EDITOR'S NOTE NUMBER 1: 

With this post, I am officially introducing my new and more professional-oriented blog, Tracking Construction Trends. Well, I know exactly what you're thinking - "You're barely handling one blog, now you're going to try and maintain two??"  I was thinking the same thing!

But the truth is, my employer (Mark Buckshon at The Construction News and Report Group) is an avid blogger himself and a strong advocate of the power of corporate blogs for communications, marketing and team-building. 

Because I started this site, Smithereens, as a personal interest blog, and not a strictly-for-business site, I sort of went my own way with it in terms of naming conventions, design, etc. But  since I also want to be a part of the CNRG's growing network of company blogs, I intend to post (a little less frequently) on this new blog that conforms to our corporate image about topics that interest me AND are relevant to the construction industry we serve. 

Occasionally, when an article that I write is relevant to both blogs, as I feel this first posting is, I will cross-post it on both sites. Where the subject matter is mostly or strictly construction-related, I may post a teaser here, or nothing at all.  I hope you enjoy the both content here and there. 

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EDITOR'S COMMENT NUMBER 2: 

Every month in the Ottawa Construction News, I write a column called The Publisher's Viewpoint about current issues that are pertinent to the industry. What follows here is this month's column, mostly as it will appear when it comes off the presses this week, with a few more points and links added in here and there. A PDF of the May issue is also embedded at the end of this post for your reference. 

This month's column was on the phenomenon of "Greenwashing." Our company President Mark Buckshon has also recently written about this issue on his blog - you can read his thoughts here...but be sure to come back! 

Please remember that while there are certainly general marketing lessons to be drawn here, the article was written for the construction industry and I haven't changed the tone in that regard. Enjoy.

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Readers of the Ottawa Construction News have heard a lot of talk in our pages recently about Green building, LEED building and sustainable design. In fact, in the soon-to-be-delivered May issue, they will see a feature profile of the new EcoCite LEED condo development on the canal by Taplen Construction and Christopher Simmonds Architect. (You can view a PDF of the Special Feature here.) At the OCN, we like to bring attention to these types of projects, and to green issues in general because we believe they are important to consider for the future of our industry.

But anytime there is a paradigm shift within an industry, like the one we are seeing now toward Green building practices, there are likely to be two camps: Those who truly believe in the new paradigm and whose body of work clearly shows it (like Taplen, Simmonds and others), and the hangers-on who merely try to 'hop on the bandwagon' without really changing the way they do business. (Here we won't name names.)

The latter camp is so common, unfortunately, that there has already been a term coined to describe those who try to make business-as-usual look 'trendy' and environmentally friendly: Greenwashers. It's a portmanteau of "green" and "whitewashing", and it means exactly what you would expect.

So what is Greenwashing and how can you avoid it in your own business, and in your own marketing? Well, I heard an excellent example of this phenomenon on the radio the other day and although it is from outside our industry, it does illustrate the point really well.

I won't name the company here, but a retail store was running a spot recently to promote their new environmentally friendly line of beauty and personal care products. "Come on in and buy from our new lineup of EnviroCare products," the ad beckoned, "and you will be entered to win in our grand prize draw with each purchase." (I've changed the name of the product line for the sake of anonymity.)

'So, what is the problem with this promo?,' you might ask. And in truth, nothing is really wrong with it on the surface - selling environmentally friendly products is a great idea.

But then the radio announcer goes on to explain that the "Grand Prize Draw" would be for... return airfare for a trip for two across Canada!

Now, let's just do a quick number crunch on that carbon tradeoff, shall we?

According to CarbonFootprint.com's online calculator, that grand prize flight to Whistler from anywhere in Canada could emit up to 2 tonnes of CO2 equivalents for two passengers, the equivalent of cutting down and burning two rain forest trees that are 40 feet tall and a foot in diametre!

I would like to hear the non-Greenwashed version of that radio spot. "With every purchase of our environmentally friendly shampoo, you will be entered into a draw to win our grand prize - the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you and a friend to chop down two giant rainforest trees!"

