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If you think 43 cars going hundreds of miles as fast as they can week after week would create a lot of waste, you would be right. The good thing is that about 4 years ago NASCAR realized the same thing and, with a growing concern over environmental issues and the sustainability of resources, they decided to do something about it. Don’t worry if you’re a NASCAR fan: things are still the same! You still get to watch your favorite drivers get out on the track and do what they do best but, behind the scenes, NASCAR has taken some huge steps towards making NASCAR one of the greenest professional sports organizations in the world.

What makes NASCAR’s effort to become a leader in sustainability and eco-friendly behavior so prolific is the pure scope of what they are trying to implement. NASCAR is arguably one of the least green activities on the planet and, in spite of that, NASCAR has re-examined the core aspects of their sport and business, from the smallest aspect to the largest, to find every opportunity they could to make changes for the better. This change has become a mantra for NASCAR but it has also begun to permeate through to NASCAR partners, sponsors and teams.

In the last 4 years, NASCAR has done a wide range of things to be better stewards for the environment including switching to a more ecofriendly fuel, starting a tree planting program that off-sets 100% of the carbon emissions from a race and creating the largest recycling program on sports by partnering Coca-Cola, Coors Light, Saftey-Kleen and Creative Recycling. One of the most impressive projects that was accomplished in relation to the NASCAR Green program was the massive solar field erected at Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania. In the course of 3 months in 2010, NASCAR installed over 40,000 American-made solar panels on 25 acres of track land. These 40,000 solar panels create enough energy to not only provide all the needed power for the race track but also provide enough energy to power almost 1,000 homes in the surrounding area.

The future looks bright for NASCAR Green as they are constantly looking for new ways to improve their programs and promote new and more effective technology. You can see the latest example of this progress as Ford unveiled the first all-electric pace car (the Ford Focus Electric) at Richmond International Raceway’s Nationwide and Sprint Cup Series races on Friday, April 27 and Saturday, April 28. (Ford was also the first manufacturer to use a hybrid pace car in 2008.)

[Ed. note: While no one took pictures to serve as "official documentation," I was able to snap this photo of the two EV pace cars after I drove one of them 3 laps at RIR last Wednesday! I made it up to a whole 60mph - only because I was scared to death on the turns, especially the inclined turn - was able to secure a 90% braking efficiency score!]

NASCAR has made large strides in its efforts to promote sustainability initiatives, truly driving on a path to a World of Good. For more information about NASCAR Green’s initiatives, visit NASCAR.com and read its white paper.

 Written with assistance from Pulsar’s newest Richmond intern, Travis Oliver.

This is a reprint from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, written by Pulsar team member Sande Snead last year to support her brother-in-law’s efforts to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The blood cancer disease struck another Pulsar team member’s family this year, and Sande is taking up the torch as a candidate for 2012 Virginia Chapter Woman of the Year. Please go to http://va.mwoy.llsevent.org/sandesnead to read her story.

When my brother-in-law, Kevin Shimp, was nominated for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s 2011 Virginia Chapter Man of the Year, it had special meaning for my family.

About three years ago, my father, Billy Snead, was diagnosed with leukemia.

Leukemia is a type of cancer that develops when blood cells produced in the bone marrow grow out of control.

My father spent about 30 days at the VCU Medical Center, then underwent more treatments, shots, pills and chemotherapy than any human being should have to endure. At times, he seemed to be nearly at death’s door between lost weight, appetite and really interest in living. However, after months of superior medical care and love, support and prayers of friends and family, especially my mother, he was in remission.

Despite this near miracle, Kevin was a reluctant candidate for Man of the Year. The registered nurse at VCU Health Systems is clinical coordinator of the inpatient bone marrow transplant unit, is a full-time Master’s degree candidate at U.Va., and father to two busy teens. He hardly had the time to take on a nearly full-time fund raising job to vie for the title of Man of the Year. But it’s a cause he believes in, so he took up the challenge.

The male and female candidates who raise the most money are awarded the title of the Virginia Chapter’s Man and Woman of the Year. They raise funds for blood cancer research in honor of local young people who are blood cancer survivors – the Young Man and the Young Lady of the Year.

