Noah Kagan described the Blended iPod video as the best example of viral marketing on the web right now. It had been viewed 4,499,819 times by the time I watched it while listening to Noah at the Opportunity Green conference at UCLA today.
He was making a point to this audience of green entrepreneurs that you've got to "keep it real" by making your eco message accessible and entertaining. Viral marketing on the Internet is the essential tool and is the key enabler of the green business movement.
Noah shared the stage with Günther Lie, Director of Interactive Marketing at Method Products, in a panel interview called Green 2.0 - Connecting Our Community. Günther observed that the marketing messages directed at prospective green customers are infused with shame and guilt. I'd say that's right, and, to an extent, is why businesses' participation in communities online is so crucial to the green sea change washing over the economy. Social pressure on a scale only possible through online communities is driving conformity to new social standards. The green ethos is coalescing first online. What was briefly a meme in early online communities is now a code of conduct among those communities with intention. The price of admission to an effective, thriving community is having a working knowledge of eco and social responsibility. Businesses lacking the vocabulary of CSR, carbon offsets, and radical resource efficiency need not apply. You won't get noticed taken seriously on worldchanging.com, treehugger.com, openthefuture.com, openarchitecturenetwork.org, care2.com, witness.org, or the myriad other huge, vibrant online communities shaping our socially and environmentally just future unless you accept an informed role in the cause.
