“I’m ashamed to say I own an iPhone.”

My husband said that to me as we started through Salt Lake City’s airport on Jan. 26th, making a connection from Seattle to New Orleans. He’d just asked if I’d read The New York Times “In China, the Human Costs That Are Built Into an iPad“ article on Apple’s manufacturing in China, which he’d finished inflight. I’d read it at breakfast before heading to SeaTac.

I had to agree with him. Particularly since I don’t just own an iPhone, but also an iPad, an iMac, and a brand spanking new MacBook Air. Kind of an Apple gal. I think I’m on my third iPhone. If you admire innovation and products designed to work really well for their customers, it’s tough not to like Apple. But if you want to support companies you believe are doing the right thing in the big picture, it’s tough to like them. And that’s my problem: I do both.

I try really hard to be the change I want to see. I believe the most powerful vote I have is my dollar. The gadget girl in me was long been in conflict with the green girl. I love cool new technology. My top concern in life is the environment. I know replacing stuff with ever newer and more complex stuff is bad for the planet. I know taking my old electronics to recycling does not compensate for my consumption. I know there’s a reason the slogan goes on the order of “reduce, reuse, recycle.”

The entire consumer electronics industry is built on people utterly ignoring that mantra. Apple, in particular, encourages customers to discard the old to make way for the new by practically forcing it.  I’ve held on to Windows computers for ages, limping through upgrades that have kept machines on life support until I finally couldn’t take it any more. That’s much tougher with Apples.

My Apple addiction was glaring me in the face. Did I need to march straight back to the Apple store when I got home and return my MacBook?

It wasn’t that I was oblivious to some of Apple’s bad press from China before the New York Times series. I read a lot of news. I knew about the explosions. I’d heard complaints. I’d wondered if I was doing the right thing buying Apple. But was any brand truly better? Everything’s made in China, right?

Practically speaking, yes. (By the way, if you want even more insight into the working conditions in China, read Paul Midler’s ”Poorly Made in China.” I picked it up at the suggestion of an investor friend who’d just been there.) So this conundrum is one every consumer electronics purchaser faces. The Sustainable Business Forum published a very strong piece on this Feb. 6th called “Apple’s China Problem — And Ours.”  This is not, Marc Gunther writes, an Apple problem. It’s our problem.

In 2003, Kogan Page published a book called “Beyond Branding,” edited by Nicholas Ind. It’s been years since I read it, but as I recall, the basic premise is that brands must adopt a wider social perspective to remain relevant to a public expecting integrity and transparency. I hadn’t realized that businesses, at the time the book was penned, accounted for 51 of the largest 100 economic entities in the world. (Another factoid from Sustainable Business Forum‘s article: Foxconn, one of Apple’s biggest manufacturers, employs 1.2 MILLION people!) Granted, the authors weren’t expecting change overnight, but here we are, nine years later, having endured the financial industry meltdown and watched in horror as oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico with seemingly little changed.

But it can, if we accept that it’s our problem.

Customers and shareholders are powerful entities when they mass. I’d love to see Apple provide some leadership here. It is one of the most powerful brands in the world. Its profit margins per employee leave plenty of room to return great shareholder value AND do good — something the company’s more or less ignored throughout its history. But Apple need to know its customers care. So we have to act, too. We can’t continually demand more and more for less and less without recognizing the consequences of our consumption. Constantly demanding more for less means screwing somebody, and if not somebody than something, like the planet.

Why are we as consumers okay with that? Can’t we do better, too?

One of the most basic tasks in creating a crisis communications plan — something I’ve eternally advocated every organization of every size should have — is thinking through a whole bunch of “what if?” scenarios. If you cut through all the crap and get right down to it, threats to a brand’s reputation typically fall into just two categories: 1) ones thrown at you out of the blue (remember how “going Postal” originated) and 2) ones you really should have anticipated. For Komen, this was one of the latter. It all could have been avoided by having the right people at the table asking “what if?”

There are tremendous lessons to be learned here for any organization dealing with a potentially divisive or high impact decision.

Lesson #1: Get Specific

One size never has and never will fit all. Major decisions require extensive debate. The Komen leadership team clearly should have spent more time debating what constituted an”investigation.” Let’s face it. Examples, including some extreme ones, should have been put on the table and played out as potential scenarios to understand how tough it could be to manage those situations and how those various scenarios would affect Komen’s brand reputation. Had the leadership team done this with diligence, I’m willing to bet they would have seen this type of situation coming and would have articulated a detailed list of either specific types of investigations or specific investigative bodies within the policy itself. Spend the time to debate through a series of “what if” scenarios to make sure you know how the policy you’re about to set could play out in when implemented.

