Google search for TFT October 29, 2009

Google search with the keyword “table for two” (both with and without quotes) returns the official website of my client Table For Two (TFT) on the top of the results page, which is impressive given the currently low visibility of the organization (it is still new in the U.S., with only one partner) and the generality of the phrase. TFT’s website does not seem to be including the phrase as keywords in the meta tag, so the result is simply due to its title and the URL.

The problem, however, is that all the results other than its own website at the top have nothing to do with TFT ― some restaurants in the U.S. with the same name, a dating service in Minneapolis, Amazon pages for the books with that title, etc. And the ads that appear are all by online shopping sites for tables (furniture). Obviously, the first thing TFT should do here is to feed a lot more content of the organization itself  into the Internet in many ways including blogs, news, and social media. This is inevitable anyway, not just for the purpose of SEO, as TFT expands its activity in the U.S. in the coming years. So far, it has not yet reached the stage to try to filter positive and negative information and push down the negative pages.

(For comparison, the search on the Japanese version of Google returns many more relevant results, with all the results on the first page about the organization. The posts and articles are overwhelmingly positive, endorsing the cause and activities of TFT. The ads, again, are for furniture shops, though.)

As for advertising, being a government-approved nonprofit, TFT is eligible for Google Grant and thus can launch an ad campaign with little or no spending. For the ad campaign, I would recommend to focus on health- and food-related keywords such as “diet” and “healthy eating” rather than cause-related ones such as “charity” and “world hunger,” because what TFT wants people to do is to pay for the meals at partnering restaurants, not for the cause itself. Although those who care for the cause are surely important constituents, their concern may be too broad and they can be reached in other ways than advertisement, whereas people seeking information on healthy meals are more likely to be motivated to take an immediate action (=eating).

To increase the findability by the search with broader keywords, TFT should follow the current news on the issues of obesity and healthy diet and update the news entries on its website and the blog posts with relevant stories. As shown by the Blog pulse chart below, the conversation on “obesity” and “healthy eating,” roughly correlating with each other, takes off when eye-catching study results about obesity are published and covered by the media. Telling a story based on these results and connecting them with the healthy meal project of TFT can increase the chance for its website and blog to be linked by other blogs. Also, it can have a targeted Google ad campaign to coincide with the publication of the related study so that the ad will appear on the search results page for the news about it.

A (May 2, 2009): On April 30, Health Behavior News Service issued a press release on a recent study finding the relationship between obesity and work productivity. Many posts on this day were mentioning the study.

B (July 1, 2009): On this day, Trust for America’s Health published a report entitled F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America 2009.

C (July 28, 2009): On July 27, CDC held a press conference reporting the study results on medical cost of obesity.

The Long Tail by Anderson October 25, 2009

It seems like a waste of bits to add another definition of the Long Tail into the blogosphere, but anyway, just in brief: With 1) the digitalization reducing or eliminating inventory costs, 2) the sophisticated production and distribution tools encouraging more creation, and 3) the online platforms enabling everyone to make comments and recommendation, there are more niche products/contents in any markets than ever before and the niches do account for a significant, if not major, part of the revenue.

Anderson makes this argument based on the same principle Shirky used for Here Comes Everybody. In the world of bits, free from the constraints of atoms, abundance rules instead of scarcity, and what used to be too expensive to do is now perfectly feasible. While Shirky focused on how the transition changed the way people form groups and take collective actions, Anderson analyzes how it transformed the consumer market. Without a worry about shelf space, retailers and content providers can offer an abundance of choices to satisfy every single customer’s need and taste. Niches are no longer negligible as a revenue source.

Born and raised in Tokyo, the city of the Long Tail where you can find almost every niche product and content that exists in the whole world (where else can you see a Spanish horror, a German experimental film, and a documentary on Tibetan Monk, in theaters on the same day?), I wasn’t too surprised by the market landscape Anderson described. Thanks to this cultural environment, I’ve been niche in pretty much everything from movies to music to reading. So I agree, from my own experience, with Anderson when he doubts Christine Rosen’s notion of “egocasting.” I don’t think I’m discouraged from cultivating the taste and shut myself in a cocoon. On the contrary, more choice always opens my eyes to the things I’d never be able to encounter within a mainstream and keeps me exploring.

