Green Options: taking the road less traveled (without leaving a huge footprint)

Shifting gears from all things mommy-blog for a moment to take a look at trends in the green-o-sphere.

The news is out that Discovery Communications has purchased uber-enviroblog Treehugger, with its ultra-efficient global staff of 50 and 1.4 million readers per month. The site will no doubt be the online anchor for the network's Planet Green channel. And kudos to Discovery for scooping up some excellent talent and providing an enthusiastic audience with a wealth of choices to get branded content.

Of course, the news may have other enviroblogs wondering if there are enough green eyeballs to go around. Of course, competing with big media companies is not a new thing for blogs, but Discovery/Treehugger will make a strong claim to advertisers that they have the audience. How will other green blogs survive?

My favorite, Green Options, is aggressively moving into more grassroots social media channels to actually build an audience. Within days of the Treehugger deal, GO had a facebook group, a squidoo lens, and a makemesustainable group up and running. These steps, of course, cost virtually nothing. I'm sure they have a few other ideas as well.

As logical as this sounds to many of us in the social media crowd, It's clearly not considered a tried-and-true method by mainstream communications folks yet. Two roads are diverging in a wood and Green Options is taking the road less traveled. We are about to witness two competing promotion strategies of similar properties (in terms of content, not size) and we're in a position to mark a baseline for each and chart progress. I have nothing against Treehugger or Discovery, but I'm rootin' for my Best Blog EVAH. We'll see how it goes.