Chinook Book/EcoMetro Guides and ecometro.com
July 9th, 2009 | Published in EcoMetro Guides
Green living guides/coupon books in 3, then 4, then 6 cities, with a website and social media for all.
My work at EcoMetro was divided into two categories: content and social media for the website, and writing and researching content for the print books (circ. 100,000 in 2009). EcoMetro is part of Celilo Group Media, a green lifestyle media company.
- Interactive print content (my favorite!)
I started with Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis in 2007/08, adding Berkeley/Oakland in 08/09, and followed by Silicon Valley and Denver/Boulder in 09/10.
To make it possible to write locally relevant copy for each city, I drafted standardized paragraphs about a topic and plugged in the relevant information (for example, a chapter on selecting organic cotton clothing, with a local business plugged in). The chapters covered in each book were usually:
- Eating local
- Farmers markets
- Saving energy
- Using clean energy
- Gardening
- Green home life/green building
- Recycling the unusual
- Community/volunteering
- Green clothing
- Pets (or kids, depending on the year)
- Bike commuting
- Taking transit
Admission: I’ve never been to Minneapolis, or Silicon Valley, or Denver (since I was 13), but I wrote about each as if I lived there. Remote research is surprisingly fun!
I used Google street view to describe something I’m writing about from afar. Zoom in on a park, landmark, or store and you’ll get a sense of the neighborhood and be able to use descriptive, lively words as if you walk the streets every single day.
Each of these books is 25% resource, 75% coupons. Businesses much meet a strict environmental criteria. In new cities, we passed a draft by local government and utilities to ensure accuracy. In following years, we passed a draft by the local marketing team.
During my time there the company grew from 3 to 6 cities and nearly doubled in employee size as well, an interesting experience that taught me mountains about small business.