Now that I’m look­ing for inno­v­a­tive uses of SMS, I see them every­where -- even on yogurt con­tain­ers. This recent Stonyfield Farm lid sug­gested I send a text mes­sage to get climate-related infor­ma­tion on a com­pany, so I did:

SENT TO 30644: cc stony­field farm

RECEIVED REPLY: Climate Counts has ranked STONYFIELD FARM 2nd out of 11 Food Products com­pa­nies. UNILEVER leads this sec­tor. Learn how to change the world at http://climatecounts.org. To get action alerts & let com­pa­nies know cli­mate change mat­ters to you (up to 6 msg/month), reply ACTION

Getting a min­i­mal read­out on a company’s envi­ron­men­tal behav­ior via SMS is a nov­elty, but not that use­ful. For that rea­son, I don’t think we’ll sud­denly see shop­pers tex­ting as they stroll the aisles. The power of brand­ing is too strong and our eco­log­i­cal sen­si­tiv­ity is too weak. An SMS will not help any­one decide between Coke and Pepsi, and I’m not buy­ing a Toshiba lap­top over an Apple, despite Apple’s rel­a­tively poor envi­ron­men­tal record (sorry), because there are too many other fac­tors at play.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen an SMS-based ser­vice pro­moted on a yogurt con­tainer. Can you imag­ine see­ing that only a few years ago? I wouldn’t have known what to make of it.