Earth Hour 2010, the global event when people, businesses and iconic buildings around the world will switch off their lights for an hour at 8.30pm local time is coming up again this Saturday, 27th March.

We’re working with the WWF to get the word out to bloggers to start conversations about Earth Hour, encourage people to sign-up to show their support and send a clear message to the world’s governments that climate change needs to be addressed urgently.

Hopefully, by working together we can top last year’s awesome achievements which saw hundreds of millions of people across 3,000 cities and towns in 83 countries participate.

If you have a blog, or a Twitter account or are on Facebook it would be fantastic if you could blog about Earth Hour and even better if you could ask your readers, friends, families, colleagues to get involved too.

If you’re keen to do more, WWF have come up with a number of online resources for you to use, including:

• The all new Earth Hour UK & Ireland county signup challenge which pits county against county to see which part of the British Isles has the most people signed up
• A nifty light-switch widget for your blog (see this in action at the top-right hand-side of our blog)
• Embeddable YouTube videos

And if none of those takes your fancy then there are loads of other ways to show your support and take part.

Every contribution, no matter how small you think it might be (even re-tweeting this post would help!), is important, so please help us and show your support. Essentially, the more signups we get, the more we can show governments around the world how seriously their people now consider global warming to be, and how loud their voice is on this urgent issue.

As I’ve mentioned before, measuring the ROI of social media on a campaign level is pretty tricky and as Sandrine pointed out a couple of weeks ago, companies may need to take a long term view in order to fully reap the benefits of social media.

However, in theory, working out the ROI of a social media programme is easy (assuming you’re measuring it over a long enough time period), as Olivier Blanchard shows us in this presentation:

Of course, there’s a lot more more to it in practice (even without resorting to econometrics, which is of course why our consultancy services may come in handy):

• In step 3 (slides 44-46), you should also consider measuring other things like:
  • Customer retention/loyalty (to understand why this is important, have a read of Chris Stephenson’s overview or his entire paper on the subject)
  • Net Promoter Score (see Paul Marsden’s study around NPS and how advocacy drives growth)
  • Brand equity (Andrew Sharp sharp gives a good overview of why you should be thinking about this).
• In steps 6 & 7 (slides 54-55) it’s possible there will be a significant lag between your efforts in social media and their potential effects so try to take this into account when looking for them

If my post on the purchase funnel and the consumer decision journey was a little too academic for you, then meet Dave, and follow his idealised journey from initial consideration to becoming an advocate:

A controversial titbit from our friend and firestarter, Mark Earls, author of Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature:

Social Media – blogging, tweeting, facebooking and so on – is not (primarily) about information (what we write, say or read – just as advertising and all those things we criticise are not either); real communication is gestural in nature – it’s about what you do and what you see others doing.

Of course, it seems like the crafting the information bit is important and of course we’d all like to believe that the information processing bit shapes those big and well-considered opinions we carry around. Sad thing is the info bit comes second in terms of shaping our behaviour: most of our thinking is after the fact (as Eliot Aronson puts it, we are more rationalizing than rational); most of our opinions attempts to make sense of what we’ve done not the wise and considered precursor to action.

So, this new landscape can’t be about information and broadcasting, albeit in a way that’s less wasteful or more credible; it’s not about advocacy and brand advocates making the case on behalf of your brand; it’s not about the 1-in-10 or any other minority group who will tell the rest of us what to do; it’s not about “talk” or WOM or any of these poor substitutes for the old TV transmission model – sending messages out to change minds in order to (somehow, eventually) change behaviour. It’s not media at all (as in a medium down which we can send information to folk).

It’s about people. People watching and listening and interacting with other people (that’s why Hugh’s championing of the Social Object is spot on).

It is at heart profoundly human.

We’re not ready to throw away awareness, consideration and recommendation as objectives and measures just yet, but we do agree with his main message – we are inherently social, and social media just lets us be social in new and different ways (even if we’re still restricted by Dunbar’s number).