Free Rice...for Google?

I wanted to write a blog post on the subject of Social Media for the Social Good, which is the subject of one of my classmate's paper and presentation. I think this is one of the best things about social media: the opportunities it has given people to donate or fund a need that wouldn’t have been possible without the awareness that social media brings.

I remember by first experience with this is when my tech-savvy brother, who was living at home at the time, was playing this game online, and if you got the answer right, rice would be given to hungry people around the world. I remember thinking how awesome that was, but I was also skeptical. Why would someone donate rice just because you answered a question correctly? And an easy question at that? How is an organization like this even possible? Where does the money and rice come from, and why don’t they just ask for donations?

Now, if I had heard about this site, www.freerice.org, today, I wouldn’t have blinked. What seemed so unbelievable 5 years ago is ubiquitous (See that, Anderson?) today. It makes sense to me now how an organization like this can work. It’s not that the actual clicks and right answers make money and rice magically appear. In fact, I’m pretty certain the rice and funding is already in the hands of the United Nations World Food Programme, the owners and operators of FreeRice.org. But what the game does is provide awareness. And awareness in a digitally-networked world translates into funding pretty quickly.

The social media and internet world today have made this concept the norm. When I think about it long enough, the whole concept does seem hard to grasp. How do you measure if a program like this really works? How do you measure the increased awareness and the direct effects of social capitol? And these questions, my friends, are the exact thing Google, Amazon, Facebook, and practically every digital entity on the Internet is trying to find out, package up into an analytics software program, and sell to organizations.

Wait, does that mean my right answers on FreeRice.org are not only leading to free rice, but are also funding the Big Bad Analytics Companies? It just might. And that is a depressing thought.

AMY