ChasNote

As part of its celebration of Earth Day 2008, Chevy kicked off a sponsorship of a green “group blog,” Best of the Green Web.

GM partnered with FM to scout sites that cover environmental topics — from design and trend-spotting sites such as Core77, TrendHunter, Boing Boing and Uncrate to do-it-yourself sites like Make and start-up news sites ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat. For those of you headed to Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA, this weekend, you better arrive on your garage-built compressed air moped:

One post on the site (sourced from ReadWriteWeb) profiles a company, BadBuster, that makes a widget that grades the eco-friendliness of large, public companies — including GM. According to the widget, GM’s environmental-performance glass is a little better than half full (or, of course, nearly half empty). It’s doing better than its North American and German rivals but is still behind its Japanese competitors.

It’s refreshing to see that kind of content on a sponsored site. Clearly this is real content, not something pumped out by GM’s PR team. With its honesty it sends the message that Chevy is committing to the green conversation in a way that goes beyond “green washing.”

Announcing that it just launched a lithium-ion prototype Chevy Volt doesn’t take away from that perception either.

Credits: Adam Erhard and the GM Planworks team, along with Marcia Simmons, Matt Jessell and Jared Katzman at FM.

There was good stuff at yesterday’s Web 2.0 panel, “Marketing: Where Are We Now.” Battelle — wearing his Web 2.0 Program Chair hat, not his FM Founder one — moderated a discussion with Curt Hecht (GM Planworks / SMG), Carla Hendrie (Ogilvy) and Casey Jones (McCann).

• Curt Hecht: Search marketing can & should play a role in brand campaigns in at least two ways. One, always coordinate keyword buys with brand and PR initiatives. For example, make sure you own “Oprah” and “Pontiac” keywords when you have Oprah surprising her studio audience with free cars. Two, use search marketing to drive audiences to content you want them to see, even if you didn’t write it, eg, favorable editorial reviews on credible, 3rd party sites.

• Casey Jones: Forget about keeping anything “off the web.” It just can’t be done anymore. He cited two examples — one, an XBOX 360 video spot that was rejected before it made it out of the marketing dept, the other an internal spoof video (what if Microsoft made the iPod) — that made their way to YouTube faster than an email leaves its outbox.

• Ed Cotton, from Butler Shine, posited from the audience that there’s a lot of talk about innovation, but the fear of screwing up is still much more powerful. How do we get beyond this?

• Carla Hendra’s examples provided interesting paths around those risk potholes. One, Motorola-sponsored silly Back Street Boys-inspired video in China with product placement for a cellphone. Two, Dove’s Evolution video that shows a model’s make-over (both by a stylist and with Photoshop), the transition from ordinary (even plain) mortal to the image we see on an advertising billboard. Three, the seed campaign for Cisco’s Human Network initiative. In all 3 cases, brands took advantage of amateur and viral videos and user-generated, participatory ad creative — yet the creative assets weren’t commercials starring cellphones, soap or routers. The campaigns gave customers some fun or thoughtful content (Motorola and Dove, respectively) to share with friends or an opportunity to converse, in a sense, with a marketing brand (Cisco) without expecting their customers to get excited about, say, soap.