Visualizing A Green Network

February 17, 2009

Richard Seireeni
President
The Brand Architect Group

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There’s a vast and growing network that supplies partners, support and a market for aspiring green brands. I discovered this network in the process of interviewing America’s top green business leaders for my new book, The Gort Cloud. Very few of these companies were using traditional media. Instead, they were using direct outreach to the green community to develop awareness and sales. Because I have this terrible habit of giving my clients’ projects odd but memorable names, I couldn’t help doing the same here. I named this network the gort cloud, but more on that later.

The gort cloud consists of publications, like Environmental Leader. It also includes green academics, business organizations, NGOs, certifying agencies, special interest groups, green tech, trendspotters, green retailers and, ultimately, eco-conscious consumers. A quick look at this chart illustrates how individuals and organizations are arranged by function and how they interact and support each other.

Click for full-size

This is where an ecopreneur can find investment partners, technical advice, product evaluation, distributors, and customers. While the gort cloud is facilitated by personal contacts as well as by the Internet, the opportunities to make use of modern social media techniques to increase outreach should be obvious. All the tricks of Web 2.0 can be found at work here.

To illustrate the network’s ability to promote viral awareness of a new green product idea, I commissioned software artist Burak Arikan to create a gort cloud network simulation. This simulation imagines the spread of awareness in a new product idea beginning with a post on Treehugger and then spreading to green news organizations like this one and then off and throughout the many nodes and clusters within the gort cloud.

While traditional media is pay-to-play, the gort cloud is driven by the currency of truth and a common desire to increase the number of earth-friendly products. All of this is overseen by an academic-style peer review process that vets out greenwashers, but – and this is important – this network is entirely self-replicating and uncontrolled.

So back to the name, gort. It comes from the Oort Cloud, a vast stellar debris field orbiting the earth far beyond Pluto. We know the mass is large, but we don’t know how large. We know that the pieces are tiny, like dust, yet this invisible mass has enormous implications for earth because this is where comets come from. The gort cloud is similar. It is a vast, interconnected but invisible network that is giving birth to the Age of Sustainability.

That’s an impact we can look to without apprehension.

Richard Seireeni is president of The Brand Architect Group, Los Angeles, a strategic brand consultancy with affiliated offices in Tokyo and Shanghai. Seireeni is the author of The Gort Cloud that describes the invisible network that is powering today’s most successful green brands.

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Reader Comments

In support of the green movement, http://www.allcities.org will be starting a monthly Green Business Networking Group in Santa Monica, CA, starting April. For more information, contact Michael Miller, moderator, at mmiller@cfo911solutions.com.

Michael Miller | February 21st, 2009

Very cool. How did you put the data together? The visualization is great too. Was it generated from the data? I’d love to hear more about the tools!

Marty | March 12th, 2009