My in-box is filled with Google alerts listing blog posts and articles that tout the benefits of green marketing, but the phrase is losing its shine. Careful analysis revealed this: the thinking seems to be that “green marketing” is a magic potion, whether or not the company or its products and services are truly sustainable and helping to reduce our collective carbon footprint.

Here’s the pitch that sent me reeling: “Thе Green Marketing Book fοr the Kindle іѕ thе ultimate guide tο ѕhοw you hοw tο mаkе money аnԁ cash іn οn thе popularity οf going green bу using proven ecological niche marketing techniques…” No wonder green marketing is becoming synonymous with greenwashing. Even when companies have a green product or internal environmental program, there’s often no genuine sustainability commitment, and offerings are simply a gambit for more market share.

Truly green marketing doesn’t need a label. If a green/sustainable organization is marketing, it’s just marketing. If someone has a green or sustainable product or service, they may want to reach a green market segment like LOHAS consumers or sustainable or cleantech businesses. But it’s still just marketing.

I’m not saying that promoting sustainable products and services isn’t different. It does require a critical difference in substance—providing transparency, being credible, and backing up claims, as well as using environmentally friendly methods (post-consumer recycled paper, more electronic communications, and so on).

That requires a genuine commitment to sustainability and the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. Wouldn’t it be great if all marketing displayed these values? I’d like to be an optimist: one day sustainable, credible communications will be the norm, and we can to do away with using “green marketing.”

We touch on support for claims in this blog with some regularity—it’s a key factor in communications credibility (and thus the Thinkshift Credibility Quotient™). But with BP’s epic greenwashing staring us in the face every day (remember the green oil company? beyond petroleum?), the credibility of green claims generally may be more suspect than ever. Now feels like the ideal time to unpack what it means to support claims.

Here are three major elements we look for:

Data or testimony from credible third parties. Support from any believable source (fully attributed customer testimonials, for example) can enhance credibility, but verification by a trusted third party is the gold standard. Eco-seals can be a good shorthand way to support claims, but be careful: They have to be well-recognized—if people don’t know what a symbol means, they’re not going to put a lot of trust in it—and they have to have real standards behind them.

Details. The support should be specific and detailed enough to be understandable—and verifiable.

Relevance. To be credible, support has to be relevant to the claim at hand. A great company recycling program isn’t support for a claim that a household cleaning product is green. Nor is a statement that the product is free of some chemical that no product of its type contains. (This is a reverse use of the old advertising ploy of highlighting some common product characteristic so that it appears to be a special feature of your product—Mad Men fans will immediately flash on “Lucky Strike—It’s Toasted.”)

Any time you can’t muster this kind of support is a good time to think about whether you should be making that claim.

Greener World Media’s State of Green Business 2010 report is out, and, as it did last year, this excellent report drives home the need for companies to communicate credibly and completely about their sustainability efforts and back up green claims with relevant information.

One reason is “radical transparency”—people are using Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms and mobile apps to instantly disseminate news and opinions to desktop and smartphone alike. If you’re not credible, you’ll be called on it—and everyone will know about it. This is good news—it’s making all kinds of companies be more sustainable, and it seems to be prompting better communications (albeit more slowly than I’d like).

But it’s also making heads spin. We’re being overloaded with information, and it’s hard to know what’s credible and what isn’t. In one egregious example, most consumers think “natural” is better than “organic.” Third-party ratings such as Green Seal, the Green Good Housekeeping seal, and Underwriters Laboratories’ UL Environment are helping, but each rating organization looks at things differently, and there’s a plethora of labels.

I hope these rating efforts achieve something close to market consensus and get up to some kind of critical mass this year. The FTC isn’t helping—it’s been foot-dragging for two years or more in its efforts to review and revise its “Green Guides” for environmental marketing. (If anyone knows how to get them moving, I’ll help you any way I can.)

The FTC’s inertia reminds me of a recent New Yorker cartoon in which an executive says to his colleagues, “Let’s never forget that the public’s desire for transparency has to be balanced by our need for concealment.”

I’m not that cynical, but as Joel Makower points out in the State of Green Business, change is coming about in no small part due to pressure from lawsuits, Congress, and activists. Companies need to step up, to be on a truly sustainable path, and to communicate credibly and transparently, all the time, not just when it serves their purpose.