ChasNote

The New York Times has launched a sponsored content section in partnership with Chevy that brings together editorial stories from the Times archive featuring GM, Chevy, fuel cell and hybrid vehicles.

I love it. How could I not? It’s a full sibling of The Best of the Green Web site FM launched in partnership with Chevy back in May. I may love it even more, since it’s validation from the Gray Lady that conversational marketing — if done transparently and authentically — can coexist comfortably with the most respected ethics in journalism.

(Disclosure: The Gray Lady is an investor in FM.)

The crew at Business Week’s Blogspotting isn’t convinced that Chevy’s Best of the Green Web sponsored site is conversational enough:

“Chevy says on the site that it wants to start a conversation. But if that’s the case, I would expect the site to be all about the technologies that will make cars more fuel efficient and less damaging in terms of resources used and carbon dioxide emitted. And I would expect Chevy’s folks to be contributing their own news about what they’re doing.”

I don’t think Blogspotting spent enough time at the site. Here’s the comment I posted to the original story:

“I agree with your critique of conversational marketing where marketing brands don’t have a voice in the discussion. In the case of Chevy’s sponsorship of the Best of the Green Web site, however, they do have a voice. Chevy is providing its own news and updates on its fuel-solutions technologies — see the left column, just below the Recent Comments. The idea is to take consumer feedback, and to addressed it issue by issue. Even tough questions like ‘Aren’t you the guys who killed the electric car?’ Creating authentic media — whether it’s editorial media or media connected to a marketing project — is hard work, and success is defined by each reader or viewer. Based on traffic and repeat traffic to this site, and engagement with the content provided by Chevy, this experience is working for a fair number of green-minded consumers. At the very least, it’s a move by Chevy in the right direction, a move towards a more fluid two-way dialog with customers.”

You careful ChasNote readers may have seen this coming when you read last month about Chevy’s sponsorship the Best of the Green Web project (or Dell’s sponsorship of a green drawing contest in Facebook’s Graffiti), but now it’s official. FM has launched its Green Federation, a collection of the best green-leaning sites online, including Inhabitat, GigaOM’s Earth2Tech and the ViroPOP video network.

Here’s the press release.

ViroPop’s ZapRoot green-topics video program is now syndicating content on Best of the Green Web, the green group blog coordinated by FM and sponsored by GM’s Chevy brand.

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.