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.

Battelle articulates what more and more marketers are coming to realize, that brand advertising investments aren’t just driving perception shift in a vacuum that must be measured by pre and post research; those dollars are informing search behavior. Nor should search-engine marketing be the express domain of direct-response advertising, since search-engine results pages are, after all, where most of our customers first experience our brands online (see Searchblog).

The two are linked, and the links are becoming more obvious. Here, for example, is the results page on Google for a trademarked phrase owned by Mitsubishi, “lancer evolution.” Battelle marked with red arrows the two links (one paid, one organic) that point to Mitsubishi; the rest of this Lancer Evolution “brand experience” falls outside of Mitsubishi’s control.

Here’s what Battelle’s hearing from marketers of late:

“First, they are noticing that when they run brand advertising both online and off, searches for their brands increase. Second, they are noticing that when searches for their brands increase, sales (or at least valuable, measureable leads) follow. And they certainly want searches for their brands to increase. But they have noticed something else as well: There’s a lot of stuff that comes up when folks search for their brands that they don’t control. In particular, there’s a ton of messaging out there — the equivalent of brand advertising, in a sense — that reflects the world’s view of their brand….

“In short, there are a lot of conversations out there that marketers can’t ‘control,’ but that are vital to the brand’s perception, consideration, and performance.”

Here are Google results for American Express-owned trademark “plum card” from September 18, not long after they launched the new card by that name.