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Ok. I’ll admit as many of us probably would, I’ve contributed my fair share of ignorant tweets. Fortunately, I’m still plankton on the twitter food chain and mine go unnoticed. But, what about when someone is tweeting on behalf of their company? And what if these tweets are aggressive, pushy sales pitches that are full of ignorance and stupidity? Should we simply ignore these 122 characters of crap that was flung at us without warning or do we sling it right back in hopes that it will never return? My answer? I hope you have your goggles on @sashabaksht and @greenscroll!

It went down like this:

@eyecatchaz (Me):

Gonna move my sites and clients sites over to window and sun powered hosting next month.http://bit.ly/7ygWu8

(What the heck is “window powered”… please excuse my lame typo. Yah, I can’t even proofread 140 characters)

@SashaBaksht

@eyecatchaz Why look for "cheap quality" green hosting? Stay with your trusted hosting and green your website @greenscroll

Ok. “@SashaBaksht, do you I know you”, I asked myself? “Well, no. I wonder why you felt inclined to tell me not too look for ‘cheap quality’ hosting. I want make sure my site is green. You say ‘green your website with @greenscroll’. What does that mean?”

After I was finished talking to myself, I went on over to greenscroll.org and quickly learned that greenscroll has an interest in promoting green technology, but how is greenscroll going to ‘green my site’. Here’s how. I give greenscroll money and then greenscroll invests that money in green technology. But greenscrool is NOT a green hosting provider or a hosting provider by any means.

@eyecatchaz:

@SashaBaksht Baah. That logic's lame. The move for green hosting is huge. I'd rather do my part than pay you to do my part.

@sashabaksht:

@eyecatchaz Not sure if I got it.

After that I had another response saying that less code, controlling file size, and good cache control are going to green my site more than @greenscroll. So, the question is? How does @greenscroll “green your site”?

@Greenscroll has a little pledge suggestion page where you enter in your domain name and then a few seconds later you are given a suggestion monthly pledge amount. You can even put a “greenscroll certified” image on your site.

Really? That’s how you are going to green my site?

Serious @greenscroll. Hire a marketing professional to help you craft quality headlines. I’d let this go if this was one instance. But @sashabaksht, @greenscroll, @Suleymani and @nikolaib (all Greenscroll employees) have said this 10 times since January 12 (create a tweetdeck column or use online twitter phrase trackers to find this out). And Google shows that you were saying this as far back as Nov 2009. So, you obviously believe what you are saying. And that’s why I am going to try and kindly tell you why this wins the ignorant tweet of the week.

1. “Why look for ‘cheap quality’ green hosting?”

What the heck is that supposed to mean? You are a non-profit with the goal to PROMOTE green technology! And why do you assume that some of these hosts are “cheap quality”? What makes a host “cheap quality”? I’ll take cheap quality pure solar/wind power hosting over the expensive coal burning kind.

The energy consumed by data center servers and related infrastructure equipment in the United States and worldwide doubled between 2000 and 2005, according to a new study. Did you know that the electricity consumed by data centers (where servers are stored) globally is equivalent to the production of 14 coal fired 1,000-megawatt power plants? (source. To give you some idea of how much electricity that is; a 1000-megawatt power plant can service the needs of a city the size of Boston or Seattle! When you take into account that traditional coal fired electricity generation spews around 1,970 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per megawatt-hour, you can get some idea of just how much an impact the hosting industry must have on global warming. Aside from the carbon dioxide, the main offender when it comes to global warming, coal power also generates other poisonous emissions such as mercury and sulfur dioxide.

Large companies like Google and Microsoft are spending a fortune on implementing green data centers. So, it is a big deal. check it out.

I did some digging on your site and you have a “soft” encouragement to host green. Your host, Slicehost is definitely a top-notch host when it comes to reliability (IP Address: 174.143.245.156, a Slicehost IP address). But they are not green. I wouldn’t expect you to leave your host for a “cheap quality” green one though. I will ask you to edit your article on http://www.greenscroll.org/solution.html that references your “support” for green hosting.

And the tweet that you recently sent me, I’m confused there too. You are virtually powered by green energy? Except that the web host for your site is not green.

@eyecatchaz We do teach consumers to get used "green web" NOW. Greenscrolled site is virtually powered by green energy.