At the end of the day, this just seems to me like a case of really poorly thought-out marketing, because to an environmentally-conscious consumer (like myself), the obvious carbon footprint of that 'grand prize' sticks out like a sore thumb and just doesn't jive with the Green image they are trying to portray. Whether it was intentional or not, this company ended up sounding like they didn't really care about their effect on the environment, they just wanted to sound like they did.

So you may be asking, how does this relate to the construction industry, and what can you learn from this example? I think the lesson to be learned here is that if you choose to go about making your business greener, you need to be genuine in those efforts, and truthful in whatever marketing you do.

And it's important to mention here that you do have a choice. While I firmly believe that to remain relevant, construction companies are going to have to be environmentally conscious, you may disagree with me and that's your right. But if you do choose to dismiss Green building as a 'fad', and go about business as usual, don't pretend otherwise because your efforts to do so will be in vain.

At the Greater Ottawa Home Builder's Association's Hello Goodbye breakfast earlier this year, Bernard Hudon presented research showing that today's homebuyers are highly educated individuals who research purchases extensively and care about environmental factors. These buyers will see through a Greenwash-smokescreen.

And in the commercial building sector, the situation is no different. The biggest commissioners of buildings care more now than ever for the environmental impact of their projects, both for the effect they will have on their public image, and for the long-term cashflow savings that ecologically sound builds can provide.

A perfect example is the City of Ottawa, which recently mandated that all its new buildings 5,400 square feet or larger must be LEED certified at minimum, even expansion projects like the Goulbourn Rec centre one we profiled in the OCN in February. (The PDF is here.) These owners will not be fooled either by slick marketing that is less than truthful.

Applying for LEED and following that spec is a great idea for larger builds - nothing will convey credibility as well as an endorsement of your ecological efforts by the Canada Green Building Council. Marketing guru Seth Godin (whose blog I love) wrote an interesting entry recently where he argued that to truly market themselves as 'green' with any credibility, businesses will soon need some way to truly quantify their green-ness. As builders, LEED's points system can certainly do the trick.

Having said that, I know LEED can be expensive if your capital budget is thin, and I know its standards are simply unworkable in some circumstances (ie: rural applications.)

However, even if you can't build to LEED spec, and get that certification, you can still take steps to make your builds greener and let your clients know about your efforts in your marketing, without being guilty of Greenwashing.

Buy materials from vendors who are committed to sustainable development, like local firm The Healthiest Home and Building Supplies, or others around the city. For the record, using leftover drywall from a previous project is not "Using recycled materials"!

If it's a home you're building, make it easy for the eventual owner to make it as energy efficient as possible by participating in programs and building philosophies like EnergyStar, SolarReady and High Performance Homes. Check out St. Thomas, Ontario-based home builder Doug Tarry Homes for a great example of how leveraging those two programs can lead to great success. (We also featured Tarry in the most recent issue of the GTA Construction Report, the PDF is here.)

If yours is a larger development, why not replant some of the trees you tore down to build elsewhere? As a publishing company, we proudly put our money where our mouth by partnering with Tree Canada, which plants a tree for each one of our advertisers in every issue, so that the net effect of printing all our papers is a surplus of trees!

There are many other online resources that can guide you in the right direction:

• This site by the American organization NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), outlines "Building Green from Principle to Practice," and aims show how building green can boost your bottom line.


• This blog is interesting - it is the personal account of a newlywed couple in Calgary who sought to build a truly eco-friendly custom home. You can follow the process from early 2006 to present and pick up some ideas along the way.


• Whatsworking.com includes a long list of resources on green building and sustainable development.


• The CaGBC's own site includes some information on how you can build more environmentally friendly projects, even if you can't afford LEED. If you live near Toronto, you could also plan to attend Shifting the Mainstream - the CaGBC Summit on June 11-12, featuring keynote speaker David Suzuki. We are an official media sponsor for the event, and it looks like there are many useful seminars and talks planned for the two-day conference.

There are many, many things you can do to respect the environment when you build, and my recommendation is to do as many of them as possible, and to be honest about it in your advertising.

