"The system doesn't know what to do with a movement."
By Flickr user Orin Optiglot
That remark on Seth Godin's blog reminded me of Hannah's earlier post about GoodGuide, a service that provides "the world's largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home."
When you walk into a store to buy whatever it is you came in for, you give your implicit approval of that product but also of the practices that go into its production. If your new shirt comes from a factory that practices child labor or has a history of illegally dumping industrial waste into neighboring rivers or a record of shameful human rights violations, every one of your dollars counts as a "vote" to continue those practices. Redirecting your money toward purchases that meet your personal standards sends a message to companies with unethical behavior.
Information is power and offering consumers a broader context to the products we purchase allows us to make better informed choices. GoodGuide gives you instant access to the data you need to make decisions based not only on price but on the ethical conduct of a company (whose true values aren't usually stated on the side of the packaging.)
Tools such as GoodGuide and AccountAbility allow consumers to begin holding companies to higher ethical standards but ultimately we will need to better organize to move change along. Consumers need to start exploring other tools and actions required to motivate disinterested and unengaged companies into changing their behavior.
An innovative approach to promoting change is the Carrotmob, with the idea of "organiz[ing] consumers to make purchases that give financial rewards to those businesses who agree to make socially beneficial choices." For example, hundreds of people showed up for a day of grocery shopping at K & D Market in San Francisco. K & D promised 22% of the day's revenue to make their store more environmentally-friendly and energy-efficient. With the huge turnout, K & D was able to meet their goal.
ThePoint and PledgeBank are services that offer a different approach. They enable like-minded people to take action toward a specific goal. If X number of people promise to do A then B will happen. An example from ThePoint:
Objective: To get a major US cola company (Coke, Pepsi, RC) to switch their sweetener from high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) back to cane or beet sugar
Terms: If this objective is met, then we agree to buy soda from the first company that stops using HFCS and switches back to cane or beet sugar
These sites and services are the first steps needed for consumers to organize themselves. Now imagine if we were able to seamlessly integrate these technologies across browsers, social networks, mobile phones, email and instant messaging. And imagine if every purchase option, real-life or online, provided us with the information needed to make informed choices, the chance to join a carrotmob or a group on ThePoint and then allow us to invite our friends from across all of our social networks, we could persuade millions of people into spending billions of dollars, "voting" on issues that we care about with our hard earned money.
This post is by Scott S., our resident expert on social media.