2. “Stay with your trusted hosting and green your website @greenscroll”

Again what the heck does that even mean? If I’m looking for green hosting, that assumes that my current hosting isn’t green. My criteria for switching from “host non-green” to “host green” is because I WANT TO GO GREEN. Until @greenscroll is a green hosting provider, you are irrelevant to why I leave or not leave my non-green host.

Here is the real humor. You are investing money in green technology. Dude! Wind and solar power are both green technology and it are already being used by large data centers. I can either use this technology now or pay you to go invest? Sounds like technology is beating you to the punch. What you do give me is a “Greenscroll Certified” button, because I pay you $5 a month? I believe this is deceitful to consumers who care about green and often give business to a company when that company has some evidence of being green. You are offering companies the “look” of green without any evidence thereof. They have to do NOTHING to do to be green except pay you.
Even my young daughter knows that you are responsible for your own choices. You can’t let someone else be responsible for you.

Conclusion: I know that my small, miniscule band-width of data-transfer on my site and that of existing and future clients is not extremely huge. But if thousands of small sites like mine decided to move to green hosting, that’s not a bad thing is it?
I will also note that I use an Apple Macbook for my machine and my storage back-up is using the Fantom Green-drive. There are other saving areas I have in place that I won’t mention here… that’s not the point. I do hope you choose a new tactic to drive and fund your cause; one that doesn’t shoot it in the foot or reek with ignorance.

Do you remember that first blog post you wrote … the one that you typed with great anticipation only minutes after your site was up and running? “Hello World. Welcome to my site. This is my blog” or something of that nature. A few days later, after the dust had settled on your first debut with your first four readers (your parents, spouse and you), you found that next entry not so easy. What do I say? What will entice my audience of four to return. What narrative can can play sequel to that first blogger-coming-out announcement?

That is how I felt about 10 minutes ago

My blog has sat here for about two months now with its “Hello World” blog announcement growing more stale each day. I tell ya. I’ve actually felt stressed about finding something to write about. First, does anybody care what I say? Well, no. Second, if they don’t care, do I care? Well, no. And then ten minutes ago, as I was catching up from some of today’s tweets in my Tweetdeck “People I wish I was as smart as” column I saw a random posting with the handle @aaronpost referenced in it. Ok. Another stranger I don’t know… but ah, his site in his profile… www.spunch.it? That sounds interesting. And it was. It is (this is the point where 2 of my four readers just left my blog to click that link. And they won’t return).

I’ll stop with the full play-by-play narrative. Long-story-not-short-enough, I clicked the link and found this really great site. I now had my first inspiration for a blog post. I wasn’t looking for ideas. This one caught me by surprise. I know that a blog can’t be forced. I’m not a writer of the fabulous breed (“did he just use the word fabulous as an adjectival modifier of the prepositional object modifier of the direct object ‘writer’.. that was horrible”); however, I know that great, no good, ok… I know that marginally decent blogs are best read when the author is pumped up about what he or she is writing about. And, well, I’m really fired up about this post and that’s because I’m really pumped up about twitter. I’m amazed at how long I went without it and how much I still don’t know about it. Even more, I’m amazed at how many businesses and technophiles are still ignoring it.

All companies say they listen to their customers, but do they really LISTEN and let people know that they are listening
SPUNCH Social Tip #22

Spunch is one of those applications that I believe separates the real listeners from those who only say they are listening… because really, that’s what twitter is all about… there’s lots of talking/”tweeting”, but what really matters is who is listening. Companies spend large percentages of their marketing on talking. Before social media really took flight, consumers didn’t have the kind of talk-back that they do now. The new business for new media in this next decade will be not as much as what you say, but how much you can listen. Listening is always hard, because we don’t always hear what we want to hear (like these companies in this video on youtube). Fortunately some of these companies were able to hear and respond. SPUNCH allows another form of response for companies willing to listen… a chance to reward those customer customers who are talking and who’s talk is positive.

So, there you go. That’s my first post. Checkout SPUNCH at http://spunch.it/ and follow @aaronpost while you are at it. If you made it this far through this blog, I’d appreciate it if you ret-weeted this post. My parents and spouse aren’t on twitter yet so I’m counting on you to help me grow my audience.

Thanks!

Corey White