Because you're either making a difference, or you're faking it. And when people think you're faking it, that's worse than if they think you just don't care.

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Here is the PDF of the May issue (click to see larger):

Ottawa Construction News May 2008 Section A

A couple weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge and start my own blog. Like many other first-time web publishers, I figured hey, I really love to write, so where better to write than on the internet and who better to write for than no one?

In any case, blogging newbie that I was, I hopped on to Google and did a quick search to see what free blogging platforms were available and which of these was considered the best. From what I read, it seemed like everyone was just head-over-heels in love with Wordpress. Nice interface! Great templates! Easy to use! Writes your posts for you and does the dishes too! (Plugins required.)

Meanwhile, it seemed no one had any love to give for Google's adopted stepchild, Blogger. Just a spammy swamp, said the collective wisdom of the net. Stay away!

And so, because Who Wants to Be a Millionnaire never taught me anything, I decided to go with the audience on this one and set my blog up on Wordpress.com. 

What I didn't know, however, was that all of those rave Wordpress reviews I had read MUST have been talking about the fully customizable, downloadable product for hosting on one's own domain, available at Wordpress.ORG, because they certainly couldn't have been talking about its crippled little brother over at Wordpress.com. 

Of course,  it wasn't until I had spent endless hours laboriously working through all the blog set up, getting it to look just right (or trying, at least), and writing a couple of posts... that I realized how much Wordpress truly failed to meet my needs.  In fact, I became so fed up with the platform's many shortcomings and limitations, and the wordpressure was so overwhelming that I felt like quitting altogether.  Instead, I decided to give Blogger a spin,  just to see how it compared to the Wordpress.com offering.

To my great surprise, I found that Blogger blew WP out of the water. I will readily admit that I am a bit of a Google fanboy (I use Gmail for email, GCal for timekeeping and GReader for RSS feeds daily, Google docs quite often and I don't remember the last time I used another search engine),  but at the end of the day, I found Blogger to be exactly the type of platform I would expect from the big G: I found it to be intuitive, comprehensive and far more powerful and customizable than Wordpress.

And so, I had a decision to make: Do I deal with WordMess.com and drive myself to an early grave, or cut my losses and start over on Blogger?  A quick poll of my faithful readers revealed that I had none, so I acted unilaterally and made the jump. (As you probably already guessed by the fact that you're reading this now on Blogger... And also, because my title pretty much says that Wordpress is horrible... And additionally, because I have photo illustration showing Blogger laying WP down for the count with a knockout punch to the face. But I digress.)

And so, without further ado, I've written this post as a guideline for new bloggers like myself, lest you make the same mistake I did. Here are The Top 5 Things About Wordpress.com That Drove Me to Blogger:

Disclaimer - This is not meant to be a balanced, unbiased comparison of these two services from every possible angle, but rather, a simple personal account of things about the Wordpress platform that drove me so nuts, I left. I should think this could still be useful for other new bloggers, but if you're looking for the former, there is a decent comparison here. [UPDATE: I stumbled across another good comparison posting on Digg, you can find it here.]

NUMBER 1: HORRIBLE THIRD-PARTY WIDGET SUPPORT

In the age of Web 2.0 Widgetization, how can it be so damn hard to add customized widgets to my blog? It shouldn't be, but with Wordpress.com, I was quickly pulling out my hair just trying to add a few widgets to my sidebar, similar to the ones you can see on the right (which, by the way, were extremely easy to add on Blogger.) 

There is a function within the Wordpress control panel that allows you to add predefined modules to your site such as a blogroll, or a list of your most recent posts, but it was when I tried to use customized widgets like the popular LinkedInABox one that you can see on the right, that it came up short. 

Using the Wordpress Text Widget, which is supposed to accept HTML and thus allow you to use third-party modules, I tried repeatedly to paste the HTML from the LinkedInABox site, to no avail. Thinking it was a problem with the LIAB code, I tried a few others like the Novel tracker (see at right) and a Google Calendar widget... nothing would work. 

Eventually, I just gave up and used a few of the standardized widgets offered in the Control Panel, and tried to be happy about it.

