How Your Business Can Celebrate Earth Day

Earth Day is coming up on April 22nd, and many cities, companies, and individuals are thinking of ways to be a little more environmentally friendly. You can use these simple ideas to save the planet (and some money) all year, not just on Earth Day, and they are easy to implement at work and at home.

Track your resources

Enroll in a utility management program that will track how much electricity, water, and gas your company uses and suggests ways you can drop your usage. This can help save the planet and your bottom line.

Make the switch from desktops to laptops

If you can, switching to a more energy efficient machine (laptops are generally more efficient) can help you lower your energy bill.

Increase sustainable efforts into your marketing strategies

Only use the paper marketing materials that are necessary to your campaign, printing more than you need increases waste, and takes up extra storage space. You may also consider converting from a traditionally print-based methodology to email, social media, and other digital tools.

Increase incentive to carpool, bike, or use public transportation

Make the jump to carpooling and ridesharing easier by setting up a matching program, this allows employees to find other commuters that share the same schedule and commute they may be unaware of. By offering perks like reduced rate parking, premium parking spots, subsidized metro passes and other incentives, you can garner more interest in the effort.

Adopt a highway or volunteer to clean up at a park

Increase community engagement while taking care of the environment and work to clean up in the neighborhood around your office. Whether you want to do this once as a volunteer opportunity or go the extra mile and committing to adopting a park or highway that you can maintain whenever you like or can.

Recycle

Recycling is easy to implement and takes relatively little effort to adjust to. Make sure that if you are not in charge of your office space custodial services that recycling is an available service. If it is, there is likely a protocol to follow, and if there is not, you can create your own, which may require you to make arrangements for what to do with your recyclable materials.

Go paperless

With all of the tools for communication and organization, it’s easy to cut paper use down to a fraction of where your usage is, if not completely. College paper limits are an example of paper rationing that has seen some success in the last few years, allotting students a certain amount of pages per semester. Cut down your spending, and cut down fewer trees.

Turn off the lights

If your building has good natural light and you can work without overhead lights, consider leaving them off. If more light is necessary, try using smaller lamps for more targeted lighting that cuts back your usage.

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Marketing Trend: Omni-Channel Marketing

Marketing is ever evolving, and consumers’ paths to purchasing are no longer as linear as they once were. Because marketers need to adapt to a changing climate, new techniques are constantly developed. Omni-Channel marketing is one such strategy that businesses are using to keep up with the trend of keeping things as simple as possible.

What is Omni-Channel Marketing?

“Omni-Channel”  is no doubt a marketing buzzword, but the concept adheres to a shift in the needs of both consumer and marketer. Omni-channel marketing is the answer to marketers needing to provide a consistent experience and path to purchase.

Because consumers now can engage with a brand and products on multiple platforms (physical store, app, website, catalog, social media), it is important that each experience with the product and brand complement the others.

Hubspot defines omni-channel marketing as “… a multi-channel approach to marketing, selling, and serving customers in a way that creates an integrated and cohesive customer experience no matter how or where a customer reaches out.” Read about some of their top examples of an Omni-Channel experience here.

How to implement Omni-Channel Marketing into your strategy

• Create a customer profile

Consolidating a customer profile can be a challenge, as customers are constantly interacting with a slew of different channels. By creating a broad and complete picture of your consumers, you can create a better overall customer experience. This can be done using collected data and applying it to your strategy. This article discusses how you can come up ahead of the competition by succeeding at cross-channel marketing.

• Interact on preferred channels

Consumers are moving back and forth on devices and platforms just for a single transaction. Be sure to keep all lines of communication open for a seamless experience. This includes, but is not limited to social media, email support, video chat, web chatbots, texting, and calling.

• Use aggregated data

Compiling data is already important, but in order to use omni-channel marketing, data is everything. From creating your customer profile to understanding how to adapt to market changes and adding platforms, data will help you gain insight into how to make your marketing strategy work for you.

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The Fall of Facebook?: the Aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Facebook has been heavily profiled in the news lately, due to a massive questioning of how users’ data is handled, after political data firm Cambridge Analytica had access to over 50 million Facebook users’ private data, which was, in turn, able to use the data in their work for the Trump campaign in 2016. The backlash against Facebook has been substantial, with companies, celebrities, and everyday users leaving the site and speaking out against misinformation of privacy policies and misuse and mishandling of personal data. But how did we get here? This scandal is years in the making.

Background:

In 2010, Facebook launched the original version of their Open Graph API, allowing third-party app developers access to user data, following this, Facebook signed a decree with the US Federal Trade Commission, consenting that user data will not be shared without the user’s permission. In 2013, Cambridge Analytica is founded by UK strategy company Strategic Communication Laboratories Group as a US branch. The founding was orchestrated by Steve Bannon, and funded in part by the Mercer family, a Republican donor and Breitbart News backer.

How did Cambridge Analytica get the data?

Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan created a personality test (for Cambridge Analytica) similar to one created by the University’s Psychometric Quiz that had been gathering Facebook data since 2007, which the University refused to share with Cambridge Analytica. Through the new test created by Kogan, the data firm collected 270,000 people’s data with their knowledge, but against Facebook’s terms, the app also collects the information of those original 270,000 users’ friends without their consent or knowledge.  Cambridge Analytica now has over 50 million profiles in its database.

What is happening now?

Christopher Wylie, a former data scientist for Cambridge Analytica becomes a whistleblower on the company’s activity and triggered the investigations into Cambridge Analytica and Facebook from governments around the world.

There is a movement to delete Facebook, which has been joined by Cher, Will Ferrell, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, and Tesla founder/CEO Elon Musk, as well as Musk having the SpaceX and Tesla Facebook pages deleted. There are multiple businesses canceling their ads, and removing themselves from the platform, and investors are nervous as stocks fall.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since responded to public outcry, first saying that the main issues have already been resolved, and then in a second statement saying that he takes minimal issue with regulating Facebook more heavily. Zuckerberg has refused to testify about the privacy violation and misuse of content in front of UK MPs but will testify before Congress in the coming months.

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