Kevin held benefit nights at local restaurants and at The Byrd, asked for auction items and solicited corporate sponsorships as well as donations from friends and family. Tragically, in the midst of the 10-week fundraising campaign, his own father, John Shimp, died of complications due to diabetes. And so, grief-stricken, Kevin packed up his entire family, and headed to New Jersey to help his devastated mother deal with the loss of the man she had been married to for 47 years. After spending a full week in his hometown of Piles Grove, NJ, helping with funeral arrangements and notifying family and friends, Kevin came back to Richmond for yet another fundraiser just two days after burying his father.

When Kevin was named the 2011 Man of the Year for the Virginia Chapter of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society on May 13, his heartfelt speech mentioned how a co-worker responded to his first email request for support within seconds. And when he said that the first family member who responded was his father, there weren’t too many dry eyes in the house. When he added that we also found out during the course of this campaign, that my father’s leukemia is no longer in remission, even he couldn’t help but shed a tear.

It’s tough to be the brother-in-law in a family with three strong (and strong-willed) sisters, and while we have all always admired his drive, determination and work ethic, I dare say we have a newfound respect for this most remarkable Man of the Year.

To make a donation to Sande’s campaign for 2012 Leukemia & Lymphoma Woman of the Year, go to http://va.mwoy.llsevent.org/sandesnead

By Arline Vezina, Sr. Print Production Manager 
There’s that one day in the year when every American—regardless of their ethnicity, creed or religion—seems to find something green to wear in honor of St. Patrick and his may-as-well-be-true act of banishing the snakes from Ireland. (You may — or may not — remember it this past weekend…) But, for all marketing departments and agencies around the world, going green can be an easy everyday trend, as long as you know the facts about eco-friendly promotional products!

At an Advertising Production Association of Los Angeles meeting in January, 2011, Rebecca Mincarelli, representing Advent Packaging at the time, gave an overview to on purchasing promotional products with the environment in mind, and to promote and support responsible usage.

First, and most importantly: Do your research! Call your reps about green items. Where are they made, and most importantly what are they made of? Are they cotton or wheat-based? If they come from China could the materials contain lead or other toxic materials? What is the composition percentage of recycled material and post-consumer waste?

Rebecca provided a great brochure “A Guide to Sustainability—Recycling—Reusing—Saving Energy.”  Their pledge is to minimize the impact promotional products have on our planet and they will choose vendors with American Made products first.

Listed in their brochure are some environmentally friendly products. Products such as:

• Bamboo—used in everything from clothing and kitchen accessories to writing instruments.
• Bonded Leather—an affordable and eco-friendly option made from recycled leather scraps which look and feels similar to genuine leather, but at a fraction of the cost.
• Hemp—a durable fabric grown without the use of herbicides and pesticides.
• Jute—a natural plant fiber that can be spun to produce strong threads made into hardy fabrics, perfect for reusable tote bags.
• Organic cotton—grown using methods and materials with low impact on the environment. And although more expensive than recycled cotton, organic cotton is produced without pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, chemical fertilizers or any other chemicals that harm the environment.
• Recycled cotton—can eliminate the use of plastic bags. Manufactured from post industrial or pre-consumer material that would normally go to landfills is instead converted into raw material to be blended with virgin yarn.
• PET or Polyethylene terephthalate is a 22-stitch material made from 85% post-consumer recyclable plastic—mainly recycled plastic bottles. Its use drastically reduces the amount of plastic in our landfills, and is used for totes and luggage.
• ReTreads—these products are made from recycled tire rubber. Mousepads made of this material are a popular eco-friendly product.
• Unifi Repreve—a fabric made from 55% recycled material and consists of a mixture of pre-consumer (yarn waste) and post-consumer (plastic bottles) recycled materials, also used in the manufacture of backpacks, sports bags, etc.

Rebecca also advised us to make sure you have PRINTED LABEL documentation of where your items are being made. You could be promised they are made in the USA, but when the item arrives, you could find a label that says otherwise. Know your reliable vendor!

Lastly, one fallacy is that pricing for recycled items is more expensive. But depending on what you’re producing, that might not be the case at all. Just explore your vendor’s option. It’s a GREEN world out there—and not just for one colorful day in March!

Check back again this week for a second installment by Arline on GREEN ink!

