Yahoo!’s Green Advantage
By Susanne Goldstein on May 28, 2007 in All Things Green, Brass Tacks, Business, Cultural Trends, The Social Age
Two weeks ago, Yahoo! Inc. launched a new environmental initiative called Yahoo! Green. The program is designed to educate consumers on things they can do to help to combat climate change.
Yahoo! executives stated that the company’s greatest potential impact on cutting greenhouse gas emissions is to educate and encourage personal change in the 500 million monthly users of Yahoo! services worldwide. Yahoo! also announced that it will go “carbon neutral” by the end of 2007.
Yahoo! has also announced a mission to find and reward America’s most eco-friendly city, called Be a Better Planet.
Not to be outdone by their rival, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. are scrambling to devise their own environmental measures according to Matt Petersen, president of non-profit advocacy group Global Green USA, which advises Starbucks and Yahoo on environmental moves.
Oh, how I love healthy competition.
I believe that the capital markets provide the best possible mechanism for effecting social change. Peer pressure, brand advantage, consumer loyalty and advertising attractiveness are surfacing as key factors of differentiation in the competitive landscape. Though price remains king currently, it will be interesting to see what happens as these new “social” factors of production start contribute to a company’s overall returns. I love that Yahoo! and others are embracing the machinery of what I like to call the Climate Economy. The Climate Economy, which will be a powerful driver for differentiating businesses in the future, is an essential component of Social Age economics.
Hi, Susanne! We’ve seen this scramble to compete up close here at Environmental Defense.
We worked for a couple weeks to supply the data for Yahoo’s carbon footprint calculator (http://green.yahoo.com/, then click the “count me in” button). We were just recovering from that when MSN asked us to help with their Live Earth project. Some of the content we wrote is posted already, like this Q and A on climate basics (http://liveearth.msn.com/green/qadrbill); other pieces are still being built. Google hasn’t called us yet, but maybe we should call them.
It’ll be interesting to see where all this goes. As more and more of the big media outlets add basic green-oriented coverage, it gets harder to stand out from the pack. The pressure grows to make what you’re doing/offering sound as good or as distinctive as possible.
There’s been a dramatic shift in this over the past 6 months, and I’m very curious to see what the next 6 months brings!
Comment by Kira -- May 29, 2007 @ 11:11 am