Baltimore’s Libraries are the New Facebook

via smarterplanet and utnetreader comes this bit about baltimore’s virtual supermarket project:

“From the Governing magazineIdea Center:

Two Baltimore libraries now have another service to offer their patrons: grocery ordering and pickup. The City Health Department’s Virtual Supermarket Project (VSP) lets patrons living in “food deserts”—areas without shops offering healthy food at reasonable prices—order and pickup groceries at the library. Once a week, library visitors place their orders online with a local grocer and pay with cash, check, credit or food stamps. Patrons can pick up their orders the next day without paying a delivery fee.”

this is innovative without question. it’ll be interesting to see the statistics once this picks up. 

this is actually very similar to social media. stay with me.

with each new social networking craze, there arises a wave of corporate wannabes that want to emulate the craze forerunner, though in a branded fashion (e.g. bud.tv). i’m not going to rehash the analyses of such misguided ventures. simply, they understood the value of online video but misunderstood (or ignored) the context of that value. they cared too little about their brand for it to be distributed across multiple, brand-diverse channels. they were too focused on control of their brand, not people’s interaction with it.

if you want to incentivize interaction with your brand, take your quality services to where the people already are. fill a legitimate need. decentralize from your store/website and set up a satellite. in short, get over yourself; don’t keep expecting people to come to you.

of course, facebook[1] is the perfect example of this. brands can build a presence within an existing neighborhood of sorts, unobtrusively there for anyone who wants to interact with them. the depth of that interaction has its expected limits, and the company home page still has its purpose (e.g. ecommerce). 

in baltimore, the city has partnered with grocery stores around the city for whom it’s not a viable investment to build a complete store in these neighborhoods. this program is a fantastic way to get content (healthy food) to those who want and need it, where they are. hopefully, it will have the added side effect of drawing people to spend more time at the library, investing in their education to draw themselves out of poverty.

——-

[1] the problem with citing facebook is that it’s assumed that everyone needs to be on facebook. that’s false. brands need to be where their people are. do some research and find out where people are talking about you. chances are, facebook isn’t the major player. to apply the baltimore grocebraries (my term :), this would be like offering grocery services at nordstrom or a movie theater. again, do your research. first go where your people are, not where everyone is.