I nerd out with Diane Hatz, founder of Sustainable Table, talking about the difference between Slow Food and sustainable food, the secrets behind making a viral video, and why she believes "you can tell people there's a problem, unless you can offer a solution."

Jed Sundwall: And would you mind telling me just a bit about what you do and what your organization is called, what your organization does?

Diane Hatz: The program I founded and run is called Sustainable Table. We started in November, 2003, and basically, we're a non-profit consumer campaign, where we try to raise awareness and educate consumers about sustainable food and eating local, shopping at farmers markets, all that type of thing.

Our first projects were, The Meatrix, (themeatrix.com) which is an online animated film. And then, we also have the Eat Well Guide (EatWellGuide.org), which is an online directory of sustainable food. All you have to do is put in your ZIP Code to get farms, stores, restaurants that sell sustainable food in your area.

That's great. So people in NetSquared are going to get sick of me only doing interviews about food. We actually just did an interview last week with Wendy Brawer, who runs the Green Map System, and I hogged the interview talking about my San Diego Local Food Map. But, it sounds like the Eat Well Guide has a lot of that data, is that right?

Eat Well Guide does it nationally. I'm sure the person that runs it would love to speak with you about what you did to see if there's a way to sort of link them up.

So, you put out this book called Cultivating the Web (pdf link), and launched it at Slow Food Nation, is that right? (ed. Britt Bravo also reported on Cultivating the Web)

Yes, again, at Sustainable Table, we use pop culture, humor, entertainment, and new media to try to educate people. The Eat Well Guide people have just launched this tool called, "Eat Well Everywhere," which is if you want to, let's say, drive from San Diego to San Francisco, it'll plot out sustainable places along the way. But, in addition to that, we've also launched, Cultivating The Web, which is based on a panel I did back last December, where we were trying to educate non-profits about new media, online technology, and simple ways that non-profits can use to promote themselves for little or no cost. I don't know about the people that read NetSquared, but we found out there was a certain percentage of the room didn't even know what a blog was yet.

So, non-profits, some non-profits are lagging way behind in these new tools, which, for a lot of us, aren't even new, anymore. So, Cultivating The Web is an attempt to try to help people understand what's out there and what they can do.

We just do it from education, raising awareness. I was even a little surprised at how far behind a lot of non-profits lag, which is understandable because some of these non-profits are trying so hard to get funding, they're understaffed, they're overworked. They just don't know that there are so many tools out there. I didn't know about things like Gabcast until last year, when we did a cross-country tour. We could use our cell phones and call in and do podcasts, which we filter through iTunes, and we can download for free. We just stumbled across the technology.

And it sounds like this is what NetSquared does, so I will start promoting you guys, more. People just don't know, when they need to know.

No, they don't. You have to come from a certain state of mind in the first place of being curious, or at least, not technophobic, right? Beyond that, there's a huge gulf of unawareness that I'm not sure what to do with this metaphor, like fill it in or help people across it? I don't know. Now, how long has Sustainable Table been around?

November, 2003. Sustainable Table and Meatrix and the Eat Well Guide all launched on the same day in November, 2003.

OK, and you're based in New York City?

Yes, we're based in New York City.

OK, now this is interesting to me. It seems to me that the Slow Food movement is really picking up steam fairly quickly maybe in the past two years or so. Do you attribute a lot of that to technology, to people finding out awareness spreading through the Internet, or do you attribute that to anything else? Is that even a correct observation that it's picking up?

Well, there're two things, there's Slow Food and there's sustainable food. They're related, but they're a little different. With regard to both of them, I work on sustainable food. Not as much as Slow Food, though. When we did our cross-country tour, Slow Food Convivia helped us, so I think it's a combination. I think a lot of it is word of mouth. If you look at Slow Food and how they work, they have these chapters in towns all across the country, so it's word of mouth. Your neighbor might be involved, and they have pig roasts or barbecues. It's a great way for people to come together offline, in front of each other, and actually enjoy food together.

But, the national Slow Food office reaches out via the Internet. So, I think it's a combination of both. And within sustainable agriculture with what I do, our film, The Meatrix, is considered to be the most popular online advocacy film ever. We lost count at 20 million people. We have it in 30 languages. It's one of those films that's so viral, our server crashed twice. We still haven't caught up with the success of the film. And we've been told by a lot of people, we've had tens of thousands of e-mails over the last five years from people, a lot of teachers, students, parents saying how much it's changed their outlook on food and farming.

