturing and disposal and power consumption of all this stuff we are using is just huge.

Of course, this is, most importantly, the method through which the whole of our society is improving, growing smarter and becoming more connected.

It’s obviously ok for the storage folks bottom lines and the power company and even me as a Social Media evangelist, but is Social Media bad for the environment? Shouldn’t we all be thinking more about Storage Conservation instead of Duplication?

Yesterday, Utterz (my client) announced its new election focused social media tool, a widget you can easily place on your blog, web site or social network, that tells the world who you are supporting in the US Presidential Election.  Unlike most of the badges that are available from the main campaign Web sites that are just GIF Banner Ads, the Utterz Voice Your Support widget contains an audio message that you personally record, telling everyone why you support your candidate.

Whether you are behind Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul or even Ralph Nader, you can get a Voice Your Support widget that activates your blog readers to understand why you are supporting your candidate of choice.  When they first announced the widget on the Utterz blog yesterday, it came out with only the top 4 candidates - but listening to the feedback from everyone, they quickly added an additional 4 widget options.  In addition to Ron Paul and Ralph Nader, they added an independent option and a ‘fix the electoral college’ option.  <plug & praise> This is what I really like about the team at Utterz - they are really responsive to the community and totally focused on their users. </plug & praise>

So enough of the pimping, I want to get more into the subject matter at hand - the elction… Perhaps you saw Larry Lessig’s excellent video on why he supports Obama - this is a powerful way to move beyond static banner ads, simple blog posts, and lawn signs, to lend your real voice and your real reasons to your candidate.  As all of us social media folks know, we trust each other, more than we trust media or institutions. This new widget allows anyone, from their computer or any telephone, to record a message and display it easily for everyone to hear.  Its so cool.

As you may have already seen, I placed a Voice Your Support widget on my blog the other day, putting my support behind Obama.  Why? Well, click the play button and listen for yourself…. ok, I am waiting.  So, as you heard, I am supporting him because I think it is time for a visionary leader - someone to see beyond this mess we are in and who isn’t held down by ‘the way its always been done’.  If we keep doing it the same way, with the same insiders, playing the same game - our game called Life may soon be over. Don’t agree?  I am up for talking about it civilly - here in the comments or over at Utterz.

Tomorrow afternoon I am flying out to a very chilly Boston, MA for a couple of days of meetings with the good folks from Utterz (our new client), so I thought it might be a good time to try to meet some other Utterz users too… Chris Brogan, Simeon Margolis and hopefully a few other friends from Boston’s great Social Media Club chapter will be there, talking about how we are using Utterz and what the outlook is for Social Media/Blogging in 2008.

It’s kind of last minute (very), so it will be a pretty low key affair for a couple of drinks and maybe an informal geek dinner afterwards somewhere nearby. We will be meeting at Vox Populi on Thursday January 3 from about 6-8pm. If you are able to join us, please rsvp on the Utterz Meetup page on Upcoming, or if you don’t have an Upcoming account, you can do so here in the comments…

It’s very important that you RSVP - if the group is large instead of small, we may need to go to another nearby venue so the RSVP will give us a way to contact you

Mobile post sent by chrisheuer using Utterz. Replies. mp3

I am very happy to announce we signed an agreement between The Conversation Group and Utterz a week or so before the holidays where we will be providing Utterz with Market Relations, Marketing, Business Development and Consulting services. This is the perfect example of the types of agency services we are providing clients in the age of conversational marketing - a mix of strategy, relationship development and communications that helps an organization grow by getting closer to the markets (or more specifically, the people) they serve. Both our organizations believe we have a great opportunity to demonstrate how smart startups can effectively engage customers in the modern world.

Talking with several friends over the last few months (the blog post is still in draft), I have stressed how important it is in the modern world to really respect any company for whom you are working. Whether it is traditional PR, Advertising, Consulting, Branding or Social Media work, a true passion for a company’s products, services, employees and values is incredibly valuable in providing great service. With Utterz, I not only respect the product and the company, I am also a raving fan.

As you know from reading my blog, I have been an active Utterz user for the past 2 months since being introduced to them at BlogWorld Expo by Chris Brogan in early November. It really is the exact sort of service I was waiting for - providing an easy to use system for mobile content creation and publishing. Better still for me personally, they are at the right place in their development where some of my ideas and insights as a “Social Media Guy” can hopefully make a difference in the product development and road map. Now that I have seen a bit of what is coming, I am even more excited because they are already working on, or soon will be working on, many of the things that I really need/want as a user of the service.

In working with the some of the members of their team (Michael Bayer, Randy Corke and Simeon Margolis) over the last few weeks, I am very glad to now think of them as friends as well as colleagues - I am also extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with them, as they truly ‘get it’, which makes our job at The Conversation Group so much easier. There are too many client opportunities out there to waste our time working with people who don’t ‘get it’. I feel truly blessed that at The Conversation Group, we have such an amazing group of clients - I am even more excited, that we get to contribute to the growth of a great company like Utterz...

BTW - this post is intended as both an announcement and a disclosure