Social Media – Towards a Greener Season Greeting?

Social Media - Towards a Greener Season Greeting?

Looking at the past on how we used to send our season greetings, I realize that we’ve progressed much when it comes to making greetings “Greener”, especially with Social Media.

*travels back in history, plays historic music*

Post Cards

The old school way of sending your season greetings. First you list out everyone you wanted to send to (You had to list them out, it’s part of calculating the cost). After that, you spend a good sum of money to buy post cards. It’s often a balance between quantity and quality that you had to aim for.

Besides the cost of the post cards, you also had to factor the cost of envelopes, the time to write on both the card and the envelope (personal touch?), the stamps and the trip to the nearest post box. Some of you probably had the “saliva cost” (read : licking the envelope to seal).

It was hard work, the part I hated the most was to actually walk around looking for cards.

Remember, cards are made of paper and paper comes from wood. Remember that cards are also printed so they actually cost more than trees. Remember also that someone had to deliver them to the recipient, and after they read it – it’ll end up in the bin, regardless whether they decide to hang on their wall or decorate their cubicle with it.

E-mails and E-Cards

This got way better for the environment with E-mail. On the easy side of things, you could just E-mail to everyone of your contact a generic E-mail. It saves you a whole lot of time, you don’t miss anyone out and you still get to pass your wish the receiving party. On the downside – it’s less personal but this is not an issue since most people would just read it once and forget it.

Some people however, doesn’t like their wishes to be without a personal touch. So good luck to those of you who hold that line of thought, customizing all your “Dear ” and spending hours on a repetitive process if you have many people to wish. The introduction of E-cards made E-mailed Wishes look better – How many of you remember Blue Mountain and similar services? In fact, how many of you still use them?

I used them before and have stopped using them ever since I know how to design my own E-cards. 🙂 Regardless which path you choose, you spend far less time and need not buy cards.

SMS

This one’s easy – 1: Type SMS. 2: Select Contacts 3: SEND!!! 🙂 Of course, this one (and E-mail) are trickier when you have a whole lot of contacts, sometimes they’re just nicknames so you don’t know whether they celebrate a religious related celebration (eg Christmas…….. despite being heavily commercialized).

Social Media

I think the Social Media is the easiest and most efficient way to wish people for the season. Using social networking sites, your updates are viewed by your network of contacts.

Just a tweet or a Facebook status update and it’s done. If you had Twitter and Facebook linked, you could do it on just one on the other and another gets updated. No selecting of contacts or anything. Whoever celebrates it would just say thank you, or LIKE, or retweet. More importantly – no papers involved, no time consuming (or not) card hunting, no time needed to customize your message and prepare the card for delivery.

Very simple, right? On the downside, not everyone is using Social Media.

Conclusion

Personally – I really wish more people use Social Media. Leave the cards to people who you really know aren’t part of the digital era, like say your grandmother (some grandparents are, like my father for example). 😀

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