Does Boycotting Online Work?

We are going to be doing a larger piece on SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) later, with the help of our Fif-TECH-Teen correspondent Sean, but as a preview we are going to look into the effectiveness of the online boycott.

One of the well-honed tools of any activist is the boycott. It is how one can vote in numbers by not voting…in numbers. One would suspect that on the Internet, a platform predicated on populist ideals (whether it knows it or not), group activism like the boycott would be especially easy to organize. One would be correct in this assumption, to a degree.

Organizing the masses online is the easy part; action is often more difficult. And even when action is taken, boycotts in particular function differently than their offline counterparts. The problem involves visibility and perceived visibility. Since it is so easy to engage like-minded people and then tally up the number of those people engaged, there is a false narrative of success with ease when it comes to online activism. The lurking variable: who is paying attention? The answer: far too often it is the pastor preaching to the choir.

Anybody who has ever seen a “One Million Strong Against The New Facebook Redesign X” group can tell you that assembling an opinionated group is easy. They can also tell you how easy they are to ignore, despite the numbers. What is lost in translation is that a one thousand person petition holds far less weight than one thousand people occupying a space. Sure, that has always been the knock on petitions, online and offline, but this logic also applies for the online boycott. When one thousand people leave your website, the only person who notices is the intern who monitors the analytics. There is no visible trail of dissent. All the sound and the fury of the boycotting group amounts to nothing outside of their own echo chamber.

Here is the challenge of activism online. Just like neurologists have shown that one gets almost all the pleasure of a completed task by just imagining its completion, one gets almost all the pleasure of making a statement by hearing from others that a statement is being made. There is a list, with one thousand people on it. They all say this is great. It feels good. Well, who else hears about it? These are not one thousand bodies, just names and analytics scores.

A few weeks ago, a list of companies supporting SOPA was passed around the Internet and a lot of noise was made about boycotting everybody on the list, from Disney to Nike. The list was so large (over 400 companies) that a blanket boycott was clearly impossible. So, Internet activists chose to focus. They picked one name off the list to go after first, the one with the clearest online ties — GoDaddy. Now here was a boycott that would make some noise! The action item was simple; move your URL to a different domain host. That is all they sell, that was all that had to be done. So, a day of domain switching was set up and people started moving out. GoDaddy publicly reversed course on their SOPA support. Job well done! Right?

Perhaps. This is the first high profile example of an online boycott working (to whatever extent it worked) but the circumstances could not have been more advantageous to success. Internet goods, an Internet audience, only people on the Internet care and this was an Internet problem. In this case, it was as if our hypothetical one thousand bodies were there in the flesh. Here’s where it gets tricky. There are still ~400 companies in support of SOPA and at the end of the day, the impact on GoDaddy’s bottom line was minimal. Sure they took a PR hit, but they’ve already survived PR nightmares, including warming over their CEO’s pension for very big game hunting. And the number of domains changed were a drop in their financial barrel.

Ironically, GoDaddy is an Internet company whose goal seems to be currying favor with a less Internet-savvy crowd. Their target demographic (at least as far as one can interpret their commercials) is the, for lack of a better term so borrowing one I’m sure has been used in a GoDaddy board room, “Nascar crowd.” It is feasible that loosing a percentage of the crowd that cares about SOPA fits the GoDaddy business model. Despite their change in stance, it’s hard to imagine this boycott having legs beyond this debate, in which the odds are still set against the anti-SOPA contingent.

So, even when online boycotting works, it seems to not work as well as needed. And it’s hard to argue that this is just because of some specifics of GoDaddy, because the success is also due to some specifics of GoDaddy. In the next few months, as the debate of SOPA rages on, we will get to see other examples of online activism and perhaps that will make more clear its merits, but for now the success or failure of the boycott seems to be as vague as what comprises a virtual boycott. Where do names become bodies become analytics become dollars become change? I guess we will have to wait and see…

– JO

Tags: boycott, GoDaddy, Internet Censorship, online activism, Protect IP, SOPA

European Venture Summit comes to an end, sadly

e-Unlimited proved again that it is serious about bringing together the venture and entrepreneurs of Europe at this two day event. Completely focused on letting VCs, angel investors and start ups in biotech, ICT, clean tech  intensely mingle and discuss the possibility of investment and the dream of having their company make it big. The Summit was a constant hive of activity and even Tattletech barely had time for a cup of coffee bouncing from meeting to meeting.