Lesson #2: Put Yourselves in Others’ Shoes

Komen’s decision to apply its new “no investigations” policy to Planned Parenthood was a second opportunity to really think this through. Apparently, that again didn’t happen. There was no possibility that Planned Parenthood wasn’t going to make a huge deal out of Komen’s decision to stop their grants. This is a difficult fundraising environment, we’re talking about a lot of money, and the grants funded a vital service — breast exams for women with no other service option.  Komen has no excuse for not anticipating Planned Parenthood’s response. All they had to do to anticipate it was think. Every organization should have a standard procedure for announcing big decisions internally and externally and a strick rule the procedure be followed without exception. That standard procedure should always include developing a Q&A to help prepare spokespeople. Even the simple act of creating the questions would have prepared Komen for the inevitability of what happened here. There’s really no excuse for being blindsided by something obvious.

Lesson #3: Get Out In Front of News

Never, ever let someone else frame your news when it has implications for your brand’s reputation. Orchestrate it with the same diligence you plan an enormous event — like the Run for The Cure. Prepare your spokesperson to handle the obvious and nasty questions. And then break it yourself so you have a chance to position the news. Otherwise, you look like a deer in headlights, which just proves to the world that you hadn’t thought your decision through and weren’t in the last bit prepared. Just like Komen.

The story is about an upcoming documentary film from American Craig Rosebraugh that “highlights the ‘influence, deceit and corruption’ of fossil fuel industry.” YouTube clips preview some of the interviews the film will contain. Smart previewing.

What a perfect excuse for a follow up to my Jan. 14th post on FUD!

You remember FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt. It’s a natural reaction to the new, the unknown, the untried, the different. We may not like the status quo, but we know it. “The devil you know …” attitude. It’s one of the hurdles blocking the way to change of any kind.

Anyone marketing innovative ideas battles FUD. Sometimes, marketers that benefit from the status quo intentionally leverage that. Most of the time, those marketers are just trying to protect market share. In this case, the battle is more fundamental. If a majority of developed nations’ citizens agreed burning fossil fuels is a primary cause of global warming and that we have to act now to mitigate the resulting climate change — and actually did act right now — then the mega companies that make up the fossil fuel industry would soon be penning their own epitaphs instead of writing annual reports touting their stunning profits.

They’re fighting for survival. Surviving often requires fitting dirty. That’s exactly what the fossil fuel industry is doing. And they’ve got an enormous war chest to finance the battle.  They’re even taking the fight into the U.S. public school system. Check out this New Scientist story, US Education Advocates Tackle Climate Change Skeptics, to get the dirt.

Why, then, is it surprising that they’re spending a fortune creating FUD around global warming? It’s a very effective strategy.

If you’re a clean tech entrepreneur, a politician, a philanthropist or an environmental activist, the problem is a tough one: how do you battle an unscrupulous street fighter?

It takes commitment, tenacity and unfortunately time. It’s the same scenario we saw play out with Big Tobacco. It took decades just to get warning labels on cigarette packages. A lot of bad things happened to individuals during those decades. This time the extinction of myriad species and the livability of the planet may be at stake. We don’t have decades to defeat these war lords.

You expected me to tell you how to do this, didn’t you? I wish I knew with certainty. We’re all a bunch of little, semi-organized Davids fighting a team of Goliaths. There are so many battle fronts. I’m beginning to come around to the view of Gernot Wagner, author of “But Will the Planet Notice?” He essentially argues that our most effective battle plan may be to get market dynamics involved. We need to put a price on greenhouse gases. If we could do that would it no longer matter if people “believed” in climate change or global warming? Could we get the behavior change we need without having to change attitudes?

What do you think?

I’m only sympathetic to a point. Yes, people should be able to share pictures and comments and such with their inner circle using available technology, and no, subterfuge (it seems some investigators used by companies to check out candidates use pretty unscrupulous methods to penetrate candidates’ inner circles to check them out) is not acceptable. But that’s where my sympathy stops. Three reasons for that:

1) This subject gets discussed a fair amount; it shouldn’t really be breaking news to anyone by now. Facebook even warns Facebook users about privacy and sharing.

