Social media, entrepreneurship and waste

Sometimes it's fun to grab three apparently dissonant ideas and rub them together. So here we go: social media, entrepreneurship and waste.

If we take social media and entrepreneurship as orbiting waste, then the two almost contradict what we currently do.

A common thing in rubbish is to have an education campaign. This goes something like this: an educator prepares a waste minimisation or recycling message, delivers it, and then perhaps measures the effectiveness of that delivery a while later. It is a megaphone. It is not a social media.

Instead, social media would require the educator to be educated as much as he/she educates. Social media in waste management would involve creating the space where a community can speak with itself, and the educator becomes facilitator. This space is, so far, unmapped. It has remained so for fear of "blow back", where the failings of the host organisation are reverberated and amplified through the community until the host reputation is shattered. The Western Earth Carers is feeling its way through the space through a series of facebook pages: Western Earth Carers and Plastic Free July. Together with twitter feeds, this is not for the faint hearted. However, it has been quite amazing thus far.

Throw entrepreneurship into the mix, and it gets even more interesting. For me, this is where social media starts to move outside the realm of communication, education and facilitating community action, and begins to move into the realm of building up new businesses. Nimble business, with social media at their core, in the field of waste management.

I'm not sure what this looks like exactly, but suspect it is the space between people taking personal action for the environment, and business doing things environmental things for people. I think it is people enabling businesses who enable people. It might manifest in viral campaigns to drive a particular business model around the environment, perhaps "gamification" of some environmental activity, maybe a deeply personalised waste service.

To get to this point, I suspect there is a fair amount of design work to enable network effects to be unleashed for a business. A lot of thinking is needed to understand what might actually resonate, and how. It must be driven by ethics rather than morality (a future blog surely rests on ethics and morality in waste management).

There needs an immense amount of authenticity - the bullshit detector runs red-hot when people can see everything you do. But it is only by seeing what you do that people trust to engage their own passions around "your" cause. And only then can this precious space at the intersection of three dissonant concepts form and thrive.

You don't know quite how this space will turn out, or even if it will form at all. It is a bit like the "scenius" described by The Technium in "Scenius, or communal genius". A bit different too, but the idea is that it erupts when the conditions are right, and also easily dissipates where it is forced into formality.

So they are my thoughts. I'd like to develop them further over the coming months, and would love any comments or suggestions for further reading, case studies, ideas.