Some bloggers interpret what this change in the market structure entails for nonprofit organizations. Jon Lebkowsky argues that the Long Tail enables ever more nonprofits to have a presence no matter how small they are, which means more competition for potential donors. Just as hits will be suffering as the tail gets longer, larger organizations will have a hard time maintaining the current level of donation, while smaller ones will benefit from niches. This is not bad for my client, TFT, which has just entered the U.S. charity market. It may not be easy for TFT to gain national visibility at once, but it can aim at geographical niches, as its activity involves local restaurants and food retailers.

While Anderson’s argument is powerful overall—he makes a particularly convincing case that neoclassical economics based on scarcity cannot explain the Long Tail market based on abundance by definition—, he is less eloquent on how, then, businesses should adopt to these new economic circumstances. The How-To chapter added to this longer edition does not cover anything more than Groundswell and other Business 2.0 books and articles do—listen to and monitor your customers, count on the power of word of mouth, don’t be afraid of losing control, etc. Actually, this blog post, commenting on Anderson’s book in the context of SEO, better summarizes the point in a more practical and compelling way (along with very cute graphics). The author suggests:

Don’t try to fight the big players with your own generic ‘everything for everyone’ bland offering. Instead, actively position your business in hundreds of niches.

After all, we have to be more finely tuned to each individual and keep seeking new niches to reach. Recent post on VolunteerMatch offers another interesting evidence of the end of mass-marketing in relation to nonprofits.

RT@TFT: Bridging by Twitter October 17, 2009

While Twitter has a great potential for corporations as a tool for market research, brand management, customer service, etc., its value for nonprofit organizations is less obvious. It is not very practical, especially for a small organization like my client, to spend much resource in constantly monitoring and joining in the conversation among possible constituents. And as far as TFT is concerned, there are not many “breaking” stories related to its cause — usually, social issues like hunger and obesity requires longer, intensive discussion, which cannot be effectively done by simply tweeting. In that sense, Twitter is not a good platform to develop a dense, highly engaged community, i.e. bonding, in Putnam’s word; however, it can be a powerful means for bridging, if we take advantage of retweeting.

TFT can use Twitter to disseminate information on its activities, such as new menus at partner restaurants, healthy cooking recipes using ingredients provided by partners, and tips for healthy eating. The content should be useful and pragmatic enough to make the followers think “wow, that’s good to know” and want to retweet to their followers, and the tweets should include links to TFT’s website which contains more information. By doing so, people who are not familiar with TFT are introduced to its project, and the network will be expanding through “connectors” among the core constituents who are following TFT. Unlike soliciting donation, which may need to convince people of the importance of the cause, what TFT asks to do as a way of contribution is as casual as eating healthy meals, so this kind of brief information (“Taco Bell has a healthier burrito!”) would be effective enough to motivate them to get involved.
As for the tools, URL shorteners like bit.ly and ow.ly would be useful not just for shortening URLs but also tracking the traffic to learn what kind of content is more effective than others in bringing people to the main website. Also, we may use Cotweet to enable multiple staff members can share the work of tweeting by topic (health beat, cooking beat, etc.).

It would be helpful to follow the accounts of the partners of TFT so that we can RT their tweets on the TFT’s project.

Video tools and channels for TFT October 17, 2009

Animoto would be a good tool to make an introductory footage of TFT aimed at those who are not familiar with the organization. Videos created by Animoto are very effective in giving emotional impact and evoking sympathy, which is essential for an organization with a cause like TFT. In fact, Animoto does support nonprofits by offering pro-accounts for free. One drawback, however, is that since it automatically processes the content, all the final products are pretty similar and could be manneristic.

Vimeo seems to be a little tricky because it prohibits any commercial content. TFT partners with restaurants and food retailers, so even though the organization itself is nonprofit, it may want to advertise particular menus and products for the cause. For that purpose, YouTube would be convenient, since many potential partners already have their channels on YouTube, which makes it easier to collaborate with the partners by linking with each other or guest-posting the videos.

As a video hub (and a hub for all the other content, too), I would recommend to use Facebook. It is an ideal platform to ensure active and continuous engagement of the constituents with the tools like SocialVibe, and to spread the words from friend to friend.

There are some video sharing sites specialized in content for social causes such as OneWorld TV and Transmission. They would be useful for reaching people who already share a concern for similar causes.

We are all hungry [video] October 17, 2009

Note: This video was created for a school assignment and is not authorized by TFT.

