If you live in SF you’ve been dreaming of local Carrotmob event #2 for awhile. Despite the fact that Carrotmob and Virgance are based here in SF, we’ve had event #2 on the backburner while we’ve been working mainly on supporting other events in other places. After all, we can have a greater impact by spreading this movement far and wide than by planning more small campaigns internally. But we want to keep experimenting with Carrotmob, and so today we’re launching event #2, which we have concocted as a grand experiment to see what else we can learn. You should expect that after this event, future SF events will be planned by other organizers (ie: YOU) who don’t work in the main office every day. But we wanted to do one more to explore the following research questions:

1. What happens when you allow the public to vote for the winner of a Carrotmob?

Will they vote based on the maximum positive impact an event can have? Will they vote on personality? What if you let everyone in the world vote? If people vote who don’t live in the community and won’t be attending the event, will they change the results? Will people get really crazy and try to hack our voting system? Will people care? Will people understand the Instant-Runoff Voting system we’ve built? How many other organizers will want to use this public voting model for their next campaigns? (if you are an editor of a blog at http://yourcity.carrotmob.org we will soon make this app available to you!)

2. What happens when you use qualitative value judgments to decide who wins a Carrotmob event instead of simple quantitative measures?

If you use quantitative measures such as I did in the first ever event (ie: what percentage of revenue do you commit….) there’s no reason to have a vote. The winner is simply the business with the best bid. But a qualitative approach allows different businesses to make different types of offers, depending on what is most appropriate for them. It may be more difficult to determine which action will have the greatest impact, but this is also an acknowledgment that there are many approaches to making a business more socially responsible, and the debate about what’s most effective is a valuable debate to have. The qualitative approach makes it possible for a number of other secondary factors (ie: emotion, context, “lobbying”, popularity, preferred location, etc) to influence the result of the competition. Depending on your perspective this is either a downside or an upside. But it is nice that this will make the whole process of selecting a winner a more inclusive process.

3. Is a campaign necessarily weakened when the mob spends relatively smaller amounts of money?

In the first ever event, many people had good reason to spend a lot of money. After all, they had to stock up their liquor cabinets anyway, so why not spend $100? In this campaign, we are focusing on coffee shops. You can only reasonably spend like $5 in a coffee shop. We know some of you are crazy unreasonable, and capable of making it rain enough money in a coffee shop to fill your little red wagon with chocolate croissants, but honestly, even if more people come to this event than the last, if they only spend $5, that’s still much less spending than what was spent at a small grocery store. So will this event still be a success?

4. How does reputation compare to cash in terms of importance for a coffee shop?

Is it possible that even if a coffee shop doesn’t get huge revenues on one day, that a campaign will be extremely profitable for them in the long-term because of their improved reputation? This may be an interesting factor. You see, people came from all over the Bay Area to support K & D Market. But I don’t expect someone who lives in Oakland to go all the way to K & D every time they want to buy a handle of Jack. They call them “convenience stores” for a reason. K & D was in it for the one day payoff. But coffee shops in SOMA are nearby lots of offices filled with lots of people who drink coffee every day. Those people have multiple options for where they get their coffee. Does a Carrotmob have the power to change the preferred coffee shop of enough people in a neighborhood to give them a long-term advantage over all their less-responsible competitors? Will this result in mini-Carrotmobs by “the usuals” every day from now on? Or will people only show up on one day and then never again support? We will have to wait awhile and then ask the winning coffee shop what sort of sustained boost they have experienced.

5. How does a campaign on a weekday with no afterparty compare to a campaign on a Sunday followed by a free concert in Dolores Park?

We know Carrotmob can work as a party destination for your day, but what does it look like when people just want to swing by for 5 minutes on their way to work? Will the mob want to stick around and hang out, or just efficiently spend their money for the cause and go? Can we keep the line short and efficient this time?

6. Will people vote for those businesses who have not made change, or those who have already made change?

This is quite possibly the most important question that we will answer with this event. Every campaign is different, but we’re definitely at a bit of a fork in the road here. This vote is going to be a referendum on the question of what Carrotmob’s primary purpose should be: Should we focus on creating the most change directly, or on rewarding the most responsible businesses whether or not we are causing change? We don’t want to interfere with your own decision-making, so you may wish to watch the videos for yourself before reading the next sentence. Most observers who have previewed the videos feel that Epicenter Cafe is the most environmentally-friendly coffee shop in the competition, but they also feel like Carrotmob could have a stronger impact by rewarding one of the other two cafes. What to do? There is no right answer to this question yet, people. This week we need to come up with our first answer.

So it’s time for a few shout outs. First off, Kirstin Henninger and the Green Cafe Network helped us out by consulting with the cafes about what changes they could make. Our expertise is in coordinating the mob, so it’s great to work with experts and non-profit partners who are able to achieve their goals by partnering to plan a Carrotmob! We hope that the winning cafe will choose to join the GCN as well. A lot of people have contributed to getting this event off the ground, including Curtis, Natasha, Brad, Jacob, Susanna… oh and a huge shout out to Aaron and Grant for coding up a voting app that is beautiful on the outside and has a beautiful algorithm on the inside as well. And thanks in advance to you, mob, for making this possible.

The time has now come for you to head on over to our Carrotmob voting page and make your choice! Be sure to subscribe to the blog or follow us on Twitter for updates on this campaign….