MG has a solid argument on behalf of communication philosophy & marketing. Reports titles should accurately describe their contents. That’s the only contention being made.

Those sites you highlight *were* accurately portrayed with an asterisk and footnote explaining their inclusion (did you miss that?). If Yahoo! Green or Treehugger are generating 10x the traffic as the vast majority of dedicated green social networks, marketers ought to know about it — they’re smart enough to see for themselves what the primary value prop is for each site. It’s not exactly rocket science.

If any of this bothered the other social networks or experts we consulted for the report, and who reviewed a copy, they hadn’t said a word.

What’s misleading is purporting to critique something without knowing what it is you are critiquing. You missed all of the other details in the tips, case studies, etc. You have no idea what value lay there, despite your disagreement with definitions or labels. That’s a disservice to your readers and the industry.

Our critique (for what it’s worth) is based solely on what we read, and we drew our conclusions based on that. To go thru it point-by-point would lead to a prohibitively long post. But it was clear to us from what was made available that one could have serious doubts about its value. If anyone would like to pay $5 to download the report and read further, they can. In fact, if you’d like to make it available to download for free, we’ll be happy to host it or link to it.

Ning is a good abstraction of a social network. This is what a social network looks like. It’s not feature rich compared to Facebook. It’s bare bones. If you contact the folks from Yahoo! Green and Treehugger and ask them if they are a social network or if they offer social networking, I’m sure you know the answer you’d get.

Here’s a good example. Mashable.com is a blog about social networking. It also offers actual social networking as a feature. But few would call it a social network. It’s a blog. That’s how they see themselves, and that’s how they represent themselves to marketers. That is their core value prop. The vast majority of their traffic comes as a result of being a blog and not for the social networking. So it would be inaccurate and misleading to characterize Mashable as a social network despite the fact that they offer it.

These distinctions are essential for understanding the social web, especially for marketers. The choice to market thru Care2 is wholly different from that of Treehugger which is different from Yahoo! Green. Lumping them together and calling them all social networks does no good, no matter what the rest of the report says. We’re sure it wasn’t intentional, but it’s misleading to anyone who doesn’t know the difference.

If Treehugger and Yahoo! Green were too large to leave out, they should have been accurately portrayed. It’s not just a matter of semantics. Marketers don’t make decisions based on how you interpret the meaning of words. They make them based on achieving objectives and ROI. They can’t do that without accurate information.

- I’d disagree that a menu item serves as adequate disclosure, but will let your readers decide that for themselves.

- Ning is one of many social networking platforms, and probably one of the most popular because it’s so feature-rich — why should Ning’s “basic tools or features . . . serve as minimum requirements for being considered a social network.” Can you elaborate on your reasoning here? You refer to criteria, but what exactly are they and why? It’s like some politicians critiquing a policy solution to a problem, but providing no alternatives. The profiles have descriptive and contact information – members can learn a little about others, interact and get in touch, and that’s basic social networking from my perspective.

- How can you critique or determine the value of something you haven’t read? Basing a critique on a short article excerpt — especially one where you cut out relevant parts of the information provided (the footnote at the bottom of the graphic acknowleding some sites not to be dedicated social networks) seems to be at least as “off” to me.

- Yes, all of Earth2Tech’s list is part of our larger list — I’d go as far to venture that you’d even agree that well over 90% of the 50+ sites we list are green social networks, even by your unspecified, but apparently more stringent criteria. It just so happened that we included Yahoo! Green and Treehugger as a few of those websites that aren’t dedicated social networks, because we felt that they were too large to leave out (as some would reasonably argue that they are/have social networks as part of their respective sites). We included the Google PageRanks to help supplement accuracy as well as trending.

We’re dedicated to full transparency. Which is why we also make it clear that we provide marketing consulting as one of the main menu items.

There was nothing personal about the critique. And it wasn’t exactly scathing. We simply pointed out that, based on the information provided by the SRB website and LOHAS article, the report was of little or no value.

You elected to promote the report thru editorial channels such as LOHAS and GreenBiz.com, and that’s how we found it. So while you opened it up for potential clients to find, you also opened it up to criticism. We didn’t look to criticize it. We were hoping to learn something and blog positively about the “Top 5 Green Social Networks.” As soon as we saw the list, though, it was clear something was off…and off by a lot. Only then did we learn it originated from a marketing firm. Before that, we’d never heard of SRB.

By how you’ve described Treehugger and Yahoo! Green, any interactivity qualifies a site as a social network. We have more specific criteria. Ning is a social networking platform. The basic tools or features of Ning should serve as minimum requirements for being considered a social network. Drupal is also an open-source social networking solution. Yahoo had a social network (Yahoo! 360) but shut it down. Opening a profile does not a social network make.

The link to the Earth2Tech post in a previous comment lists several other green social networks.

Another way to test whether or not the term social network is accurate is to substitute “website”. Would it change the actual meaning? Or would it make the report headline more accurate? Top 5 Green Websites. Perhaps.

The rest of your criticism seems a little unusual, though, seeing as how you: (1) didn’t actually read the report (I would have been happy to send you a review copy); (2) declined to define what a social network is, acknowledging that as “too broad”; and (3) didn’t contact SRB to address your concerns prior to writing such a scathing critique (was it our implication that social networks can be used as a marketing medium that got you so piqued at us — that’s really not clear to us?).

Your main beef seems to be that we included Yahoo! Green, Treehugger and Kiva as social networks.

If you look at the report, you’ll see we specify that the social networking aspects of Yahoo! Green, Treehugger and Kiva are only a part or subsection of their respective websites — that those websites aren’t dedicated social networks didn’t indicate to us that they should be excluded from a report on the subject matter. I’d really appreciate you’re letting us at least know your criteria for determining what’s *not* a social network, so we know where we went wrong.

Yes, social networks are hard to define, but they all have common components — in the case of Yahoo! Green, while it’s certainly a portal, there’s a Q&A section geared toward green living questions that require those participating to sign up and create descriptive personal profiles to ask and answer those questions, interacting with other members who also have profiles. To us, that’s a type of social networking — but we’d love to know why not if others disagree.

For Treehugger, while it’s certainly a blog, there’s a whole Interaction section, including “Forums,” where again, participants have to sign-up and create descriptive profiles to participate in the discussion. For Kiva, the social networking components are even more clear.

Hope you’re a little more “fair and balanced” than Fox News and actually permit this response to your post. I also welcome further, constructive contact and/or dialogue with you. Peace.

I hope you can work that out into a full article!

At rSitez we are glad to contribute to their development with our white label social network software. One of our last ‘green’ customers is from New Zealand http://www.greentree-united.rsitez.com . It’s clear this phenomena is global.

Luis Carbajo
VP Business Development
http://www.rSitez.com