TFT Podcast: voices from both sides of the table October 17, 2009

Podcasting is a great way to put a human face on the organization, with people actually talking to the audience, instead of a written message. It especially fits the concept of Table For Two that people in both the developed and developing countries share the experience of having a healthy meal at the same table. By telling stories from both ends of the table, it enables the audience (those who purchase meals and groceries through the TFT program in the U.S. and thereby donate for school meals in the African countries) to vividly feel the connection with the people they are helping.

For now, I do not see the necessity to use BlogTalkRadio, since our podcast doesn’t have to be a live show. Meanwhile, there’s no reason not to create an iTunes channel, assuming that majority of iPod users use iTunes for listening podcasts. To retain continuous engagement of the audience, the show should be updated regularly, hopefully weekly or bi-weekly, so it is essential to keep the audience posted through RSS subscription. In addition to keep the core audience, we’d also try to reach more listeners by utilizing the service like Utterli and PodBean.com that enables cross-posting on the TFT blog, Facebook, and other social media.

Here Comes Everybody by Shirky October 11, 2009

We’ve already been fed up with “2.0″ (or even 3.0) hype, but this book explains quite logically not just what is changing but why and how, and puts it beyond the issue of new media and technology. This was more interesting and insightful to me than Groundswell: While both point out what matters is people rather than technology itself, Shirky’s book further explores what the consequences will be in a larger social context and highlights more profound change our society is facing now.

In short, Shirky argues that we are in a new social ecosystem where cost of forming and maintaining groups is so law, thanks to new technologies, that group activities previously unaffordable to organize are actually viable. In looking at how the change is taking place, he breaks group activities into three types: sharing, cooperation, collective action.

First, now that media for one-to-many communication (=broadcasting) and media for one-to-one personal communication are merging because of the Internet, not just mass media in a traditional sense but every single person can publish any information. In most cases, what people share with each other is not really “content” intended to be consumed by public audience, but unfiltered personal messages targeted to their friends and families. However, as the Internet also enables many-to-many communication, personal interaction within a small group can be extended to a larger community, especially when it assumes the potential to serve as what the author calls  “community of practice” where people ask “how did you do that?” and share information.

When this type of conversation goes on from “how did you do that?” to “look what I’ve done!” and further to “I can make it even better!,” it can lead to cooperation/collaborative production. What makes collaboration possible is not only tools like wiki but also motivation of the community members. Financial incentive is not always necessary here, because of the low cost of operation as well as low barriers to participate, and social motivation — willingness to contribute, desire for recognition and respect, etc. — is often enough to get things going, even in such a large project like Wikipedia.

Sharing and participating being this easy, it has become easier to coordinate collective action as well. Information and awareness of the need and possibility of a certain action can be readily shared through many-to-many communication tools, and thus with little or no advanced planning, a large number of people can spontaneously get together and take an action.

Power law distribution (Picture by Hay Kranen / PD)

When it cost to organize a group and the resources were scarce, people who shared latent desire to get together for something of negative or trivial value could not gain enough social support to make it happen. Now, with much less cost for forming a group, they no longer need social approval to realize their desire. Also, making a failure is too costly for traditional corporations, whereas open collaboration can tolerate many failures by allowing the participants to test their ideas and filter them by themselves. People and ideas at the lower end of the power law distribution (small in number, less in frequency/amount of contribution) can make themselves visible and meaningful. All of these eventually leads to more people forming more groups for more objectives. And as Shirky repeatedly emphasizes, more is different, not in quantity but in quality.

So, what does this all mean to my client? Lower cost of mobilizing people, along with “love” as a practical incentive, is a good news especially for nonprofit organizations like TFT. Even for a very small organization, there should be a group of people out there who are potentially interested in the cause it advocates, but are below “the Coasean ceiling,” in Shirky’s words, without enough resources to get activated, or too small and isolated due to the lack of “connectors.” It is highly feasible now for such an organization to gain support from them by having them to form, participate in, and expand a community. Since TFT asks people for contribution in a more participatory way than simply making donation —buying and eating a healthy meal —, there is a strong potential to involve them in sharing (e.g. conversation on what they eat, how to eat healthy, etc), collaborative production (e.g. proposing healthy recipe ideas), and collaborative action (e.g. petition requesting fast food restaurants to carry healthy menus). Also, as eating is such a basic human activity and relevant to anyone, possibility of growing from dense, small groups to a loose but larger network is promising.

This video and Q&A summarize his argument very well, with some updates.