SXSW featured many sessions focused on mobility and transportation including: “Sexy Data Solutions for Public Transit Systems”, “Future of Cities: Technology in Public Service”, and “Connected Cars, Connected Cities and Urban Driving” as well as sessions for social change included “Video for Social Change”, “Can Gaming Make the World Better”, and “Building Brand Advocates.” Here are the top mobility trends from these sessions:

1.    Building Brand Advocates Starts from Within – Your best advocates are your own employees. Enabling your employees to use social media as a customer service tool is essential in today’s social world. They need to understand the perimeters of your brand, speak in one voice (i.e. your established elevator pitch) and make them feel invested in building the customer experience. By using social media listening tools, you can use “surprise marketing” to source people who had difficult transit issues (missed the bus, bus stopped running) and offer them a free coupon using social media (i.e. “#missedthebus sorry you missed the bus here is a free ride coupon and check out our free mobile app so you’ll never miss the bus again.” These actions can turn a negative experience into a positive one. Caltrain Tweets is a good example of empowering passengers with crowdsourced content and information that is also a customer service tool. Worried about your customers not having smart phones? Create an epanel — the brainchild of Champaign Urban Mass Transit to aggregate customer service issues from non-smart phone users and communicate them out to the service provider for them to address.

2.    Gaming for Behavior Change – The gamification of social change starts with fun, simple actions that offer rewards. Points are a strong motivator, but an even stronger motivator is the ability to compare yourself to your peers and show the financial value of an action or display the savings or benefit from an action and then showcase this among peer groups with an affirmation. As marketers, we need to give them an incentive to start the game, and motivate them to simulate an action online (try using the bus but also educating them on how to do it), so they will do it offline. Adding a team component can also work well if you make the team members dependent on one another – making it clear, if you don’t contribute, the entire team will fail.  Baking in the ability to track the behavior you have incentivised over time is also essential so you can continue to give friendly reminders down the road.

3.    Motivate Change with Content – Videos are a great vehicle to enable you to tell your story and enable people to share, discuss, and refer. Don’t have a big enough budget? Align with brands or services that share your vision and co-create content. Launch a user-generated promotion and offer relevant prizes to aid in increasing trial and generate new content. Create a video-powered social campaign that includes an action to spark a movement, educate, and spread the word. Use a local transit blog to curate and collect stories like MuniDiaries that provides a platform for people to communicate and their Pinterest feeds that feature boards on topics such as street fashion, map it, weddings, and more.  MuniDiaries takes this one step further with live storytelling events each month (ex. a BART driver talks about what it’s like to drive the train).

4.    Sell Your Services Virtually – Create a virtual billboard at transit centers, bus shelters, and on-board to enable people to purchase tickets and passes with their smart phones using QR codes. Create specialized packages to gain publicity and attention, like Guilt City did by selling an entire plane for $60,000. It sold out in less than 4 hours and added 1,000 people to the waiting list. Why not sell out the entire bus/route or bike sharing station? Target local businesses, colleges, and tourist groups and enable group booking.

 5.    Rethink How Things are Done – The future of mobile technology is to enable people to contribute to their neighborhood, their community and their streets. An example is the Street Bump project. This location-enabled application enables drivers to make their daily commutes and will measure bumps in the road and pin point them geographically for the city to fix. Adopt a Hydrant is another program in Boston that gets people engaged and by giving them responsibility for the city. By adopting a hydrant and helping the city maintain it in the winter – keeping the snow off — it keeps the city functioning and provides a valuable service. Why not launch an Adopt a Bus Stop project? Organizations such as Community Planet are leading design interventions to help create a sustainable planet by reimagining what trashcans look like. This has been done in the transportation realm with Next Stop Design — a contest to build a better bus stop through crowdsourcing.

6.    Apps to Make it Easy – One session focused on how to make driving and cars more productive, and parking more efficient, which is also at the core of the Street Bump Project. There are many mobile applications focused on this, but the future is more collaborative and focused on sharing and rewarding with hyper-local incentives. Imagine an app that allows the bike sharing system to talk to the bus shelter to tell it it’s empty? Goingmyway is a new mobile app that helps people consider alternatives. It pushes a route to your friends to rideshare or brings people into your car and can provide real-time data back to the system. Zimride is a carpool solution for university and corporate networks that enables you to grab a seat and save money. Carsurfing.com is another new application that has partnered with Avego to use their same system of payment to reward people for taking seats in cars. People need to be aware of the real cost of driving, so applications that calculate this information are valuable in motivating behavior change.

