There are a lot of green social networks out there: Care2, Greenwala, Gaia, Greenvoice… They all offer excellent social networking tools to encourage greener lifestyles through mutual help. One of those Websites, MakeMeSustainable, created a little Google Maps mashup to enable users to mark green businesses on a map. As a user registered in San Francisco, when I open this page, it suggests green locations in my area. When maps appear in the context of a social network, they always feel more consumer-friendly (because specific to a center of interest).

Up the green mapping alley, there is a much more impressive player in the field: Open Green Map.

Open Green Map leverages the collaborative intelligence behind social technologies to provide a comprehensive geo-located resource to find green sites, wherever you are! So far, volunteering contributors have created more than 350 maps in over 50 countries. I find their tagline ‘Directions to a sustainable future’ wittingly appropriate.

As of today, the most interesting way to engage with Open Green Map is to explore their maps. There are two features that the Open Green Map team built on top of the Google Maps API that I really liked:

1. First, maps appearing in an expanded marker’s window all have the background template of OpenGreenMap.org. In terms of maps’ marketing and branding, this is very smart and well-executed.

2. In the right sidebar, you have a small window that contains info about the map, about the map creators, and a search box to look for a specific keyword in the sites marked on the map. I have looked for this feature on Google Maps, and am pretty sure it doesn’t exist. This is some untapped search activity that Google is missing, but that Open Green Map nailed perfectly.

Open Green Map is a long way from becoming a complete resource. Also, as it will grow in popularity, I’d like to see how they will control the ‘green’ label users are applying to the sites they contribute to the system. There is still a lot of clutter, mainly when it comes to creating a map (I just couldn’t access this feature). It seems like you can share documents (hosted on Slideshare) about a list of companies, but I am not sure what it is for. Building a green geo-platform is an excellent idea that will hopefully help millions find their green paths (and may it not become a leftout project).

A few days ago, Google launched a really smart campaign to create incentives for business owners to register with the Local Business Center: They distributed real-size markers (even though markers only have a virtual size) to local businesses in various cities across the globe. Those lucky businesses - they are getting some local media attention - were selected by ‘local experts’. It is not clear how these ‘local experts‘ were selected though…

I happened to bump into one of those markers at the Butler and the Chef (picture above), and asked the chef how it happened.

It seems that the business owners who received the giant marker knew way ahead of time about this PR coup. Google dropped all of their markers during the night of Monday to Tuesday, around midnight. The Chef even painted the sidewalk blue in front of his restaurant to make the trophy stand out more. A reception was also organized at the City Hall, where the local business owners mingled with Mayor Newsom and a bunch of Google top executives.

I agree with Techcrunch writer MG Siegler who finds the operation :

This looks like a very smart way for Google to promote Maps. It’s also a good way to ensure that businesses list themselves on Maps, for the possibility that they’ll receive one of these markers, which are basically a (presumably) free endorsement of the establishment.

We often wrote about how local business owners should put themselves on the map. Now Google is trying to make it obvious.