Anyone who owns a business understands the cost of advertising. Just like product cost and other overhead expenses, advertising fees are a necessary expense… or at least they used to be. When I joined the family business a few years back, we were spending a good deal of money to promote our services. Whether we were sending out mailers, flyering parking lots, distributing door hangers or canvassing with posters, each cut into our bottom line.

While I was bothered by the amount of money were spending on these methods of advertisement, I was even more disturbed to see the unnecessary waste we were generating in the process. Not only did each method involve a paper product of some sort (non-post consumer recycled, I’m sure), the printing of our advertisement (non-soy based ink, no doubt) and the shipping of the material to our headquarters (and they didn’t arrive in a fleet of Hybrids). Also, I would argue that instead of being read and thus effective, many of our ads fell on blind eyes, or into the hands of the wrong demographic.

Enter MySpace. Given that I don’t have a conscious memory of what it is like not to have a computer, it only seems fitting that the youngest member of the family would be the one to usher the business into the MySpace world. When I first asked the bosses if our business had a MySpace page, they looked at me as though I was speaking another language and, in a sense, I was.

MySpace and other social networking websites are a great way to reduce, if not eliminate, the environmental impact of a business’ advertisements. For those not familiar with MySpace, it is a website that allows users to set up a profile and then find and add "friends." When a friend is added, they then have access to photos, updates and bulletins of all their other friends.

The business advantage of MySpace can be found when the availability of the target demographic is examined. As a restaurant and catering company, I was able to make friends with hundreds of people in my area who fit into my target demographic. The only thing this requires is a knack for keywords and a ton of patience. Once our business had a substantial friend base, we were able to send out promotions, updates and other tools of advertising… for free. Oh yeah, and did I mention, the whole process was totally paperless as well?

Not only did I have more control over to whom we were advertising, if our ads ended up reaching people out of our target demographic, it was no harm- no foul. This meant that we were wasting less money, saving more trees and more effectively getting our message out. Ingenious, no?

Given that my family is in the service and entertainment industry, the MySpace approach worked very well for us. If you are in an industry that is less conducive to MySpace, I urge you to find another social networking site that better fits your business. LinkedIn is a good site for larger businesses, especially those wishing to advertise to the general business community. Bebo is a social networking site with a general user base that is, in general, a little older than that of MySpace. In the end, it doesn’t matter which site you chose, as long as you are decreasing your advertising costs while, at the same time decreasing the environmental impact of your advertising methods.

Image credit: www.myspace.com