Facebook and Linkedin: Focused on Conserving Energy, Water, Sourcing Clean and Renewable Energy

Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. As they work towards their mission, they are focused on conserving energy and water, sourcing clean and renewable energy to power their operations, and creating sustainable work environments for their employees to ensure a sustainable future.

By 2020, Facebook is committed to both reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by 75% from a 2017 baseline – a science-based target – and to supporting their operations with 100% renewable energy.

Their approach to achieve the above-mentioned sustainable future are:

• Engineer energy- and water-efficient data centers

Starting with their first data center in Prineville, Oregon, Facebook has sought to revolutionize data center design to maximize efficiency and reliability.

By rethinking and reengineering everything from servers to cooling systems, they designed and constructed a new data center that was 38% more energy efficient and used 80% less water than a traditional data center.

Producing wind and solar energy takes less water than producing energy from fossil fuels. They are powering their operations with 100% clean and renewable energy and reducing their water footprint in the process. Between 2014 and 2017, it was estimated that their solar and wind energy procurement efforts saved hundreds of millions of gallons of water. Facebook also strives to conserve water directly. They installed water-saving fixtures and appliances to conserve water, and all their bathroom and kitchen fixtures meet Energy Star standards.

• Build sustainable workspaces

All of Facebook’s offices in Menlo Park, California, are powered by 100% renewable energy and by the end of 2020, all offices globally will also be at 100% renewable energy.

Facebook has implemented global sustainability standards to help their offices around the world practice resource conservation, purchase clean and renewable energy, reduce waste, and participate in green building certification programs. These standards determine how to design, build, retrofit, and operate their buildings. During demolition and construction, they achieve high waste diversion rates and utilize energy efficient equipment, lighting controls, water-saving fixtures, and sophisticated energy management systems to reduce heating, ventilation, air conditioning loads, and to optimize indoor air quality.

Facebook designs and constructs all tenant improvement and new construction projects on their campus to achieve LEED Gold certification or higher, with their newest ground-up building pursuing LEED Platinum certification. Across campus, they have a combined 3.6 megawatts of photovoltaics installed.

Facebook has a robust transportation program that aims to reduce single-car trips by implementing employee shuttles, as well as resources for ride-sharing, carpooling, taking public transportation, and biking to work.

Facebook’s waste diversion rate is more than 90% at their Menlo Park headquarters, and the campus features robust recycling and composting programs.

Facebook encourages its employees to work in communities surrounding their operations through volunteering and other ways of giving back like, by hosting weekly mobile farmer’s market and sponsoring solar installations in homes in Belle Haven.

• Add clean and renewable energy to the grids

Facebook exceeded their goal of reaching 50% clean and renewable energy in 2017, a year earlier than they targeted. They are now aiming of reaching 100% across all facilities, including office and data centers by the end of 2020.

Facebook’s renewable energy approach has been diverse and customized for each market that they have entered. For example- In Europe, they contracted for the largest wind energy procurement by a corporate customer to support their data centers in Luleå, Sweden, and Odense, Denmark. In Iowa, they worked with the local utility to add wind energy projects to their portfolio in a way that benefits all the utility’s customers while providing power to their data center. In Nebraska, they worked with the local utility on a new tariff structure that allows them to purchase wind from a new local project.

• Low Carbon Footprint

In 2004, one million people were using Facebook. In December 2017, there were 2.1 billion people using Facebook every month. Despite this growth and the expansion of services, Facebook’s carbon impact per person has remained about the same.

In 2017, Facebook’s total carbon footprint was 979,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MT CO2e).

Facebook is engineering a smaller carbon footprint across their apps and services by making their infrastructure more efficient and by sourcing clean and renewable energy. They are working to increase their use of clean and renewable electricity sources to 100% by the end of 2020.

Facebook owned data centers Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is 1.10, which is far more efficient than the industry standard of 1.50. This, coupled with their efficient servers, makes the infrastructure approximately 40% more efficient than what’s typical in the industry. Their data centers are built to be water efficient and use 80% less water than a typical data center.

LinkedIn believes that how they work is as important as what they do in creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. They do this by giving back or contributing to the world in different ways:

• Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging: LinkedIn’s strategy is to diversify and ensure that employees from all backgrounds are successful, with a focus on groups that are underrepresented today. Their vision of creating a thriving community of diverse professionals in tech works around these three pillars: hire & grow, invest and culture.

