Many product manufacturers who will be involved in the Green Deal scheme will probably be ramping up their marketing activity to gain some attraction from all the talk about Green Deal.
One of the things which has interested me over the last 12 months is whether or not the interest levels in the Green Deal is growing (are people googling ‘green deal’) as awareness increases (or not as we found out recently) or if it’s flatlined throughout the last 12 months.
Using data from Google Trends we see this for searches related to ‘Green Deal’ on Google:
The letters on the graph represent news headlines and you can see which major news stories increased interest levels on Google.
Moving on to Wikipedia. No doubt those who do want to find out more will have read of the content on the Green Deal Wikipedia page. So here is what the data looks like for the Wikipedia pageviews over the last 90 days.
It’s clear that interest levels are rising on the internet. The more publicity the Green Deal gets the more the interest will build.
As I found out today that only 5 households have signed up for the deal so far it is clear that there is still a lot of work to do. I personally don’t think PR on it’s own will help change behaviours, help communicate the complex financial structure and quality provided by each company involved.
No more Green Deal domains left……or is there?
One of the things I’ve noticed is the sheer volume of Green Deal websites which have been set up by companies and anonymous people.
As a homeowner, when I’m researching about the scheme, every time I visit a website the one key question which I keep asking myself is “Do trust this website?”
Here are a few examples of websites which are quite visible on Google for various Green Deal searches:
http://www.greendealcentral.com – Set up by a company called Property and Training Solutions Ltd but they don’t have their own website. So who are they?
http://greendeal.net/ – A website that claims it’s an easy way to find solar & heat pumps but offers a host of other info about the Green Deal. Who are they?
http://www.easy-greendeal.com/ – This website belongs to a company called Easy MCS. Notice how similar the websites look?
http://www.greendeal-dorset.org.uk/ – Getting local, but again, this website can’t answer the question “who are you?”
http://www.greendealmanager.co.uk – Again “Who are you?”
http://www.greendeal-helpline.co.uk/ – Again “Who are you?”
From an internet perspective, I think there’s lots of things which could be done by various companies involved in the scheme, building trust is probably the biggest one for me.
Building trust also involves using Social Media channels, one which I have not yet seen being used to help the public.
Good luck to Freud who have won the PR contract to promote the Green Deal.