In Blogger, on the other hand, I logged in, added an HTML module, plopped in the LinkedInABox code and it just worked - On the first try! That's the way it should be, plain and simple.

I should also point out here that I am not your ol' Grandpa Cletus who ain't nevuh seen none a these high-falutin' com-putin machines before... I consider myself a pretty tech-savvy individual, and yet I found this interface so difficult that I gave up trying to figure it out. If you think my experience was isolated, or you know what I was doing wrong, please leave a comment and I would be happy to update the post accordingly.

NUMBER 2- NO GOOGLE ADS, OR ANY OTHER MONETIZATION ALLOWED

Now I don't expect to make money off this blog, and I firmly believe that those who do set out blogging to put food on the table are, well, out to lunch. Having said that, when you are starting a blog, you never do know that you might not become the next Michael Arrington!

And if you do become famous one day, why shouldn't you be allowed to make a little pocket change off the site you have spent thousands of hours writing and grooming?

Well if your blog is on Wordpress.com, tough cookies - no Google Ads, or any other kind of third party affiliate advertising allowed. Period.

Posters on official Wordpress forums wax poetic about discouraging SPAM by eliminating the incentive to set up blogs to make money, but that argument is really quite weak. By the same logic, we should make the resale of luxury cars illegal to discourage criminals from stealing them to sell for profit! 

The fact of the matter is that in every economy, there will always be those who use the systems in place for good, and those who abuse them for evil ... crippling the systems to the disadvantage of both parties is not the answer. 

Google, needless to say, does not have a problem with the display of Google Ads (or any other affiliate ads) on your blog, and they make it quite easy to implement and track the former.

NUMBER 3 - NO ACCESS TO THE CODE (OR PAY FOR CRIPPLED ACCESS!)

This relates partially to Number 2, but on Wordpress.com, as a default, you are not allowed to insert any snippets of code into your site or edit the CSS template (the code that controls how your blog looks.)

That means no visitor tracking scripts or use of analysis apps like Google Analytics to track who is coming to your blog, no specialized layouts, no Google Ads (see above), and no anything that requires you to alter the code on your site (more tools than you would think do.)

On Blogger, two clicks gets you to a form that contains all the code for your site. After warning you that if you don't know what you're doing, you will probably mess up your site beyond repair, it allows you to insert whatever code you want to customize your blog. 

If you look to the right and scroll up to see my sidebar, you'll see a list of the tags I've used in my posts so far. It's not much to look at yet, because this is only my fourth post, but that little list is actually a really cool piece of code that I picked up from Kevin over at the Frivolous Motion Blog, and the Tag Words will actually grow in size the more they are used, so that you can see my most popular tags at a glance. (See a cool example of the code in use here.) 

Not being a coder myself, or anything close to one, I followed Kevin's careful instructions to add the module to my Blogger account, clicked save and voila - it was added and functional on my blog, once again on the first try! 

I should mention that on Wordpress.com, if you want to pay 15 dollars a year (which is admittedly not a lot, but is more than free), you can access and edit the CSS to change the look of your site, but you are still not allowed to inject HTML code to use any of the types of tools listed in the paragraph above.

Whose blog is this again - mine or theirs?

NUMBER 4 - NO POSTING BY EMAIL OR MOBILE.

This one is pretty self-explanatory - to my surprise I found that there is no way to post to a Wordpress.com blog via email, or even using a mobile interface. It's Wordpress.com on your computer, or no dice.

Blogger, and many other blogging platforms, offer the option of posting simple notes to your site by emailing a special secret email address - very convenient if you're on the go or just don't have time to labour over a posting for hours on end and just want to get the most important thing out there - your content.

Blogger also allows you to upload a post directly from a Google document, which I find less useful, but at least this shows some innovation in providing new ways of getting your words of wisdom online quickly and efficiently. 

Frankly, it baffles me that Wordpress.com, an open-source project, has not been able to add this seemingly simple feature. It may not be a big deal for some, but for me it was annoying.

