EcoHome Magazine’s EcoWatch blog recently had a good post about the Top Three Marketing Mistakes of Green Businesses. It’s a helpful reminder with some good info.

Here’s an excerpt:

Since sustainability is a relatively new concept for the general public, it is defined in a multitude of ways. The mistake that green builders make is not communicating what green means to their company.

Indeed. If you’re going to market yourself as green, be sure you are honest and transparent about what that means. You don’t have to be perfect. Nobody is. But people will give you credit for trying.

And remember, don’t lose sight of your true colors, whether that’s green or something else.

Several marketing pundits have been writing lately about the death of branding. Geoffrey James of the Sales Machine blog at BNet declared Branding to be dead and that the only thing that mattered was product quality.

It seems as though Mr. James is like John Cleese in this excerpt of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” wanting to be rid of Old Man Branding and get on with his life.

Problem is, Branding is “not quite dead.” In fact it’s getting better. So we would be wise not to club it on the head and throw it on the cart.

To be sure, Branding is vastly different than it used to be. Quality and innovation are more important than ever. But branding still plays an important role in the success of a product (or service, etc.).

First, it helps to define branding. Some say it’s little more than the logos, jingles and ads. I agree that too much emphasis is often placed on those things, but I think branding is much more.

Your brand is the foundation on which the customer-facing portion of your company is built. It is what people – customers, employees, vendors, the community – thinks when they hear your name or see your logo. It is what sets you apart from your competitors.

How you build and nurture that brand is, of course, a huge issue. People much smarter than I have debated this for decades, and continue to do so.

Nevertheless, I’ll throw my hat in the ring. Watch this space for a discussion of the key elements of Branding. And by all means, join the conversation.

I was listening to a local radio talk show the other day when the host was talking about a school board considering banning teachers from becoming “friends” with students on Facebook.

The issue was that this kind of thing could lead to inappropriate or worse interactions between students and teachers. Furthermore, the host was lamenting the fact that people have not considered the ramifications of putting all their personal information on sites like Facebook. After all, the Internet is forever.

All of those things are true. Kids can and have gotten into trouble by posting too much on Facebook. And I also agree that people may not yet fully understand how the social Web will affect them down the road.

But I have two problems with the idea of a blanket rule banning Facebook relationships between students and teachers.

The first is that it assumes teachers are not responsible adults, capable of making decisions about when to and not to “friend” their students on Facebook. I am troubled by individual judgement and responsibility continually being usurped by rules. But that’s another discussion.

The other problem I have is the mentality of resisting (futilely, I might add) the advance of technology and the social Web instead of embracing it. Facebook and the rest are here, for better or worse. We might as well embrace it and use it to our advantage.

There are some really innovative teachers out there. Why not give them all the tools they want to come up with new ways to teach the next generation and engage them?

The thing I’ve noticed about sites like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others is their potential in business, education, culture and more is nearly boundless. But you don’t know what the possibilities are unless you dive in, embrace technology and start using it. New ideas will present themselves to those who look for them.

But the larger issue is that these kids are growing up in a world we never could have imagined. We do them a disservice by pretending it doesn’t exist.

If you’re looking for another blog post of most- and least-favorite Super Bowl ads, you won’t find it here. Though I will say that anything with Betty White is a winner in my book.

Super Bowl ads have become a joke, and not in a good way. The stories are about the ads themselves, not the products they’re trying to sell, or the brands they’re representing. The big game is more of a showcase for ad agencies, a contest to see who can make the ad of the game. Creativity for creativity’s sake.

Good advertising should allow the brand message to resonate with the target audience. It should connect with the consumer and create some spark of awareness about the key benefit of the product for sale.

Instead, Super Bowl ads, for the most part, are just trying to out-do one another to get laughs, often at the expense of the brand. Although the Super Bowl still delivers a great value in terms of the audience size, I have to believe that the $3 million plus production costs of the ad could be much better spent.

The problem, of course, is advertising in general doesn’t work like it used to. People are skeptical, and don’t like having messages shoved in their faces when they’re trying to enjoy a game or a TV show. Today’s marketers have to be smarter than that.

There are ways to stand out in the Super Bowl ad race, and one of those ways is to have your ad rejected. GoDaddy.com became a master of this tactic. Make your ad too controversial so as to be rejected by the network. Then issue a news release about your ad being rejected. People will jump on YouTube immediately to see what all the fuss is about. This year, gay dating site ManCrunch.com used this tactic perfectly.

Recognizing that most people reading this blog are not in a position to buy ad space during the Super Bowl, what is the lesson here? It’s simply this: resist blowing big chunks of your market on making a big splash. You will be much better served engaging in far cheaper marketing tactics that engage your customers and build loyalty and community around your brand.

One of my favorite blogs is KBCulture. Author Leslie Clagett is extremely knowledgeable about the kitchen & bath category, and always has really cool products featured.

One she featured recently was a dramatic, black faucet from an Italian manufacturer (naturally). I lifted the image from Leslie’s blog. As you can see, it’s a visually stunning faucet.

But what caught my attention wasn’t so much the faucet, it was the comments. A commenter noted that since the handle was on the right-hand side of the faucet, it would be frustrating to use for about 13% of the population.

That got me to thinking. What if the faucet company catered exclusively to lefties? They would be heroes to some 39 million Americans. They would quickly generate more awareness and notoriety than they could ever hope to by designing just another fancy product like everyone else.

Sometimes the way to get noticed is not in your product, but who you sell it to.

Who are the “lefties” among your customer base? That smaller, under-served group who would give their undying loyalty to a product or service that figured out to meet their unique needs.

Targeting one of these groups could get you a good, solid following in no time.