I returned last night from SXSW after six days to find a lot of news articles about the Bartle Bogle Hegarty's BBH Labs Wifi stunt gone bad. If you haven't caught up to this controversy, BBH Labs hired 14 homeless people in Austin to work as human "Hotspots," carrying around mobile Wifi stations. According to news reports, each homeless person was paid $20 plus whatever tips they could hustle as donations.
I met two of the homeless working on the project while I was there when one of them, a man named Rudolph, approached me with the offer.
I talked with him for a few moments, trying to understand how the offer worked. It seemed complicated to me. I was going to my next session, and I didn't need Wifi, so I just moved on.
I didn't take a close look at his tee shirt, since I was busy listening to his pitch. By not looking at his shirt I missed the problem at the center of the controversy, the tagline that reads:
"I'm Rudolph, a 4G Hotspot."
This is the heart of the criticism of the idea, which BBH Labs called a "charitable innovation project." The tee shirt tagline very clearly says that Rudolph is a 4G Hotspot--and by implication he's an object, not a human being.
Melvin and Rudolph
People upset about the project say BBH Labs has created a business model that uses homeless people only for their utility to provide a portable Wifi hotspot.
I get that. But let me ask what if the tee-shirt had read:
"I'm Rudolph, and I'm selling Wifi From My 4G Hotspot"
This version clearly makes Rudolph a human being, and in fact by putting his name out there he becomes more of a human being because I know his name. One major dislocation homeless people suffer with is that people treat them like they're "invisible."
Rudolph wasn't invisible to me. He was a guy on the streets at SXSW selling portable Wifi connections.
The SXSW experiment was based on the Street Newspaper, a shopper that the homeless get for free that contains ads and coupons, as well as stories and other content created by homeless people about themselves. Homeless people hand the newspaper out in return for spare change. It gives them something of value to sell, rather than simply panhandling.
BBH Labs said their effort was trying to pull the Street Newspaper idea into the 21st century, and provide a service of commercial value that homeless people can sell, rather than having to beg.
Personally, I feel that BBH Labs should get some credit for at least thinking about ways to help homeless people make money to survive. But I also believe they were brain-locked about how well the project was going to be received, and as a result wrote a dumb tagline.
And there's more to this controversy than a bad tagline for some.
On the BBH Labs blog this week they acknowledged the criticism the project received, including taking blame for one of the bigger complaints about the Street Newspaper comparison. Saneel Radia of BBH Labs writes:
"The biggest criticism (which we agree with actually) is that Street Newspapers allow for content creation by the homeless (we encourage those to research this a bit more as it certainly does not work exactly as you would assume). This is definitely a part of the vision of the program but alas we could not afford to create a custom log-in page because it's through a device we didn't make. However, we'd really like to see iterations of the program in which this media channel of hotspots is owned by the homeless organizations and used as a platform for them to create content. We are doing this because we believe in the model of street newspapers."
Regardless of what you think of the BBH Labs project, we can all agree there's more and more good thinking going into how to use social networks to solve social problems.
Clearly social media works for non-profits because all social media success is built on people sharing their passions-and at the heart of every good non-profit is a cause that people are passionate about. That's so true that corporations try to buy some of the "brand halo" of non-profit causes by making them a focus of their marketing campaigns.
But more thinking is going into how to create long-term solutions to social problems, not just throw money at them or worse, ignore them.
For example, several campaigns are focused on how to help small businesses survive the recession. Amex created "Small Business Saturday," urging people to shop at local businesses on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. They reported at SXSW this week that Small Business Saturday resulted in a 26% lift in total dollars spent over last year on the same day.
"Cash Mobs" are Flash Mobs that pour into a local store to give it a big infusion of business on a certain day.
Kickstarter and dozens of other "social platforms" are trying to use crowds and social networking to solve social problems.
And I think BBH Labs sincerely was trying to think about how to create a sustainable innovation to help homeless people, based on how they see the Street Newspaper works. But in the attempt they missed some key issues with their thinking, capped off by the bad tagline on the tee shirts.
(I also think giving each homeless person $20 a day was cheap on their part, but they probably thought each one would make ten times that in tips each day.)
I drove my 16 year old daughter to school this morning (it was my day with the car) and she told me that they discussed the BBH Labs controversy in her Ethics class yesterday. I asked her what she thought about it.
"It objectified and marginalized the homeless at the same time," she said. "We don't want to see them as real human beings and that's what this thing did."
Even though the shirt said, I'm Rudolph?
"That's worse in a way," she said, "because then Rudolph himself is telling you he's not a human being."
So was the BBH Labs experiment exploitation, misplaced charity, a good idea in need of revision, or just a bad tagline?
What do you think about the controversy?