• Environmental Sustainability:

• Green Building

LinkedIn is committed to creating world-class environmentally responsible office spaces for their thousands of employees across the globe. Over 60% of their workspaces are certified green spaces and they are transforming more with every passing day.

• Data Centers

LinkedIn’s goal is to scale and operate the most reliable, innovative, efficient and sustainable data centers in the world. Through collaborative programs such as the Business of Social Responsibility (BSR) Future of Internet Power, they are looking for opportunities to maximize efficiency and utilize renewable energy sources.

The Uptime Institute recently recognized their Oregon datacenter with the highest score to-date for the Efficient IT award. This award cites LinkedIn’s leadership in innovation and design to achieve lasting reductions in the data center’s costs, utilities, and carbon emissions, and their commitment to renewable energy.

• Sustainable Operation

Waste: They measure the waste generation in their offices across the globe, and through education and outreach, they are targeting and tracking improvements in their recycling and composting rates.

Energy: They use data to make smart energy decisions. In the first 6 months of 2016, they saved 26 tons of CO2 by leveraging insights from an energy management platform in their Bay Area offices.

Water: LinkedIn tracks their water footprint and act to conserve it. Since 2015, they have been educating their employees on water conservation opportunities through food choice in their California workplaces.

• Carbon Footprint

LinkedIn tracks the carbon emissions from their global operations, including offices, data centers, employee air travel, and commuting. They are committed to reducing their emissions, and in 2015 also participated in the American Business Act on Climate initiative sponsored by the White House where they pledged to a path towards powering their global operations with 100% renewable energy.

• Global Ethics and Compliance

LinkedIn believes that doing business ethically gives it a competitive advantage. They provide employees with the framework they need to avoid risks like corruption and conflicts of interest, while honing their ethical leadership skills. They monitor their performance as a company against the ever-changing regulatory landscape, ensuring that LinkedIn is always practicing thoughtfully and responsibly in an innovative way.

• Disaster Response

LinkedIn’s Disaster Response Program aims to support humanitarian efforts in times of crisis. Examples of their work include their immediate response to the devastating earthquake in Nepal in 2015 and their 2016 support of Syrian refugees. During the Nepal earthquake, they used their tools to match UAV (drone) experts to the Digital Humanitarian Network, a humanitarian organization that was responding on the ground.

How social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn get the most of it requires some degree of understanding, notably about who is looking at your Facebook/LinkedIn page and how they are engaging with it.

It is here that analysis comes into play in order to build upon your company’s presence and expand its reach and engagement with new and existing fans and visitors.

Whether they’re trying to understand where the visitors are coming from on these website, even how existing customers interact with other customers and understanding where traffic comes from is vital across the entire marketing spectrum.

They need to understand who is using their digital touchpoints, whether you want to glean more detailed information, such as how old they are, their gender, interests or more, which can be used to offer better-targeted content. And this is where Big Data and Analytics comes into the picture.

Every day, we feed Facebook’s data beast with tons of information. Every 60 seconds, 136,000 photos are uploaded, 510,000 comments are posted, and 293,000 status updates are posted, which is a lot of data. With data like this, Facebook knows who our friends are, what we look like, where we are, what we are doing, our likes, our dislikes, and a lot more.

Apart from Google, Facebook is probably the only company that possesses this high level of detailed customer information. The more users who use Facebook, the more information they get. Apart from analyzing user data, Facebook has other ways of determining user behavior. For ex:

1. Tracking cookies: Facebook tracks its users across the web by using tracking cookies. If a user is logged into Facebook and simultaneously browses other websites, Facebook can track the sites they are visiting.

2. Facial recognition: One of Facebook’s latest investments has been in facial recognition and image processing capabilities. Facebook can track its users across the internet and other Facebook profiles with image data provided through user sharing.

3. Tag suggestions: Facebook suggests who to tag in user photos through image processing and facial recognition.

4. Analyzing the Likes: A recent study conducted showed that it is viable to predict data accurately on a range of personal attributes that are highly sensitive just by analyzing a user’s Facebook Likes. Work conducted by researchers at Cambridge University and Microsoft Research show how the patterns of Facebook Likes can very accurately predict your sexual orientation, satisfaction with life, intelligence, emotional stability, religion, alcohol use and drug use, relationship status, age, gender, race, and political views—among many others.