Despite the statistics and the mood of markets, there was no lack of entrepreneurial spirit and positive outlook at this event. Even from two start ups who were just looking for seed money to the Swedish mobile language learning tool seeking 10 million, both VCs and start ups were talking business.

Some highlights included the amazingly and oddly interesting commentary by the keynote  Dr. Thomas Meyer an Economist for Deutsche Bank Research who, despite his youthful looks, talked about an aspect of economics that held everyone’s attention – the economic benefit of start ups to this particular economy in terms of keeping a fire burning in the business cycle – making the market more flexible and rich in diversity.

Charles Van Costenobel, Director Eurecan and Ester Palomar, Eurecan Cataluna

The Summit also had a large contingency of Spanish start ups as part of the work with Eurocan – led by the dynamic duo Charles Van Costenobel and Ester Palomar.  OK  first we have to just point out that they are with Caja Navarra which is Civic Banking – yes you heard right – Civic Banking a new and truly pioneering concept in banking.

CEO Davorin Gurnick and COO Dennis Gurnick, Intera

Tattletech’s favorites at the Summit were the Slovenian Intera rolling out software as a service for the Enterprise in the emerging Central European markets as well as German markets. Their competitive advantage lies in their business model and approach to market as well as the platform focusing on social media tools for the enterprise. We also liked IRL, led by a young and dynamic team out of Amsterdam. They had the business model right when it came to location based social networking because they also had a platform for corporations as well. (video to come!) They were passionate about their product but also extremely realistic and cautious about investment and how to use that money to correctly roll to market. Also, Yasmo LIve which is a mobile application for networking at conferences – in other words lets you know who is there so you can get some business done and provides a revenue producing opportunity for conference organizers and promotional options for sponsors. The company was led by the only female entrepreneur at the event, Areti Kampyli.

As we said before, Spain seemed to dominate and three other favorite Spanish start ups were Intelliglass which improves energy efficiency of buildings; La Cupula Music,  founded by another Dutchman, is focused on the digital distribution of music for the Spanish and Latin America markets; Zentym led by the one of the most dynamic CFO’s we have ever met – Jaime Pont who is going to revolutionize and make profitable (he claims) advertising models, distribution and relevancy for MobileTV, and then of course Tattletech’s personal favorite, nuubo. So many reasons we like nuubo – because they have taken smart materials and combined them with  innovative software & wireless communication systems in order to make bio monitoring clothes or equipment to improve health or save lives. Sure that is one of them. Because he went along with a little semantic joke, or  because they had one of the best presentations for a start up that we have ever seen, because they are already working with Telefonica Mobiles to bring this to market or because their General Manager Rodrigo Miranda Beltran is just the most charming, deeply intelligent and ultimate gentleman on the planet universe.

Arican Wegter, Internet Entrepreneur & Angel Investor and Dorte Wiene, Regional Director, e-Unlimited and bGrand Advisory Board

We also found that angel investors like Internet Entrepreneur and Angel Investor Arican Wegter, former founder of Lovefilm (Europe’s NetFlix) but he embraces the true spirit of the entrepreneur – providing funding, business support and direction to help them get off the ground successfully with the right business model and foundation for growth.

This week we will post a series of video interviews with many covered in this post. So stay tuned.

Tags: Arican Wegter, Caja Navarra, Civic Banking, e-Unlimited, Intera, IRLConnect, La Cupula, Lovefilm, nuubo, Zentym

Wow!

A shining example of making things happen through sadness. Sorry you will have to just paste this link in your browser.

http://necn.everyzing.com/results.jsp?q=stephen+heywood&s=&col=en-vid-pod_necn-ep

Ah-ha! A real superhero

And all she had was a hammer! This has to be the best story ever! Thank you Neely for writing it and thank you Mona for doing what all of us really want to do! Customer service does indeed “suck” and Comcast needs to wake up!

And what does the spokesperson for Comcast say – a one Ms. Beth Bacha? That Comcast has more than 25 million customers, the overwhelming majority of which are very satistified with their service. Ha ha ha! I think that Beth should get a visit from Kiefer Sutherland and let him get the truth out of her.

For all of you with an ache for revenge (without your hammer) go to Comcastmustdie.com.