You’re seeing it everywhere … everyone is jumping on the “green” bandwagon. And it means something entirely different than when Kermit the Frog sang about it. I know that I feel a twinge of guilt when I throw something out that could possibly be recycled. So what do consumers think at this point?

The Center for Media Resarch has found that consumers are not fully embracing the concept as of yet. The messaging is definitely out there in the marketplace, and 37.1% of consumers admitted to frequently recalling what is now becoming known as “green messaging.” So rising awareness is good news, right?

Not so fast. Although the consumer awareness is there, the consumer’s trust is not. Only 12.1% claim to always believe green advertising claims. A whopping 65.3% say they sometimes believe the green claims. However, the consumer is definitely taking the green movement and incorporating it into their own life — 81.9% say they are doing something to make their life more green. Only 12.9% say they are “not green at all.” As far as going completely green, only 5.2% of respondents consider themselves in that bucket.

Not surprising, the number one reason for going green is because it’s good for the environment, and that’s the number one reason specified in this survey. What appeals most to these green groups? The top two are recycling information and healthy recipes. Also popular are alternative energy sources, natural remedies, eco-friendly cleaning products, outdoor recreation, tips for simple living and organic foods.

The majority of people who are trying to live green find their information on the Internet (79.6%). But they seem to be disappointed in what they’re finding. Only 41.6% of people said they would rate the information that they found as average, 20.8% rated the info found as fair, and 17.2% rated info found as poor.

This represents a huge opportunity for marketers if you’re wanting to reach a green or a green aspiring audience. It’s obvious that people are hungry for information and want to do the right thing. Consumers are looking for ways to incorporate “green” into their daily lives, so it is a perfect opportunity for companies to not just offer “green” information about their products/services, but go beyond to educate them.

Let’s face it, if your company is venturing into “greening” your products, you have done research that consumers might not have access to? Share it, with no “sales or marketing” expectations, then consumers will develop a relationship with your company, build trust and eventually will become loyal customers of your company.

Everything in the media, ads lately is about “green” and I believe there is going to be a backlash on “green” marketing. So be smart, educate, provide real information about how to instill a green living, don’t just use “green” as a marketing gimmick - you will be called out, and ignored. That will hurt your bottom line.

While at Ad:Tech, we got some video footage from attendees and vendors to get a feel for what participants were looking for at San Francisco event hosted at the Moscone

For this series entitled “The Vibe” we engaged participants with a few questions about their background and their intentions at Ad:Tech to assess the current pulse of our industry. Videos include footage from both seasoned players as well as newcomers such as Gevirtz Media.

Here are some folks we interviewed:

- Megan Ross Farrell & Clay Moore - Jive Software
- Blair Swedeen & Jessica Jurva - Placecast
- Yael Yekutiel - TraffIQ
- Brad Thompson - Advertising.com
- Carnet Williams - SproutBuilder.com
- Michael Bender - Prospectiv
- Shane Graper - CPA Empire
- Harrison Gevirtz - Gevirtz Media
- Gen McGlothlin - Internet Old Timers Foundation
- Ad-o-Tube
- Graham Gochneaur - Clickbooth
- Nadja Blagojevic - PageOne PR
- Chris Graham - Syntryx

Here’s a sample of for your enjoyment:

For the rest please visit our channel here.

We have been doing Social Media Marketing for Sutter Home Wineries, Wells Fargo, Plantronics, Shogakukan, Ebates, Pleo and many more for about 10 years. Social Media Marketing is the new term for what was called Word of Mouth Marketing. Before WOM, we called this type of marketing Guerilla marketing, and before that, newsgroups marketing (I am dating myself!) We still have a large number of clients (companies in entertainment, wine, travel and many B2B) and prospects who don’t know where to start. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Friendfeed, RSS, Mashable, Kaboodle, etc…

…ARGH! It’s no wonder they are confused!

Here are some recommended baby/first steps that many corporations/organizations can follow to get involved:

Phase I:

• Review, evaluate and select a buzz audit tool/social media metric tool such as Radian6, BuzzLogic, BuzzMetrics, Kavaa, Umbria, Cymphony

• Ask the account manager for the tool company to run queries (and grouped them by themes/categories) on your company’s name, product names, services, key executives, competitors, competitors brands, products, services
• Analyze for the last 3-6 months who are the influencers, what are the top social media channels for your company (forums, blogs, photo sites, video sites, news sites, social networks, mobile networks, etc.), high level topics, negative and positive word of mouth

Phase II:

If you analyze the information from Phase I, next you should be able to identify the following information:

• Trends: what consumers or B2B professionals are talking about
• News: what consumers or B2B professionals have noticed and is newsworthy to them
• Negative sentiments about a brand, a product, a service, your company, your competitors
• Positive sentiments about a brand, a product, a service, your company, your competitors
• Top influential bloggers, forum leaders, Flickr groups/person, YouTube Partner Pages, Facebook groups, MySpace

   

  Phase III:

Once you have identified the information and started to analyze it, you have the following choices:

Observe and Report:

• Continue to observe trends and report them to marketing, product development, corporate management and PR
• Continue to provide brand, product, service reports on negative and positive word of mouth and comments on forums, blogs, Flickr, Amazon reviews, etc.

