Nothing is so Green as On line

With Earth Day 2008 now behind us, I’ve had a chance to read a lot of stories about how companies are reducing their own “ecological footprint” in one way or another. It strikes me that no one wants to be a litterbug – it’s just that we don’t often have any choice. It would be great to help out by driving a hydrogen fuel cell car, but they’re a long way off right now. The huge jump in fuel prices hasn’t yet helped cut down on people driving either. It has just made things more expensive. However, on line business has not been feeling the hit as badly. Google just posted $1.31 billion in earnings for Q1. Amazon is reporting $143 million in earnings for the same period. Yahoo!, which everyone seemed to be under the misimpression a couple of months ago as struggling, is reporting $1.82 billion in revenue. Apple came in at just over $1 billion in profits as well. What kind of recession is this, anyway? So what does all of this have to do with Earth Day? Well, all four of the businesses above deal in digital purchasing. Not having to drive to a store is nice, but more importantly these companies don’t have to have goods shipped to their stores either. Sure, Amazon needs to have all of those books sent to their distribution points, but a good deal of their income is now coming from their iTunes-like music service. And Apple's good news had more to do with sales of computers - but then, people need those if they're going to shop on line in the first place. (That, and the world is slowly building towards revolt against Vista, but that axe will have to be ground another day.) Since digital goods don’t need shipping, they don’t go up in price with fuel the way “real” goods will. This doesn’t mean everything will be going digital to escape recession, of course. You can’t buy a grapefruit on line and have it spit out of your Hewlett-Packard desktop. Still, on line business has, does, and will give our economy a solid fall-back option. Companies that have invested smartly in on line are seeing how their revenue streams here maintain, while the off line ones can fall victim to external events. Like the price of gas. In the end, as more companies opt for more virtual shopping spaces, and consumers go in for the new ways to shop, one of the net effects will be less consumed fuel. It is the most effective kind of environmental solution you could hope for: One driven not by good intentions, which can be forgotten or ignored our of laziness, but by commerce. Now if we can just get HP jumping on that grocery printer, we should be home free.

About the Author: Eric Reid

I am the Social Media Services Manager for Off Madison Ave. I've been with the company since 2006, when I was hired to do SEO, and link building in particular. When social networking sites started cropping up, at first I started using them to create backlinks - but they weren't the best for that, given all of the "nofollow" attributes. However, I did see the potential for all of the direct referral traffic they represent. Since then I've been actively pursuing both tactics for clients: Links that can help them for search, and social postings that get them involved in the conversation. It's about the coolest job you could ever get. ;)