Innovations are everywhere. It’s our challenge to make these innovations a reality in order to motivate behavior change to alternative forms of transportation.

More than 24,000 people from around the globe descended on Austin this week for the 2012 SXSW Interactive Festival. The festival is a “must do” for anyone in marketing or advertising who wants to follow the future of technology and how to apply it to marketing brands and services.

From turning the homeless into Wi-Fi hotspots (no really), to Highlight’s inexplicable neon-colored grocery carts (sensing a theme there), it was difficult for companies to stand out this year.

Past sensations at SXSW have included Twitter and Foursquare. There was no big standout this year, but lots of buzz surrounding the top 10 trends of 2012 SXSW Interactive:

1. Location, location, location – Location-based services promise to leave Foursquare in the dust, enabling people to connect with their friends or people with like-minded interests virtually in any space. Startups at SXSW in this space include: Highlight, Banjo,  Sonar, EchoEcho, and Vibe.

2. Organizing and Documenting Your Social World – The idea of organizing your life and various communities online was also a hot trend this year with companies like LifeDots, Savvy Card, Clipix, Hibe, IJustShared, and Qubeey. This trend also includes a variety of photo applications including: Instagram, Glomper, and GeoSpike.

3. Mobile Payments/Digital Wallets – This is projected to be a huge megatrend shift for 2013. The theory is that we will all have mobile wallets and eliminate the need for credit cards. Starbucks has pioneered this space with their Starbucks app, which enables people to pay by scanning the code on their mobile phone and deducting the balance. Other players include: NFC phones, Isis, Google Wallet, PayPal and Linkable Networks. The golden ticket is synching the wallets with customized deals based on past purchases and with social applications so you can see how much your friends paid for items, where they bought them, how they rate them and even deliver differential pricing based on the price elasticity for each customer.

4. Digital Deals –Living Social announced at SXSW that they are evolving their platform to encompass takeout and delivery and turning local deals into local platforms, with support for local businesses dedicated to creating unique experiences. One example was the launch of 918 F Street in Washington, D.C. Groupon is now pushing Groupon Goods, a new ecommerce platform featuring good deals on great products. The next generation of digital deal sites and mobile apps are focused on hyper-localized applications with built-in rewards programs that aid in loyalty efforts AND will be “socialized,” enabling coupon-sharing across social platforms. The future of digital deals is linked with the mobile wallet concept, in which credit card companies that already know your past purchase history have access to know where you are through location-based applications, and can serve you up customized, personalized deals. “Hi Kelly, your favorite Starbucks is one block away from you. Come in for a mocha and get 10% off.” Spooky.

5. Digital Reviews Sites – Yelp on steroids was another big theme with new players such as LocalFave, and Womzit.

6. Monitizing Social – American Express is testing a new Sync Service which allows cardholders to link their cards to their Twitter accounts and earn discounts for sending tweets with particular hashtags. They have partnered with 17 retailers to offer special deals for this Twitter cross-promotion (ex. tweet #amexwholefoods and get $25 off for buying $75 at Whole Foods). This concept is how SXSW attendees were able to get tickets to the Jay-Z concert this year.

7. Content Marketing – Now that branded content accounts for 26% of overall marketing budgets, there was a big focus on story and content creation with new apps and platforms that enable people to curate their own stories, post and spread them virally, and monitor them. A sampling of this category includes: Shoutlet, GetCurata, and Storify. On the journalism side CNNiReport leads the way in crowdsourcing the news, followed by new player NewsiT.

8. Virtual Stores – Tesco in Korea led the way with their subway-based virtual store that enabled people to shop for groceries virtually by scanning in QR codes with their smart phones and having them delivered. Kmart recently replicated this concept for holiday shopping with a virtual toy store on bus shelter wraps and large scale out-of-home media enabling shoppers to view toys, scan the QR code and have them delivered. The campaign delivered less than expected sales, but offered up some key takeaways, such as ensuring that QR codes are customized by location and geo-tracked.

