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Online reputation monitoring of greenwashers
The Communication Summit is the yearly highlight for PR and Communication professionals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. During a panel discussion on online PR and communication, Mr. Volker Gaßner from Greenpeace, made an interesting contribution to the topic of online reputation monitoring.
Greenpeace does online reputation monitoring of companies they see as “greenwashing” their corporate image (i.e. claiming without merit that they are green and sustainable). He used an example of RWE, a large energy provider, who recently hired a high profile PR and marketing agency to create a video to improve their corporate image. The video depicts an animated version of the energy giant planting windmills, wave power generators and fixing broken power lines.
In fact, only 2% of RWE’s energy comes from green and sustainable energy and Greenpeace sees the RWE video as a typical “greenwashing” campaign. Accordingly, Greenpeace re-cut and altered the video to be shown on a TV monitor, sitting in a wasteland of nuclear energy plants (RWE owns 5 of them in Germany).
After only a few weeks the Greenpeace response has almost as many YouTube views as the original, it backfired.
Mr. Dieter Zetsche, Chairman of the Board of Management at Daimler AG, also addressed the topic at his opening Keynote to the Communication Summit. The challenges for PR and communication professionals in communicating green technology efforts are indeed real. It is not only a complex and difficult technology to understand (especially in the car industry), it is also easy to fall for the temptation of playing with statistics and nice imagery.
Mr. Zetsche concluded that only communication of real substance is likely to gain trust and goodwill. It is also safe to assume that Greenpeace, as well as competitors, will continue with online reputation monitoring, to keep track of greenwashing and misleading advertising.
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Love it!
BTW, you guys should do a case study on Desertec (http://www.desertec.org/). Looks to be the PR coup of 2009.
Great post, eMobility will be THE topic for 2010 and we’re very likely to see a bit of greenwashing from the car industry. For example; how green is a Prius when the battery needs to be exchanged after 10 years? At that time the price of a new battery will be more than the car is worth… And what about disclosing the real environmental cost of charging on board batteries, i.e. how is the electricity generated. If it is with coal or nuclear powerplants, the net benefit of eMobility will be questionable.