Observe and Ask Questions:

If you have observed and analyzed information, there is naturally going to be a lot questions you as a corporation/organization you are going to ask yourself. This is one of the powers of communities, social networks, blogs, etc – you can initiate contact with prospects and customers. Here are some of the things to think about before you do though:

• If you ask questions, you will get feedback, good and bad
• If the feedback is good, be ready to say thank you
• If the feedback is bad, be ready to say thank you, and answer honestly. Marketing, PR speak is always seen as dodging the real issues and many bloggers, consumers will call you on it. If you answer honest about what you can and cannot do as an organization, consumers/B2B professionals will respect you. As a matter of fact, we have had many occasions where your worst enemy becomes your best advocate – why? Because you were not afraid to be honest and you engaged in a two way dialogue with them – not a “push marketing” dialogue.
• Keep in mind this statistic – reducing negative word of mouth by 2% has the same effect as increasing positive word of mouth by 7% according to a London School of Economics study. Reducing negative word of mouth is 3 times more effective than trying to increase positive word of mouth – which one should you invest in first?

Proactively Participate in the Conversations

Once you have started to engage in two way conversations, you could start initiate conversations, you could start engaging with folks proactively. Here are some examples of ways to do so:

• For a B2B company, if there are many forums that speak about your product, service, brand, you can dedicate some of the support, marketing personnel to proactively answer questions on them. Take a look at xdadevelopers.com – this extremely active forum with consumers and developers about every cell phone on the planet is peppered with experts from AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Singapore Telecom who are genuinely answering questions.
• For a B2C company, if there are many forums, blogs, flickr, YouTube comments about your company, brand, product, service – go ahead, answer their questions, thank them for their comments and correct misinformation by backing every statement you make. Just remember, you are engaging in a two way conversation

Proactively participate and engage them into your company

You can take the next level and participate but more importantly, engage influential bloggers, forum leaders, group leaders etc into your company. How? Simply have multiple conversations with them, and overtime you can evaluate who are the bloggers, forum participants, etc who know about the industry you serve or don’t. From there, you can invite them to participate into your company’s growth; here are some ways it can help:

• Product Requirements
• Product Development
• Support
• Internal Knowledge
• Market & Customer Feedback

In conclusion, if organizations follow Phase I, II and 1) & 2) of Phase III, they can dive into Social media marketing or at least intelligence by using the power of social media networks, sites and Web 2.0 communities to gather real information about their prospects, customers. These recommended steps are not very resources intensive, and can help organizations be much more aware of their customers needs.

Wow, we are blushing….Amanda Vega, thanks for the kudos. Kudos also goes to the UGOBE team, and SHIFT communications for working hard in ensuring that Pleo is getting the right attention, that Pleo fans are being communicated to, and that it’s launch and beyond is a success. We thank you for the kudos. OK, back to work here.

We had the pleasure to recently review and evaluate the new product (still in Beta) from BuzzLogic called BuzzLogic AdTargeting. Wow, what a great product.

If you are a company like many of our clients that wants to advertise on blogs, yet have no idea about the results, don’t want to risk, don’t have the time to research which blogs to advertise on, search no more.

BuzzLogic’s ad targeting product allows you to run a search on the top influential bloggers for your industry (Say you are TravelPod (an old client of ours) your top 50-100 influencer blogs/social media sites could include About.com’s Europe section , ReadWriteWeb, Kattie Fehrenbacher from GigaOm, Emily Chang’s eHub - all of whom have written about travel and travel start ups ). From there, you can select the sites (that offer Google Ads now, but I am sure they will add ad networks such as Blog Ads, Text Ad Link, Ad Brite, etc. more later) on which you want to place a Text Ad or Visual Ad. You create the ad. Then you launch.

Now not only this takes the work out of figuring out which blogs to place your ads on since the tool identifies for you, the influential bloggers that have covered your product/service (or competitors’ product), but it also brings forward two strong things in BuzzLogic’s favor:
- Through the development work they have done with Google, they are able to allow us agencies and advertisers to do site targeting on sites that usually you can not target through Google’s content network (I am not talking about site targeting here, we are talking about being able to target sites in the “content network” of Google)
- Because you are placing ads on blogs that have covered your product or service (or competitors), your ads on such sites are VERY relevant, and therefore will perform that much better because your ads are going to be VERY relevant to your target audiences.

We are launching a few test campaigns and am sure we will see great results.

Congrats to BuzzLogic for being innovative.