New initiatives from entrepreneurs and purpose-driven leaders in the South Whidbey area are not always easy to discover, as the Washington Secretary of State website which publishes new legal entities just isn’t designed for tracking what’s new at a regional level. So for anyone interested in taking an occasional peak to see what’s new in our area, I wrote a program to scan the site and update it every day with the latest 90-day running list for incorporations in Langley, Clinton, Freeland and Greenbank. Enjoy!
April 9th, 2025
Letter submitted to judge Amit Mehta!
Proposed remedies in Google's monopoly ruling to restore local, community communications.
February 18th, 2025
Application Submitted! Microsoft's AI For Good Grant
Full transcript of our application below. Application questions appear in bold. Consider downloading the PDF for a better viewing experience. Microsoft will notify grant winners by March 18, 2025. Any and all updates from Microsoft will be shared here within 24 hours. This represents a great opportunity to make our online community, our own!
September 14th, 2024
Re-Igniting Main Street Economics In The Era of Big-Tech
Listen to a discussion of this article by NotebookLM:
In Main Street economics, one business investing in advertising helps all the nearby businesses. Foot-traffic is a shared and critical resource for any brick and mortar retailer, yet as print ads declined in favor of digital ads, so too did this fabric which lifted entire communities.
Today, digital ads connect users in a siloed manner: users go directly from the global web to the sponsoring website with no pitstop for community along the way. Yet this ‘along the way’ part is still where most commerce is taking place.
So where does ‘community’ fit in the big-tech era?
To find the missing piece, let’s dive into the foot and web traffic metrics:
Foot-traffic: 30% enter a given business, and 25% of those become customers. Notice most of the commerce from this traffic will be derived by the community rather than by any one business. For instance, in a downtown with 40 storefronts, 12 would be entered and 3 would gain customers. Now if you can imagine a local economy without this shared pool of prospective customers, then bingo! This is how ads work on the global web which we’ll compare next.
Web-traffic: 2% visit an advertised website, and 3% of those become customers. These are known as the Click Through Rate and the Conversion Rate, respectively. Like the foot traffic above, consider the value this traffic represents to the community: Where do the 98% go who viewed an ad but didn’t click? Where do the 97% go who clicked but didn’t purchase? Like foot-traffic, this ‘organic’ traffic generates the lion’s share of commerce but unlike foot-traffic, they don’t go to the next storefront in the community. Instead, they go back to the global web. Unless… drumroll… The advertised website is a storefront in an online community! This is a game-changer as now the community’s ad-dollars become pooled and collectively beneficial
Example:
A visitor on the Rob Schouten Gallery website can’t find the desired piece. With a click of the ‘back’ button, the user is either:
Back to Google’s search results where Yelp and TripAdvisor are displayed before other nearby resources. Outcome: customer lost. Or,
Back to the Rob Schouten Gallery landing page on South Whidbey Online, where, serendipitously, WICA and the Double Bluff Brewing Co. appear as intriguing options to make a day of it. Outcome: The customer is converted to foot-traffic for the Rob Schouten Gallery, and, by the power of community, two more local organizations gain additional business.
The mission of South Whidbey Online, A Social Purpose Corporation (SWO-SPC), is to make our online community, our own. Our average user visits 2.7 organizations in our directory -more than enough to make productive use of the 97% of traffic which is ‘just browsing.’
We’re in a pilot now using Google ads to measure the ‘lift’ one advertiser can make in our community. If you’re interested in participating, please contact us. Phase two will include five advertisers, each with a landing page featuring three to four complementary organizations.
Please note SWO-SPC does NOT offer advertising, SEO or any other professional services on a commercial basis. For Google Search ads managed by SWO-SPC, the Advertiser contracts directly with Google. SWO-SPC is happy to create a dedicated landing page for any business (free of charge) who would like to advertise or simply include the link on their website, in newsletters, etc. Together we rise! Please feel free to reach out!
September 13th, 2024
Pleased to add My Brown Wren to the SWO Directory!
My Brown Wren offers earth-conscious jewelry & jewelry-making tutorials.
