EPA launches “Pick 5 for the Environment,” biggest Web 2.0 effort yet

I’m excited to announce that we’ve launched a new campaign called “Pick 5 for the Environment” as a mixed Web 1.0/2.0 effort. It’s our widest use of social media yet, and the first time we’re really asking people to take action through these new tools. I’ll eventually pull together a presentation on all of this, but I wanted to share some info immediately.

The basic premise is that we challenge people to choose 5 actions to protect the environment out of a list of 10 we provide.

In addition to allowing people to sign up on our site, we’re including all the social media sites with whom we’ve signed recently-negotiated federal terms of service:
– Facebook fan page and application (our first-ever application)
– Flickr group for sharing photos
– YouTube group for sharing videos
– Twitter hash tag: #p5e (this is a code we ask people to use on Twitter when discussing the project and their participation, which can then easily be searched for at http://search.twitter.com )

We’ve been publicizing it via Twitter and Facebook, and we sent the news release out to everyone who’d ever signed up for any of our releases, a total of 99,000 people..

In addition, we’re making special efforts to make it shareable right from our own page. We’ve had a standard “share” button in the upper right corner of all our web pages for some time now. But for Pick 5, we added a row of small icons right next to “Step 1: Commit to Action” to make it even easier to share.

The White House also helped us out, including us in their initial Earth Day post

Finally, our Administrator blogged for the first time today, both in our own blog, Greenversations, and as an invited guest blogger for Facebook.

Here are some early results:
– Fifty minutes after posting the Administrator’s blog to Facebook, there were 190 comments and 2300 people had clicked the “like” button. It’s their blog, so we’re not moderating.
– 300 people have signed up on our Web site. Most gave us email addresses.