2) One privacy advocate compared searching a candidate’s social network postings to asking to read a candidate’s personal diary and called it an infringement on free speech. It’s not a personal diary. People don’t open social network accounts to keep a personal diary. Few do it to keep in touch with a tight circle of friends or family members. No one actually has hundreds of close personal friends. And where’s the free speech connection? No one’s saying people can’t post what they want. They’re just acknowledging there are consequences. Just like there could be consequences of my standing on the corner of 1st & Pine trying to convince people to care about what I care about. Someone who knows me and disagrees with my position could be in the crowd going by and could decide they’ll never do business with me again. We’d both be well within our rights.

One example cited by a source was a person wearing a blatantly racist tee-shirt in a photograph posted online. That the person would be willing to wear the shirt under any circumstance, much less be photographed wearing it, says a lot about that person — about both their attitudes and awareness.

3) But most important from my vantage point is that each of us is responsible for managing our personal reputations — our personal brands — everywhere and that includes online. And it’s a concept we should be introducing kids to when they’re young, before they do really stupid things online that would damage their brand.

It’s like the guy I saw quoted on the local news this week as Olympia, Wash., was being buried under a foot of snow. “A little common sense goes a long way, people.” I have no idea who he was, but I love his quote! The same applies online. A little common sense goes a long way.

More analogous than the diary thing to me is this question: What would you be willing to share with your family or friends where strangers could overhear all or part of your conversation or catch a glimpse of the photo you’re sharing? You may intend to only share the information with a select few, but if you stop and think about it a nanosecond, you realize you’ve got an unintended audience and if you’ve got any common sense, you censor the sharing accordingly. You never know who might be within earshot.

A little common sense goes a long way, people.

Long pause. “Yes …”

“As in, ‘very one-of-a-kind’?”

Shorter pause. “Yes.” Another pause. “Unique means one of a kind.”

“Yes …” my turn to drag out the word.

“That would be redundant then.”

“Yes!”

“’Truly’ would be more appropriate.”

“’Truly’ would be fine if you want emphasis.”

Genuinely perhaps more so. We’ve all got our pet peeves. I have no idea why this is one of mine. But it is. Genuinely.

Thursday’s Environmental blog from The Guardian opened with this paragraph:

2012 has begun where 2011 left off with weird weather in Europe and the Americas, Arctic ice at almost its lowest extent ever recorded in midwinter, disastrous droughts and searing heat in Africa and Latin America, and one of the world’s biggest insurance companies warning that climate change will increase damages.

Friday’s New York Times featured photos of Jan. ’11′s snow-covered Central Park and this month’s grassy green lawn. And then there’s the 18 feet of snow in Alaska. There’s a reason some call global warming “global weirding.” Who knows what we’re in for?

My apologies to those still subscribing. Bet you’ve been wondering where in the hell I’ve been.

All that great advice about blocking out time to write, writing several posts at a time, writing evergreen content people value … . I thought all of it sage and important then promptly ignored it because it was write or meet a client deadline; or write or teach; or write or sleep; or write or eat.  Which is to say that if I’d taken that sage advice and written a few good how-to pieces, I could’ve still been publishing despite it all.

I originally went to college to be a reporter. Took all the journalism courses. Worked as a beat reporter and then feature writer on the university paper. I switched to a PR emphasis my sophomore year and went for marketing my junior year, but the training remains. I’m always grateful for it and in fact have lived by that news judgement a great deal of my career. But I’m fighting it now because I want to write timely pieces, not evergreen pieces. I want to interview people and write their stories of entrepreneurial marketing, clean tech innovation and environmental brilliance. I need to retrain me.

The Clarity Blog will not flatline! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I can be retrained. I will be writing regularly again soon. Promise.

Melissa also mentioned an ebook analysis I’ve written about before. I’d discovered the analysis through Conservation Magazine, a favorite of mine, but it originated in a New York Times op-ed piece written by the folks who did the analysis, Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris, both well known names and leaders in LCA work. Norris founded the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, which is a tremendous resource (check out this LCA on algae biodiesel as an example).

When I wrote about the e-reader analysis in July, I noted that you needed to read 40-50 books a year to make an e-reader the better choice over paper books, based on the report in Conservation Magazine. Melissa commented that if we took greenhouse gas emissions into account, it was actually 100 books. If we looked at human impact, it was somewhere in between those two numbers. My iPad is a lot more than an e-reader to me, but I still glanced at it guiltily.

