Marc Gunther is one of the most respected thinkers, writers and speakers on business, the environment and corporate social responsibility.

Last year, Ethisphere ranked him # 39 out of 100 “influentials” in business ethics, ahead of Jim Koch, T. Boone Pickens, James Goodnight and Paul Newman. It’s a well-earned reputation. 

In a wide-brush conversation, I asked him about his early influences, career highlights and how he became enamored with business ethics and sustainability. 

Gunther grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. “I was a child of the Sixties. My parents weren’t that politically involved, but our Rabbi was part of the civil rights movement; he had marched with Martin Luther King. That inspired me.

“I was an idealist, growing up during one of the most interesting times in history with JFK, Martin Luther King, RFK. Incredible social progress was being made, from the civil rights movement to the women’s movement. Vietnam and Watergate were happening. This had a big impact on me.”

Gunther graduated from Yale in 1973 with an English degree, but couldn’t find a job in journalism. His first gig was with a clean air activist group funded by Ralph Nader. “I inspected boilers in New York City, making sure pollution controls were being met, working with City enforcement groups. It was literally a dirty job.”  

Then he cracked journalism.

Over the next two decades, he climbed the newspaper ladder, starting with the Paterson (N.J.) News, then The Hartford Courant, The Detroit News, Detroit Free Press and Washington Bureau of Knight Ridder. He covered many topics, but wrote most often about TV, media, politics and business. Gunther also interpreted the Internet in the nineties, writing stories like "What is cyberspace?" and "What is e-mail?”

When Fortune magazine hired him in 1996, he wrote even more about business. “I was beginning to wonder what had happened to my idealistic values. I had gotten off track.”

Around the time Gunther turned 50, he wrote a cover story for Fortune called “God and Business.”

“I interviewed people at the intersection of religion and corporate America. People like Jim Collins of "Built to Last" talked about business and values. I spoke with a Notre Dame priest who also taught MBAs. These people got me thinking about business in a fresh way. They were treating people well and believed business can – and should be - a force for good, for positive social change.”

The story became a turning point for him professionally and personally.

“Until then, I had a cliché view of business. The tension that existed between business and values got me thinking in a fresh way. Suddenly, I was no longer interested in writing about media companies, the entertainment industry, American Idol.”

Gunther began writing with “a sense of purpose.”

He wrote a cover story about the greening of Walmart and one about Jeff Immelt’s efforts to reshape the values of General Electric. “Those were two very interesting reputational turnarounds.”

He wrote a cover piece about Hank Paulson, as well as spirituality in the workplace. He authored stories about the business of carbon finance, the rise of corporate social responsibility, the zero-waste movement, genetically-modified rice, environmental activism, corporate governance, AIDS and gay rights in corporate America.

Last December, Gunther (and about 100 others) was let go by Fortune. He calls this experience “a hugely valuable event,” because it connected him with even greater numbers of interesting people and opportunities. Gunther likens it to an economic model called creative disruption “where things are destroyed and then new things spring up.”

The social media revolution is serving him well. His popular blog is proliferating. Gunther is on Facebook, YouTube and he’s started Tweeting (@MarcGunther).

His blog is being syndicated by two of the most influential online environmental voices, GreenBiz.com and The Energy Collective.

Proving "creative disruption" brings good karma to good people, Gunther not only still writes for Fortune, he authored the current cover story “Warren Buffett takes charge” about the Chinese company BYD. 

Gunther smiles and in his self-effacing style says, "This could be a first - a laid off reporter writing a cover story for the publication that let him go, four months after it happened."

2008 was a breakthrough year for Twitter. It grew 752%, ending the year with 4.43 million unique visitors, up from 500,000 at the start of ’08. This year Twitter is growing at a 1,382% clip and has over seven million unique visitors.

As Twitter explodes around us, have you ever wondered which categories of tagging are most popular?
 
WeFollow.com figures this out, bucketing the most popular Twitter hash tags (#) that people assign themselves. WeFollow can’t tell you how many people have adopted specific tags (as those numbers are constantly in flux), but it can provide some indication of their popularity based on the cumulative number of followers. For example, the # 2 most popular tag is #socialmedia. # 4 is #blogger and #5 is #music.

The WeFollow top 100 tag list is actually pretty straightforward, including things like #news, #politics, #travel, #marketing, #business, #women, #education, #sports, #biking, #art and #photography.

Dig beyond the WeFollow Hot 100 Tag list, however, and some bizarre insights reveal themselves, including:

• There are only 132,679 followers of people who’ve embraced the #sex tag. That’s surprising to me, especially when I found out 457,404 are followers of #zombie. I guess more people have a hunger for human brains than flesh.
• #love is such an omnipresent theme; yet its 108,788 followers fall far short of the 370,126 people who follow #taco tagged people. Ethnic foods are big.
• 56,355 followers of people align with #dopeness, proving how utterly un-hip I am. (What's it mean?) 
• Awesome evidently remains a word-du-jour with the over 185,000 following #awesome and/or #awesomestuff. That’s so awesome.
• There are 92,409 followers of #porn” taggers. Meanwhile #phlebotomist racks-up 424,851. Who knew drawing blood was more popular? 
• #cloudcomputing - one of the current hot tech markets – has 55,319 followers. This may not sound like many, but it is, especially compared with the mere 3,405 who follow people tagged with #drinking. This got me thinking … are more people interested in buying computing resources as an online service than imbibing a glass of pinot noir? 
• #badass yields a disappointing 9,207; meanwhile #python delivers 42,639 people who intentionally choose to follow people affiliated with that noun. I searched and searched, but couldn’t find  #badasspython anywhere on Twitter.

And so it goes.

As Twitter explodes as a social media platform, we’ll continue to gain real time insight into personal branding, with all its idiosyncrasies.

As for me, I’m putting all my money on #hollywood. It’s currently at 55,910 tags, but I have a gut feel it’s going to climb the Twitter charts. After all, #celebrity is # 1 with 13+ million following people this tag.