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Is this the man behind our change in goodwill?

Scanning Google’s blog today I came across two different examples of the company making a legitimate effort to do right for the world outside of their standard business model. The first, GoogleServe: Thinking globally and serving locally, detailed Google’s greater efforts over the past few weeks to help better the environment and the world’s more famished communities through a series of hands-on projects. Four days later, Paul Rademacher and Adam Sah posted a blog titled All for Good: Bringing Search, Scale and Openness to community service.

All for Good, more of the teach-a-man-to-fish variety than the more temporary (and far less extensive) efforts of GoogleServe, was built by Google, Craigslist, UCLA, YouTube, FanFeedr and Aha! under the premise that we can do more to make volunteering and community service widely available to the public. Non-profit programs that specialize in building up the community generally have small web presences and operate in low-tech ways, but there’s no reason that their accessibility can’t be enhanced.

Though not entirely completed, All for Good is already at the point where it can help potential volunteers find programs both near and far that are looking for helpers. One visit to the site immediately shows opportunities to help at food pantries, child care centers, book drives and French litigation museums. And, because Google played a major role in its development, All for Good is strapped with a Google Map to make searching and locating different volunteer opportunities even easier.

It got me thinking, though. President Obama has spent much of his presidential tenure preaching the virtues of service, and in the wake of the economy’s tumbling, we’re starting to see a number of companies changing their public strategies to take on more of a humanitarian – or less money-driven – personality. Essentially, companies acting out of goodwill, or at least trying to encourage that perception, are starting to make a much more prevalent mark on the public scene.

Now, this is hardly Google’s first rodeo. They adopted the unofficial motto of “Don’t Be Evil” back in 2001 and have gotten a great deal of attention for their moral compass over the years. Mashable picked up on the trend this year, instituting the Summer of Social Good, a “large scale online charitable campaign to raise funds strictly online through the power of Social Media.” It’s not the only way social media is changing the world.

For hard evidence of this change in ideology one need look no further than IBM’s ad campaign, “Building a Smarter Planet,” which has encouraged the public to be more energy efficient and, well, smarter, with the way the world works.

The auto-industry is singing a similar tune, as GM’s most recent, post-bankruptcy ad campaign has suggested. Check out BMW’s new All-Electric Mini-Coopers and Toyota’s Lithium-ion Battery Run Prius, as well.

Other companies, like TOMS Shoes, have made it their business to help in more lo-tech forms. They donate a pair of shoes to a child in need every time you buy yourself a pair. Chegg.com plants a tree every time you rent a book through the site.

On a different playing field entirely, the Ice Cream Man has spent the past few years operating under the “We Like You!” motto. He drives around the country handing out ice cream to concert goers.

"Make People Happy!" - Photo by Matthias Ingimarsson

Yes, most of the companies we’ve touched on are making profits. True, also, that the greater percentage of each company’s income is not directly the result of the initiatives and programs that have been mentioned above. But the fact remains: across every medium, people are starting to understand that you can’t help only yourself any longer. Kudos to each of these organizations for doing their part to make the world a better place, for today and the future.

Is this a trend that you’ve been noticing, too? What other companies have you seen showing a more humanistic side since Google started setting the bar?