The Internet is the Activist Tool

Meet the Troublemaker.

Something pretty amazing has happened in the past few days that wonderfully reconfirms how important the internet has become for grassroot activists.

First a little background:

Our group, "The No Home Depot Campaign" has been waging a battle against the 2nd largest retail corporation in America for over 4 years. The issue is about whether or not a corporation can trounce on and ignore a Community Plan in order to place their mega warehouse store smack dab in a small community, on a site surrounded by homes on 3 sides, and with an LAUSD elementary school less than 500 feet away. There are other issues as well, including the community need for a general merchandise store (we don't have one), and the expected dramatic increase in traffic, and specifically, industrial traffic on our one main street.

In the course of this struggle, we have come to rely on the internet for communication, research, and rapid response. We've been able to get our message out to the entire world (we receive visitors from every time zone on the planet), and we can post updates about the situation on a moment's notice. This ability may be a tool that many take for granted these days, but I often try to imagine the difficulties anyone would have of achieving the same results even 10 years ago. I picture us all standing on street corners handing out fliers, posting notices in local newspapers, and holding monthly meetings to strategize and bring everyone up to date. Actually, we still do all these things, but we no longer have to rely on them as our sole means of outreach (the ratio between effort expended and results achieved is now greatly decreased).


Now back to the amazing thing that has just happened. At least it is to me.

If you Google the words "Home Depot", our site comes up as the #3 search result. Forget about entering "No Home Depot in Sunland-Tujunga" or even "No Home Depot". For reasons we can't entirely explain, simply entering the name of the corporation will send you to a link that leads directly to us. It cannot just be the meta tags doing this, as there are literally thousands of sites with "Home Depot" embedded in the same way.

So, in essence, we are entering the realm of the corporate brand. I say this not as a boast, but as a point to ponder. Google is taking our site high up the food chain, to the point of being listed ahead of the company's own sites and other related sites. In the world of internet rankings, we suddenly find ourselves the equivalent of front page news.

Our website is now being viewed by some guy looking for a sale on power tools, an investor doing research on a company that they may want to invest in, or a similar community facing the same problem as us.

So while Home Depot continues in their insane efforts to reshape our little town into the image they see fit, as they spend millions of $ to influence the City, and as they sit on a $10,000,000 lawsuit against the City (that they can reactivate unless they get their way), we get a little payback.

We're in their heads.

We are sitting on the front porch of their corporate brand and greeting their potential customers before they enter the store. We are telling the public our story.

And we are doing it all from a couple of old laptops and a Dell XPS 410 that could use a serious tune-up.

Remember, this story is not about the group I belong to, it's about all of us. It's about a thousand stories and a handy little tool that in a special way, helps to level the playing fields.



You can visit our site at:
http://www.no2homedepot.com