Dell's Integrated Approach to Green

Dell continues to be a leader in the corporate sustainability space, recently announcing that it plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions from its facilities by 40% by 2015. And that's after announcing it went carbon neutral awhile back. Good stuff on the corporate end. And they're doing plenty on the product end (often with my employer's client AMD) to tap into consumer demand and keep up with the Joneses.

From a marcoms perspective, it's pretty integrated in its approach to the topic, which is impressive and shows is this isn't just sitting in the CSR group, where it tends to have less power to change the business.

For my quick review, I started with a Yahoo! search for "Dell sustainability," which gave me its sustainability report. Not the most interactive thing and it sits outside of other marketing efforts; I'd rather have a microsite come up that ties it all together and hopefully generates some sales leads at the same time. And a search for "Dell green" was pretty worthless.

But a Google Search gives us Dell Earth, the microsite that pulls it together, which also has a link to another microsite, where the ReGeneration concept comes to life a bit more, with a further link to a Facebook group (adminned by Dell guy) with almost 1,200 members and some good interactivity. Nice use of social web to bring it all together. But it's missing an opportunity with the Yahoo! search community (and Live.com, which returns results focused on the government vertical).

To round out the communcations channels, a search for "green" on the Dell YouTube channel brings up dozens of vids, which is great in this time of video obsession. I don't see any green-specific groups on Twitter (though it's advanced in other areas such as @IdeaStorm and @Digital_Nomads campaigns). And there's a section called The ReGeneration on Flickr and a Green Room forum, but both of those are pretty limited.

All in all, Dell is doing a great job shifting its business toward sustainability and communicating and creating community around the topic across multiple channels.