Ivan Storck | http://www.ivanenviroman.com/

A few choice quotes from a great article on Triple Pundit. The one thing that’s important to note, viral marketing is not limited to passing funny messages along. Viral marketing is really any marketing message that gets passed around, via facebook status updates, or showing up in other activity streams, such as blog comments, twitter, stumbleupon, etc.

Viral marketing is a concept that few of us environmentalists are naturally inclined to take up in a technical sense. Yet there’s no denying that green has got wonderful potential when it comes to creatively using the internet to spread messages.

Take Jeremiah Owyang, a web strategist familiar with the subject. Having zealously compiled a top ten viral ads ranking last year too, he comments “I’d rather build a thriving community of customers, users, partners, and employees than risk all my resources on the potential to get a one hit wonder.”

Now that environmentalists are getting their way in just about every area of public and corporate life, their information is in demand. That’s new. Viral marketing of green issues will only work in cases that we’re all waiting for wisdom and knowledge (eco is simply not funny most of the times yet) to confirm that what’s authentic actually is authentic.

The most powerful example of this is eco activist Van Jones’ newly launched book “The Green Collar Economy,” which was published this month. It made it to 12th place on the New York Times best sellers list within a week from being launched.

The reasons behind the book’s success? Van Jones’ authentic message plus a clever viral marketing strategy. The visionary’s own organization Green For All can be mostly credited with the marketing success. The organization contacted around 150 different organizations of all shapes and sizes, according to Van Jones’ grassroots publicity coordinator Alli Chagi-Starr. Endorsements of the book by many organizations worked miracles. For instance, the Environmental Defense Fund recommended the book to its 500,000 members. An online strategy involved getting the owners of greencollareconomy.com to promote the book as well and contacting all the environmental bloggers they knew.

Another example of a recently launched viral green ad is All Terrain.net’s Dude we can fix it campaign supporting Al Gore’s We can solve it climate organization whose goal is to have America’s electricity generated from non-fossil fuel sources within 10 years. The ad agency has dedicated its creative muscle power –built up in the last ten years- to ‘fixing the climate crisis’. by mobilizing experts in experiential, viral, public relations and influencer marketing strategies.to persuade people to contribute at least $10 to the cause of energy independence. The campaign runs on a series of sketch comedy video spoofs of people trying to be green but whose tactics are far from effective. The first two, “Wind Power,” and “Water Conversation” are posted at DudeWeCanFixIt.com and YouTube.com. Check out Water Conversation (which YouTube seems to group persistently under Water Conservation).