Social platforms are ushering in a new way to promote energy efficiency. By using behavioral principles of goal setting, social comparison (comparing your energy efficiency with your neighbors), customized and personalized reporting, rewarding you for being energy efficient, blogging, trending, letting you share your success stories while following others’ and other incentives, these platforms are defining new inroads towards consumer engagement for achieving energy efficiency.

Leading the way in this venture are companies like Opower, Efficiency 2.0, Simple Energy, Tendril Inc to name a few. While these companies all have different approaches towards creating a social network for energy, yet their goal is the same: capture an audience that can be motivated to being much more energy efficient through online social interactions and engagements. Following the success of social networks like Facebook, these new ventures are aimed at creating the new social platform for energy. Some of their noteworthy aspects are captured below.

Opower – Opower today defines itself as a customer engagement platform for the utility industry. Its online tools are available through the 60 or more Utility providers that it has partnered with and consumers can benefit from them. Opower generates customized Home Energy Reports which are personalized; these give the user an analysis of their energy usage, and provide comparisons with their neighbors’ energy efficiency. Opower also has an online Marketplace that brings together utilities, retailers, manufacturers in the context of reward programs for utility customers. This marketplace allows users to take benefit of personalized rebates and coupons from their utilities which can be redeemed at retail stores, and helps increase customer-participation in the energy efficiency cycle. Their research shows that sharing individualized energy consumption analysis with users results in a nearly 80% increase in participation.

On the other hand Efficiency 2.0 has a unique Personal Energy Efficiency Rewards Program (PEER) which uses sophisticated evaluation criteria and makes use of four key behavioral insights to increase customer participation:

• Personalized Recommendations – As a recommendation engine that analyses and ranks actions and purchases based on factors like popularity and payback periods, PEER uses this data to send its customers personalized energy recommendations and savings estimates without any surveys or audits.
• Goal Tracking – It sends periodic emails to customers that track their progress in lowering their energy bills and also points out where they are using maximum energy.
• Social Context and Competition – Customers are able to see how energy savings compare to their neighbors and they can also compete for prizes.
• Rewarding Savings – PEER issues reward points to customers based on how much energy they save. These points can be redeemed for discounts at national and local stores.

Yet other companies like Tendril focus on creating the cloud platform, automation control of smart in-home energy devices, and energy social applications that become the backbone for communication for energy based social media. Based on research grounded in behavioral science, Tendril Energize allows energy service providers to meet customers where they are—through home energy reports, a web application, or mobile applications for the iPhone and Android—to spark an ongoing and evolving dialogue with today’s energy consumer.

The power of partnerships – Opower has recently announced a partnership with Facebook in creating a social energy application. Users will be able to compare their energy usage with friends, enter energy saving competitions and share tips on how to save energy. Commonwealth Edison (ComED), the city of Palo Alto (CA) and Glendale Water and Power (GWP) are the first U.S. utilities who will participate in this social app allowing their customers to automatically import their energy data into this app. Similarly Simple Energy and Tendril have partnered together in San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E) biggest energy saver campaign in CA and results indicate that on an average consumers were able to save 20% of their energy savings with this program. Tendril also has created partnerships for Electric Vehicles, leveraging their technology into other energy specific domains while still providing a social media interface for the consumer.

Government and the social energy platform - The Department of Energy is also moving towards social media platforms to educate users about energy efficiency. DOE’s website explains various initiatives that it is taking to orient itself around these ideas. Similarly, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s Home Energy Pros is yet another energy-based social media engagement platform which has a large number of registered participants already.

While it remains to be seen how these companies carry forward and translate their ideas into success, it is clear that there is now a new way of using social media platforms for promoting energy efficiency that is slowly and steadily gaining acceptance in the community. By forming strategic partnerships with utilities, with market leaders or with each other, and backed by behavioral research on user acceptance criteria of a platform, these companies are paving a new way of promoting energy efficiency efficiently among the masses.

Author: Anuradha Munshi

Blog: http://colorearthgreen.wordpress.com/