NUMBER 5- THE SUPPORT FORUMS ARE OVER-RUN BY UNHELPFUL FANBOYS

Finally, the thing that really turned me off of Wordpress was the lack of true support in its forums. 

Let me say that as a Mac user and all-around unabashed Apple fanboy, I know what is like to be passionate about a product or company, and so while I don't quite understand the obsession some have with Wordpress.com, I nonetheless accept that some people do love the platform. 

However, to continue with the Apple-fanboyism comparison, if a newbie who just switched from Windows logs into a Mac forum to ask questions or discuss, you are likely to see a chorus of messages congratulating the user, as though for some spiritual conversion to the way of salvation. What you won't often hear is snooty dismissals of the rookie's 'stupid' questions.

Not so with the Wordpress Defenders - ask the wrong question or raise the wrong issue and prepare to be crucified!    

Case in point, when I was wondering about the Google Adsense question (see number 2 above), I did a quick search on the Wordpress.com forums and stumbled across this gem of a thread. 

Basically, a user named Inquirer posted this innocent-enough plea asking for Wordpress Adsense support:

I know right now Adsense\Adwords is not allowed and at the moment I do not have the blog statistics to even apply for such things, but in the future I think it would be great if Wordpress.com could allow adsense. (ed note: As mentioned in Number 2, these are my thoughts exactly.)

Wordpress is definitely the best blogging tool but no Adsense is kind of a downer (For the long run with my blog). I know you guys are smart and I hope you can find a way to allow adsense without spammers and such being a problem.

Anyway just wanted to let you know there are people out here supporting adsense for wordpress lol.

But rather than receiving an understanding response or explanation for this particular Policy (or even a thank you for the compliments he left!), Inquirer instead faced the fabled wrath of the Wordpress fanboys.  

"...Why would Wordpress.com want to let you make money off a service they're giving for free?" asks user cheerless beauty incredulously. (Perhaps because other competing free blog platforms do?)

Seemingly flustered fangirl Judyb12 then added her two cents: "no no no. You need to have the hosting elsewhere. You cannot edit your theme files directly here, because we all use the same ones, and unless you want to join the VIP program ($600 per month), you cannot have Adsense on a blog hosted by wordpress.com."

And with a digital sigh of frustration at Inquirer's stupidity, moderator drmike lets us know: 

"I've gone ahead and deleted a number of posts as I for one am tired of repeating this discussion over and over again so lets not."

Well, I'll be! Heaven forbid new users raise old questions! (And for that matter, if this issue is so contentious and so many users are demanding the freedom to include Adsense on their blog... shouldn't that tell them something?) [UPDATE: drmike responds in the comments, defending his actions and raising some other interesting issues.] 

Another user in the above thread, Paradoxian, expressed my thoughts quite well:

So, any new member who starts a blog here at WordPress and wants to know something that you are tired of discussing gets this nasty attitude? Wouldn't it be better to direct these questions from newcomers to the old discussions/old posts? The results would likely be: Happier new users, and the appearance of more professionalism from the WordPress staff.

I couldn't have said it better myself. The bottom line is this: new bloggers like myself are seeking community involvement - why else would we blog? We want to write about things we care about and interact with others who share those interests. 

For Wordpress' forum trolls to treat new bloggers with such disdain just leaves a bad taste in their mouths and drives them away from Wordpress altogether. 

It certainly drove me away, and here at Blogger I intend to stay.

[UPDATE: BONUS REASON NUMBER 6: Missing Comment Features  

Linden in the comments of this post reminds me of another area where Blogger one-ups Wordpress.com - comment previews. As you can see on this blog, when you leave a comment, you can option to preview it first to avoid typos. On Wordpress this is not possible. 

To expand on this - Blogger also offers a useful feature called Comment-tracking where you can opt to be notified by email when someone replies to a comment you've made on that blog - really helpful. Wordpress, as far as I know, does not offer this function either. So there you have it - Bonus reason number 6!] 

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If you have had a similar experience, or a different experience; whether you agree with me or if you just think I am flat-out wrong in my assessment, please leave me a comment as I'd love to hear from you.

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