I have learned a great deal of what I know about coffee from the internet. It has the ability to be the best tool we have to gain a foothold on the mind of our consumer but a simple test can show you how negative the internet is for someone unaware of what is the truth about great coffee. Go to google.com and search for “specialty coffee”.
I want to try to make this an on going thing so I am going to start at the top of the list. Maybe, if I can keep focused enough, I will do one of these a day but don’t hold me to it.
#1 scaa.org
Well, the SCAA comes up first. Can this be a good way to grab a new comer? Answer: Sure it can. If the person is curious enough to google “specialty coffee” hopefully they are still curious enough to navigate their way to some information about why some coffees taste better than others and why they should spend money on the better stuff. Lets take a look at the layout shall we?
Ok, so there are some people drinking coffee and looking very comforted. I like the feeling of it… hopefully other people will also. A very distinct difference from Folgers and 8 O’clock’s marketing but not so different from Starbucks? This doesn’t scream different and better to me at all but I am personally a huge proponent of Stumptown’s crazy ads so maybe I am not the best judge of this but I will state that its not too far away from what Starbucks does and that isn’t great. Who am I to judge though, right? Now onto content.
So, there are some really great things in this section of the site and some not so good. I want to focus on the positives as much as I can because, well, that’s the nice thing to do. All the statistics stuff is awesome. It was a good read for me and I appreciate that the SCAA provides that information but to a newcomer it may be over their heads a bit, but the SCAA standards are right below it and that is a barrel full of goodness if the curious coffee novice is willing to download 5 seperate PDF’s and attempt to decipher the language of it. All that is great information. Telling someone that we hold our coffee to higher standards is great. Showing them that we screen coffees and grade them also great! Making them download a two page PDF… eh… could be better as a link to another page on the site but I like the content and I think that a random NOOB would too.
Also below that is a sustainability section with loads of information about the cultural side of coffee. Very sexxy SCAA! Consumers and coffee professionals alike love this stuff, heck, its why alot of us do what we do. Coffee as a passion is about people and helping the farmers that deserve more than they get. This is the gold in the mine right here. This practically sells coffee by itself and does a lot of good for the human race at the same time. There is even stuff about saving birds in there! People love birds! Another very surprising addition is a little about the history of how certain programs for raising the level of sustainability began. That’s a nice touch also. Again we are forced to download and open annoying PDF’s of things that could be on another page but beggars can’t be choosers right?
There is more on the front page but most of it is for members or coffee professionals and that is not the point of this particular post. The one thing that does stand out however is Ric Rhineharts heartfelt article entitled, “What is Specialty Coffee”. Mr. Rhinehart does a great job of summing up a very difficult answer into a two page (not in a pdf for some reason) article that is very approachable to a novice consumer.
All in all the #1 search result on google isn’t a disaster. There are worse places to go to find information about specialty coffee and I am glad the first website, which I assume people click on the most, wasn’t something featuring links to Cuisinart espresso machines and blade grinders. We’ll take a look at the number two site on google tomorrow. (hopefully)
2 Comments
As an industry professional, I find the SCAA site being first on the search list to be convenient, but in the shoes of a consumer, I wonder how effective it is. With an internet full of “bouncers” (people who pop in on a page and then bounce off site to something else) and an average time-on-site of less than a minute (unless you’re TED.com!) nearly web-wide, it doesn’t leave much time to grab the attention of who we want to be a specialty coffee customer and plant some knowledge or at least a feeling of desire. I fear that what comes up when you search for “specialty coffee” is largely for ‘us’ and not situated enough towards the consumer base that we so desperately want to turn on to the great coffee we’re talking about. What to do?
So, I plugged “specialty coffee” in and got a decent list of sites that might provide useful information. What I thought was interesting was the fact that all of the advertisements on the sides were somewhat misleading. Lots of links to companies of dubious repute.
So, those “bouncers” you spoke of are bouncing around to these ad links and begin to associate specialty coffee with lavazza, danesi, illy and the like, but they aren’t being introduced to microroasteries such as your own, or even the larger companies like intelli, CC and the like.
It’s a double-edged sword. Google’s tagging system seems to sort out some good resources in their web results but the ads are a craps shoot.