Facebook Inc. analytics chief Ken Rudin says, “Big Data is crucial to the company’s very being.” He goes on to say that, “Facebook relies on a massive installation of Hadoop, a highly scalable open-source framework that uses clusters of low-cost servers to solve problems. Facebook even designs its own hardware for this purpose. Hadoop is just one of many Big Data technologies employed at Facebook.”

Here are a few examples to show, how Facebook uses its Data:

Example 1: The Flashback

On its 10th anniversary, Facebook offered its users the option of viewing and sharing a video that traces the course of their social network activity from the date of registration till the present called the “Flashback,”. This video is a collection of photos and posts that received the most comments and likes and set to a nostalgic background music.

Example 2: I Voted

Facebook successfully tied political activity to user engagement when they came out with a social experiment by creating a sticker allowing its users to declare “I Voted” on their profiles.

This experiment ran during the 2010 midterm elections and seemed effective, as users who noticed the button were likely to vote and be vocal about the behavior of voting once they saw their friends were participating in it too.

The Data science unit at Facebook claimed that this experiment motivated close to 60,000 voters directly, and the social contagion, which motivated 280,000 connected users to vote for a total of 340,000 additional voters in the midterm elections.

Example 3: Topic Data

Topic Data is a Facebook technology that displays to marketers the responses of the audience about brands, events, activities, and subjects, in a way that keeps their personal information private. Marketers use the information from topic data to selectively change the way they market on the platform.

LINKEDIN:

With more than 400 million profiles (122 million in US and 33 million in India) across 200+ countries, more than 100 million unique monthly visitors- LinkedIn is the largest social network for professionals. People prefer to share their expertise and connect with like-minded professionals to discuss various issues of interest in a platform like LinkedIn, as it allows them to represent themselves formally in a less traditional manner.

LinkedIn keeps up with our job preferences, our connections, suggestions and stories we prefer to read. LinkedIn Big Data Analytics is what makes LinkedIn predict what kind of information you need to know and when you need it. At LinkedIn, big data is more about business than data.

LinkedIn tracks every user’s moves on the site, and the company analyses this mountain of data in order to make better decisions and design data-powered features. LinkedIn uses Big Data across the company, and here are a few examples of it in action:

Example 1: LinkedIn uses data to make suggestions for users – “People you may know”. LinkedIn uses machine learning techniques to refine its algorithms and make better suggestions for users. So, if the site regularly suggested people you may know from Company A and Company B, but you almost never clicked on the company A profiles, LinkedIn would tailor its suggestions going forward with that in mind. This personalized approach enables users to build the networks that works best for them.

Example 2: LinkedIn uses stream-processing technology to display the most up-to-date information when users are on the site – from who got a new job to useful articles that contacts have shared. LinkedIn incorporates data analytics and intelligence to understand what kind of information you’d like to read, what subjects’ interest you most, what kind of updates you like and puts together the aggregated real-time news feed. This constant streaming of data adds interest and speeds up the analytics process. Instead of capturing data and storing it to be analyzed later, real-time stream-processing technology allows LinkedIn to stream data direct from the user activity and analyze it on the fly.

Example 3: Searchable job titles, connections and skills are LinkedIn’s greatest possessions that employers can use when looking for top talent. LinkedIn is joining the dot for corporates by leverage big data for intelligent workforce planning through “Jobs You May Be Interested In” feature. 90% of Fortune 100 Companies use LinkedIn to hire top talent and 89% of professionals use LinkedIn to land a job. According to LinkedIn, 50% of the website engagement comes from “Jobs You May Be Interested In” feature. Machine Learning plays a vital role in everything at LinkedIn whether it is Job Recommendations, Group Recommendations, News Story Recommendations, Personalization of the Social Feed or any personalized search.

LinkedIn tracks every move of its users made on the site, from everything liked and shared to every job clicked on and every contact messaged. Hadoop forms the core of LinkedIn’s Big Data infrastructure, but other key parts of the LinkedIn Big Data jigsaw include Oracle, Pig, Hive, Kafka, Java and MySQL.

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