Greenpeace and Facebook: Can firms be coerced into becoming social enterprises?

Greenpeace to Facebook: "Clean up your data"—or more specifically, your Prineville, Oregon data center. The public conflict between Greenpeace and Facebook sits at the intersection of social media, sustainable business, and social enterprise. Here are the facts:

1) This past week, Kumi Naidoo, the executive director of Greenpeace International, wrote an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking his firm to end its use of coal-fired electricity.

- Interesting stuff, right? Perhaps I'm alone, but I never considered how the environmental footprint of Web services providers like Facebook impacts earth and the quality of life for people. Greenpeace is performing a useful educational function by drawing attention to coal-fired sources of electricity on the one hand, and highlighting the growing footprint of internet firms like Google, Yahoo, Myspace.com, etc.

2) Greenpeace's "Unfriend Coal" campaign has mobilized 500,000 Facebook users who calling on Facebook to "100 percent renewable energy, cutting its carbon footprint and helping in the struggle to prevent catastrophic climate change."

- It's kind of ironic, isn't it? Greenpeace is using Facebook's platforms (wall posts, messages, events, etc.) to mount a massive campaign…against Facebook. According to Sara Stroud at Sustainable Industries.com, the issue concerns "The environmental group [Greenpeace], along with about 500,000 Facebook users, pressing Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook to switch to 100 percent renewable power to run its data centers. The Prineville facility—slated to be operational in 2011—would be powered by Portland-based utility PacificCorp, which Greenpeace says is powered disproportionately by coal". Barry Schnitt, Facebook's director of Policy Communications, acknowledged that the data center would be disproportionately run by coal, but argued that Facebook is unable to control its sources of electricity.

The hurly burly between Greenpeace and Facebook contains important implications for the social enterprise field. Many assume that new legal structures, herculean social entrepreneurs, VC firms for social enterprise, in and of themselves, will bring the dawn of social enterprise. Those tools are indispensable, but cannot force the sunrise alone. It will, rather, take a combination of innovation, legislation responsive to social enterprise—and political pressure, let's call it poking in honor of Facebook—to increase the scale of social enterprises. Facebook, according to their website, perceives their firm as a social utility that brings the world together. They increase the social capital of individuals and, through marketing and advertising, indirectly transforms the social capital of institutional users like business firms into revenue streams. Due to the evidence-based advocacy of Greenpeace (which even Facebook acknowledges!), Facebook may not only unfriend coal, but may also begin the long and difficult work of setting a standard of renewable energy for other Web services providers.

Facebook, to be fair, is not beholden to coal interests. In fact, its decision to locate its data centers in Oregon - one of the greenest states in America - could not only be read as a low-cost location decision (Facebook is based is Palo Alto, California), but also as evidence of its intention to move toward sustainable energy sources. That intention however, assuming it exists, can all too easily be sacrificed on an altar of efficiency and profit maximization. Sometimes, it takes a little "poking" from concerned stakeholders like Greenpeace to ensure that firms like Facebook understand that social media and social enterprise are not opposing values.

What are your thoughts? Will Greenpeace's strategy of poking and pressuring Facebook into social responsibility work? Is it a short-term tactic, or will it catalyze Facebook's movement toward social enterprise?

Public responses by Greenpeace and Facebook, below:

Kumi Naidoo's open letter to Facebook:

Facebook's official response:

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Photo credit: Jodie Van Horn