Sustainability, environmental marketing, and green messaging are all terms that I recently asked my seven year old son to explain so I could find out how much kids might know about green marketing. Of course, his mom works in advertising, so shouldn’t he already know this? His response – “I don’t know” – I thought was typical since these words probably don’t make sense to a lot of kids. When I took him to the Build It Green Expo this past March, the first thing he told me was “Wow, mom! How cool is that. Everything there will be green?” Little did he know that the word green was not just a color, there was a lot more meaning to the term green as he was soon to find. So, although he didn’t comprehend any of the words above, once I explained he had a pretty good idea of what I was talking about. So I decided to put him through a test. Hey, it’s summer, a test would do him good. I asked him a few questions to get his viewpoint on this green philosophy:

What do you think green marketing/advertising is?

“Saving the planet”

(Nickelodeon and Disney are actually doing a great job of getting the word out to kids. He mentioned the campaign from Disney called “Friends for Change” and Nickelodeon “The Big Help” )

Why do you think it’s so important?

“Because the earth is like a person, if it’s not clean then it gets dirty. The earth needs to be clean just like people. You don’t want to live in a dump.”

What are a few things that you do that are “green”?

“Turn off the water while I’m brushing my teeth. Recycle cans and plastic bottles. Turn off the lights when I’m not using them.”

What does mommy do for her job? (Well this wasn’t exactly green related, but I thought I’d throw him a curveball – every kid should know what their mom/dad does, right?)

Of course, much to my surprise, he first gave me this answer:

“Feed us, make us dinner and take care of us.”

I thought that was funny, but I had to remind him I was talking about my other job, the one that makes us money. Now taking into account he has been to work with me a few times, this was his response:

“Work on the computer, meetings, drink coffee, and eat lunch.”

Hmmm, now I know I do more than that….

So in the end I was quite impressed with his answers and the knowledge he retained in our short conversation. I think it’s important to educate your kids on the importance of being green and what it really means. After all, these green initiatives are for future generations. If we don’t teach our kids to save the world, who will?

According to research done in December 2008 by Pew Internet & American Life Project, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter that allowed them to share updates about themselves with others.

With this growing popularity in mind, I recently tried to make Twitter part of my daily routine. I signed up, gave myself a Twitter name, and got a bunch of people to follow me.  However, I ran into couple of problems: I’m never on Twitter long enough to really follow anyone, and when I did “tweet,” none of my followers tweeted back. It seemed as though one constantly has to be online with Twitter to really keep up, and since I’m working most of the day, I don’t know how that’s possible.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t totally disagree with the concept behind Twitter, but unless you’re a celebrity or have a profound love of a specific topic or person, does anyone really want or have time to read or write 20 tweet updates a day?  My conclusion: if you’re really going to be a Twitter fan, you’ll need to be very committed or it just doesn’t seem like fun. It should be fun, shouldn’t it?

This video crystalizes my thoughts on Twitter in a nutshell: