GE launches lame "Tag Your Green" campaign

I thought the commodification of the environmental movement was going out of style. Apparently, not at least if your GE, which has just launched something called the "Tag Your Green" campaign. Here is how Mashable describes it:

GE (together with BBDO, SocialVibe, SpeedShape and Howcast) has launched a new digital campaign to get you thinking about the environment with a photo project called Tag Your Green. GE hopes the project will inspire people to share new “green” ideas and connect with others by watching, commenting and uploading photos and videos on Flickr and YouTube.

GE will make a donation every time a user uploads a photo of wind, water, or light to Flickr. For every wind photo, 4.5 kilowatt hours of wind energy will be donated to Practical Action; every water photo will trigger a donation of 480 gallons to charity: water; and every light photo will yield 175 hours of solar power to d.light Lighting Oecusse Project.

GE’s goal is to raise 4.8 million gallons of clean water, 1.7 million hours of solar power and 45,000 kW hours of wind energy.

So how on Earth do you photograph wind? Well, there's a helpful YouTube video on how to make that happen:



Pinwheel power! How come none of us thought of that before?

There's more fun to be had with this -- go take a look at GE's website for this campaign. It takes so long to load that you'll be reminded of the dial-up days of the early Web. And once it's done loading, it's reliant on so much processing power that your cooling fan will start to run wild. It's like looking at the world's worst MySpace page.

The problem here is this: what does such a campaign actually accomplish?  Sure, GE is committed to making some token donations of clean water and green energy.  But GE could donate this stuff today if it wanted to (how do you donate wind and solar power, anyway?)  But the goal here, of course, if for GE to promote itself -- to show how much it supposedly cares about the environment.  You get a few marketers to put together a slapdash social media campaign around this message, and you get Tag Your Green.  The actual benefit to environmental causes is negligible at best.

I thought this kind of lame-brained corporate "activism" had faded away sometime during the 2008 financial crisis. Apparently not.