If you're in Vancouver this weekend, you'll want to drop by the Globe Foundation's EPIC: The Sustainable Living Expo: three days of exhibits and events geared to people who want to live healthier, more sustainable lives.

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When you're a company looking to make your first foray into the thickets of social media, building your own online community from scratch – and taking on everything from usability issues to platform selection to how you get that critical mass of people to sign up in the first place – can seem pretty daunting, and with good reason.

British Columbia's public power utility, BC Hydro, is taking a different tack: a toe in the water that could well signal a bigger splash to come. Instead of building their own stand-alone entry in the Web 2.0 sweepstakes and trying to lure users from other sites, they've headed to where people are already participating in droves: Facebook.

We've worked with BC Hydro to create Green Gifts, a brand new Facebook Platform application. Green Gifts lets you send a free virtual gift to your friends, including an icon-sized environmentally-themed image, a personal message from you, and a practical Power Smart tip for conserving energy and reducing your environmental footprint.

And it's that tip that's the key to the whole thing. Virtual gift-giving is huge on Facebook (as your notification inbox attests soon after you join it). We want to capture just a little of that activity... and give people a chance to devote it to energy conservation.

Which is emblematic of the approach we're recommending to many of our clients who are new to the social web (and more than a few who are old hands). You don't have to create the next Facebook, YouTube or Flickr to successfully engage your public; especially if you're starting out, join them wherever they're already participating:

• Chances are good your potential users are already voting with their feet - or, more to the point, their browsers. For instance, judging by the figures for the Vancouver and Kelowna networks alone, there are well over half a million British Columbians registered on Facebook, and the number keeps growing. The province's goal of becoming energy self-sufficient by 2016 makes it urgent that BC Hydro's message reach as many ears and eyes as possible... and Facebook's an ideal vehicle.
  

• Look for opportunities that offer plenty of participatory infrastructure. The Facebook Platform is loaded with features, beautifully usable and highly flexible. (Want to program in PHP? Go ahead. Java? Sure. Flash? Knock yourself out.) The documentation is extensive and, at least as far as functionality goes, thorough. (Facebook's admirable determination to prevent spam and abuse, on the other hand, translates into unannounced notification restrictions and usage algorithms that had us climbing the walls once or twice. Eh, we lived.)

• Look for the culture of participation among the users, and work with it. Facebook is a place where people come to keep touch with each other, and often it's a light touch at that. Green Gifts gives users a way to connect, while spreading the word about conservation.

So if we've seemed a little more excitable than usual these past few weeks, now you know why: we've been working on one of the most fun projects we've taken on so far, on a topic that's core to our social mission, on a platform we've been itching to dig into for the better part of a year, with a client that has the (ahem) power to make a real difference in sustainability.

We've had the privilege of working with some first-rate people, too. Agencies that operate in strict regulatory environments often have to find their way carefully in new media, but we were impressed at our client's determination to get their feet wet in the world of social networking.

And on the project team, we had the pleasure of working with folks like Jeff Reifman of NewsCloud fame and Communicopia's Jason Mogus. But the guy who truly blew us away was illustrator extraordinaire Jeremy Crowle, who produced some absolutely gorgeous icons for the first round of gifts:

I hope you'll check Green Gifts out. You can find it right here.

There's a great big gorgeous frog in the centrefold of the latest issue of SharedVISION now hitting Vancouver's streets, along with the URL happyfrog.ca... so I guess the frog is out of the bag, and it's safe to tell you about our latest project.

happyfrog is a directory of thousands of Vancouver-area businesses and organizations working in sustainability and wellness. But it's also built with community in mind. Users can rate and review the businesses they've patronized; anyone listed in happyfrog can open a conversation with the community via built-in blogging.

It's still in beta mode (as the site puts it, this is the tadpole edition), so we'll be listening closely to what community members tell us is and isn't working – and what could make it even better.

happyfrog is the brainchild/labour-of-love of Ron Williams. Ron's been a dream to work with: a passionate, practical visionary eager to make a positive difference in the world. His long-time association with wellness and sustainability publishing generally and SharedVISION in particular has been invaluable in steering happyfrog to its launch. And we're looking forward to working with him to see just how far this frog can jump.

(And if you're wondering what this is about, you'll want to check these great folks out.)

I've just discovered that Dreamhost, which we use to host all of our personal sites, is carbon neutral. They're buying carbon credits so that their users can proudly note that they have carbon neutral sites. Bravo, Dreamhost.

The 30 Days of Sustainability 2007 site has gone live (and if a few of us at Social Signal look a little more relaxed today than we have for the last week, that's a big reason)... and with it, a new initiative from the ever-inventive 30 Days folks.

They're calling it Turn It Off! British Columbia. Taking a cue from similar initiatives in Paris and Sydney, TIOBC asks British Columbians to use as little energy as they can on May 16th. You can use the web site to pledge your participation, and then check back afterward to see how we all did.

While we were building the site, I wondered how TIOBC could dovetail with some of the other web places we were exploring. One of the principles I've tried to apply since we launched Social Signal is to meet people where they already are. (So, for example, rather than ask visitors to upload their pictures to the 30 Days site, we ask them to tag their photos "30days2007" on Flickr, and display a Flickr stream across the bottom of the page.)

And right now, a lot of folks are heading to Facebook. Already the place to be networking for high school, college and university students, Facebook is suddenly hot with parents, professionals and the public at large.

One reason why: the tools are almost supernaturally easy to use. Adding friends, updating your profile, changing your status message – you can do them all in seconds thanks to a clean, simple interface that makes judicious use of now-famous AJAX technology.

And one of the easiest things of all to do is to create and join groups. There are thousands of them on Facebook. And while most are dedicated to things like pop culture and lifestyle, a growing number have a social change focus.

So I created a Facebook group called "Turn It Off! British Columbia". It took me less than a minute to create the group, fill in a profile and upload a logo. Another minute, and I'd sent an invitation to eight friends, asking them to join.

A few days later, there are more than 60 members.

Bear in mind: there was no promotion, no supporting web site (it hadn't launched yet), and not even a request in my invitation that my friends pass the news on.

This is a testament to two things: the compelling nature of the idea, and the phenomenal ease that Facebook lends to collaboration. If you're hoping to bring people together online, you could do far worse than check out Facebook.

Just as you can never really tell if an online community will really take off, you also really don't know what form that success will take. And ChangeEverything.ca has proven that in spades.

First there was the out-of-the-blue thunderbolt of site moderator Kate Dugas' "Got Hats?" initiative.

Now comes the runaway success of community member EnviroWoman's blog about her resolution to live plastic-free in 2007.

Each post tells the story – often hilarious – of her attempts to find non-plastic alternatives to a product many of the rest of us take for granted. Her blog posts invariably foster lively comment threads that become little resource libraries, pointing to plastic-free options and information.

Beneath the self-deprecating humour, there's a serious determination to live up to the commitment she's made, and she now has hundreds of fellow community members pulling for her. (ChangeEverything.ca just signed up its thousandth member.)

But that's only the tip of the iceberg: EnviroWoman's saga has struck a chord across the blogging world. Treehugger, the 800-pound gorilla of sustainability blogs, picked up her story; across the Atlantic, her blog has become one of The Guardian's "sites we love".

It's another example of how passion, transparency (check out the deodorant thread) and practical relevance can combine with a distinctive, engaging voice to
yield real power. With a dawning awareness that we'll have to make profound changes in our lives – and that switching to compact fluorescents alone won't cut it – EnviroWoman is steering a deft middle course of change between the daunting and the incremental. And a growing number of people are hopping on for the ride.