9. Gamification – Every thing is a game this year at SXSW. Games that focus on doing simple fun things and rewarding people for doing so can not only build loyalty, they can also aid in behavior change – enabling people to simulate an action online in the hopes that they will do it offline (ex. recycling).  A good example of this is DoSomething’s eMission Game.

10. New Channels for Digital & Social Advertising – Many sessions at SXSW focused on hyper-local marketing with things like geo-modified paid search and social PPC, advertising to micro-communities (bloggers, boards, listservs) like Linqia, and building community engagement through social tools like FanCore.

The future is bright in emerging technologies enabling people to connect with the things they love in greater, more enriching ways. Now the hard part begins for us as marketers to dissect these technologies to turn them into meaningful experiences that resonate, making it easy for customers to choose products and services and remain loyal to them.  Does your head hurt yet?

Campbell Mithun has recently developed a pretty handy video to explain what they call the “Sharing Economy.” What is it? Where did it come from? And how is it creating a World of Good? Check out the video below. (Capitalists, beware.)

I recently had a conversation with a friend about Craigslist and was told, “We don’t post job opportunities there. All you get are the Crazies.” But I have to wonder – despite the Craigslist’s killers and “crazies” – where would we be today without this type of online platform? Since 1995, according to the information sharing website Wikipedia.org, Craigslist has offered us a venue for C2C, B2C and B2B sharing…of information, goods and services. And now, we also have Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Pandora, Spotify, Monster, Indeed, CareerBuilder, RedBox, CouchSurfing, Home Exchanges, ZipCars, Bikesharing and more, all of which crash down the doors of the sharing economy to let in the entire world!

Often times, I argue with myself – yes, I talk to myself – about the “sharing economy.” Do the pros outweigh the cons? I mean, really, do I really need Netflix if I can use Redbox and On-Demand? Do I really need Spotify and Pandora? Or should I just stick to torrents, YouTube and Hulu? Does it even matter?

As a proud Bachelorette of Arts in English, I often wonder, “Where’s the difference here between properly cited information and plagiarized material?” And, “Does the sharing economy require something more – like monetary influence – in order to meet the criteria of ‘properly cited information?’”

To dramatize the following story, I’ll tell it in the language of the teenage softball players that I coach, whose use of the English language is absolutely horrendous:

it was like 06 n i just got fb at va tech. read some story bout some canada dude that like traded like a paper clip r sumthin 4 a house!

Okay, that’s enough of that. Maybe you remember the story, though? And if you’re thinking to yourself, “That was just an urban legend,” then I dare you to read this and visit oneredpaperclip.com.

The then-26-year-old Canadian Kyle MacDonald, from the ultimate Craigslist bartering story, proved to us all that (even in 2006) the world was changing from its buy/sell mentality to a sharing/trading style of consumerism. I think he also made more companies mark their goods with the infamous words: Not for resale.

Fast-forward six years and nearly anything we could ever want can be acquired through the “sharing economy,” and most times we don’t even have to leave our computer for it. Some of what we want is for purchase, some for trade, some through sheer sharing power. The two words “Pin It,” in particular, make it incredibly easy for Great-Grandma Jean’s Super Spicy, Super Secret Family Jambalaya Recipe to be shared freely (play on words) throughout the world.

So, it’s really no wonder that the whole world basically FREAKED OUT when SOPA and PIPA popped up into legislative discussions. How would we ever get meme images of Business Cat to share with our colleagues (and not our bosses) on Google+? *Gasp* What would even happen to TheOatmeal.com or, I guess a bit more importantly, Wikipedia?

If we weren’t allowed to share content, neither would we be able to receive content. And isn’t that what the internet – and life, I guess – is all about? …Stalking all of my classmates from high school, so I don’t have to attend the ever-dreaded high school reunion?

So, do us all a favor. Let freedom of speech live on – no Larry Flynt dramatics necessary – and share with us why you think the sharing economy is good for you and the world. There may not be a “freedom of sharing” amendment to The Constitution in our future, but it’s undeniable that sharing is becoming more important to consumers today. Less waste spent on the production of DVDs and CDs – through the reuse of movies and digital copies of musical albums – and a reduction of negative impacts on the environment – from public transportation and bikesharing – and even the stretching of monetary values based on personal values – through bartering and trading. Who knows, maybe through trading a few paperclips we can all gain something without spending our hard-earned dollars or adding on to credit lines?