Since Melissa works with the building industry, the whole conversation reminded me of a TEDTalk I really enjoyed a while back, so I want hunting. It’s Catherine Mohr on building green and I think it’s great! It playfully but powerfully demonstrates that obvious answers for what’s the “greenest” choice is often very wrong. Or as she puts it: “Sometimes the things you least expect … have a bigger impact than any of those things you’re trying to optimize.”

The next morning, I spotted a story from dexigner.com on how the Cascadia Green Building Council had commissioned an LCA study on the “Environmental Impacts of Wastewater Treatment Strategies” and had just released the report. It’s a good read for anyone connected to the building industry or anyone who just wants to get a handle on what a life cycle analysis can uncover.

From a marketing perspective, a life cycle analysis does two things: 1) it’s an insurance policy that you know the up and downsides of your product before a competitor figures them out and uses the latter against you, and 2) assuming you do well in the analysis, it’s a grabbag of positive messages you can take to the market. From a business plan perspective, it’s an insurance policy to demonstrate you know the risk associated with your business and a grabbag of positive messages to take to investors, employees and business partners.

The trick for cleantech and other green entrepreneurs is the cost. Conducting LCA is pricey. For startups, a true LCA may be out of reach. But you can still do a significant amount of digging for data, look for comparables in your industry or adjacent ones, and make informed decisions. You can get a primer on life cycle assessment on the EPA’s website and well as a list of resources to serve as a starting point for research life cycle assessment on any product or service category.

Get as smart as you can about the potential environmental impact of your products or services. It’s smart business.

I was reviewing a batch of resumes last week for a client who’s hiring a communications intern. It’s a paid position, so there are lots of applications. The intern will be responsible for social media, writing, blogging and blog management and PR. I think it’ll be great experience for the intern!

I was totally blown away by some of the applicants and a bit dumbfounded (if you can be that in degrees) by others. Only two of the applicants followed the client organization on Twitter. The same two had liked the organization’s Facebook page. If the job you’re applying for includes social media, checking out the hiring organization’s social profiles and following them seems like low-hanging fruit for scoring points. It doesn’t matter that you just did it. It shows you’re paying attention. Little things do get noticed.

When the job involves writing for the hiring organization, makes sure yours is good! Carefully proof read your letter and resume. One resume looked promising to me, but the applicant used “lead” where she should have used “led,” the past tense of lead. “Lead” pronounced “led” is a heavy metal you want to avoid in paint and such. The English language has lots of those little traps. You should know them.

That led me to think maybe I should write about this in the hope of helping others seeking entry level positions. So here are my 5 tips:

1. Assume you’ll be checked out online. I made the first cut strictly on resumes. If the resume didn’t make me become interested in the candidate, I went no further with them. The next step was Google and from there Facebook and Twitter. One candidate had a profile on about.me with links to all her social media profiles. Smart.
2. Save the hiring manager time. Assuming you’ll be checked out online, you can do the hiring manager a favor by giving them links to all the places they will find you: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (if you don’t have a profile there and your job hunting, get one! It’s an online resume) and wherever else you may be. It shows you get it and favors rarely go unnoticed. Also realize internships aren’t about teaching you; that’s what school is for. Internships are about getting real-world experience. Some cover letters talked about how interested candidates were learning about social media or public relations. But we need interns who can DO social media and public relations tasks with little direction. You, the candidate, have to walk in with the core skills. The internship is a chance to build upon them and gain great references.
3. Understand there’s nothing social about social media. That tip is courtesy of Jenni Hogan.  One candidate’s Twitter account followed a few dozen celebrities. I guess that’d be good if she was applying at Hollywood Reporter, but it doesn’t help us. Despite warnings being written in a lot of different places, I still found most candidates to use Facebook for connecting with real friends with no regard to how they’d look to potential hirers. The picture you chose for your profile says more about you than you may think. So choose it with purpose.
4. You are a brand. Just like Nordstrom and Microsoft and REI. And just like any brand, your brand needs to be managed carefully to have the greatest value. If you Google your own name, what comes up? How many of the results on the first page are really you? And are ones that show up ones you want potential employers to see? Think about what messages you are sending about yourself. You will never be associated with a brand that’s more valuable to you than your own. Manage it wisely.
5. Go after THAT job. Do your research. Understand what the organization will need from this hire. Tailor not just your cover letter but your resume. It’s all electronic so how hard can that be? When you can demonstrate some knowledge about the organization and make yourself relevant to the hiring manager or screener, you’ll stand out. If you’re really not interested, don’t apply. You’re wasting both your time and the screener’s. Besides, why set yourself up for another rejection letter? Apply for positions you truly want and then really go after them.