Ethiopia wants to trademark some its coffee beans to give growers more control (and presumably higher prices). Oxfam is supporting their campaign and has put a video on Youtube accusing Starbucks of failing to support coffee growers. Starbucks has responded by putting its own video up. What’s interesting – from our perspective – about all that is that the conversation is moving to a different media.
And if we link that to a new survey of teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which shows that more than half (55%) of all of online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites, we need to be ready to move our conversation to where people are.
(Details on the coffee story are here. The videos wouldn’t work on a crippled DOI computer even if the site were not blocked by the departmental nannywall, but will work on a real one.)