So, I do think it's a combination because a lot of people who saw The Meatrix would go to Sustainable Table, which is an educational resource, learn more about the issues, look at our Shop Sustainable sections and go out and shop better. So, it's a really nice combination of both online technology, but also good old, offline word of mouth.

Right, and really, what's most compelling about food to people, beyond the idea of the ethical and political things that are so compelling about sustainable food is getting together with people and eating good food that hasn't been processed.

Right, and part of our mission is to build community through food. And what I found is food is just a great way to bring people, literally, around a table. And if you break bread with your neighbor, you're less likely to argue with him. And this might sound like an eternal optimist, but I think if we could get people sitting back down at a table and sharing meals with each other, we'd have a lot less problems in the world.

I actually met somebody from Free Range Studios, who produced The Meatrix, at PDF last year.

We won a grant from Free Range Studios to do an animation, and I sent them all the information about factory farming because that's what we had pitched. The reason they told us we won it was because I offered a solution. I don't believe you can tell people there's a problem, unless you can offer a solution. So, the Eat Well Guide is our solution to the problem with industrial food. So, they told us the reason we won over everyone else was because we had actually offered a solution.

So, when we first did this, it feels like so long ago now, I sent them all the information on factory farming. If you watch The Meatrix, that's basically how the information was sent. And they were having a staff meeting, and one of them just said, "Oh, my God, this is so much like The Matrix." Once that came out of their mouth, the film was just written, I mean, it was just done.

Right, thank you for sharing this story because there are about a billion non-profits out there who want to use video in some way. And everyone's like, "How do I make a viral video?" It's always these very rare, like aha moments that let you make something that compelling.

It is rare, and I also tell people we put in a lot of hard work, and I haven't slept since 2003. I've been working seven days a week. I'm not saying we haven't worked hard, but there's just something you can't really pinpoint when something becomes that successful because non-profits call me up all the time, saying, "I want a Meatrix and I want something that's successful." And I tell them, "I can't guarantee that." But, what I do tell everyone is if you're looking to do any type of viral video, you have to look beyond just the video. We started going into film festivals, which they hadn't done that before. We won a lot of awards, and we got a lot of additional exposure. We transferred it on to DVD, which in 2003, was actually very difficult to do. Now, it's simple.

But, we actually put into place marketing plans off the Internet, so that we could take it even further. And even with the Meatrix, with over 20 million people watching it, we haven't even begun to saturate the market yet. We are still planning to do another push to get it out to even more people. So, it's not just a matter of having a video made. You then have to look at where are you going to put it out? What are you going to do with it? It's not you just hit go on your e-mail and it's gone.

Right.

I think some non-profits think it's that simple.

Right, because people are so enamored by the idea, like "Wow, look at this viral video that everybody's seeing. It seems like that would be really effective, I want one of those." And it's putting the cart before the horse.

Right, and trust me, it has been extremely effective. I've had more people tell me that this film has finally made them understand what the issues were, and it opened their eyes. Because there's humor in it and it's animated, it's very non-threatening, a lot of people were able to stay open to it and they got the message. So, from that, they then went and learned more. And since then, all these books have come out, Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Barbara Kingsolver with Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. So, I think the awareness of Sustainable Food and the awareness of the problems with industrial agriculture is much greater than it was even a year ago.

Absolutely, and I guess that goes back to my original question, where did this come from? I imagine there are a number of catalysts, but the Meatrix, the efficacy of a video like this is hugely impactful.

Yes, yes. I wish I could tell you exactly how it happened and how we did it because I would replicate it again. Part of it was timing. We found out a month before the video was released that the Matrix 3 movie was coming out two days before or two days after ours. It was right within the timeframe, and that helped with publicity. And we worked around the clock. I'm a real big advocate of word of mouth and one to ones, so I answered every single e-mail that came in, unless it was just like "Thanks." But, people who e-mailed me with questions, people who e-mailed in and said something, every person got a reply. And that's time-consuming, it's very time-consuming. But, it's worth it in the end.

And that highlights a point. You're talking about social media, you're talking about word of mouth and having two-way conversations with people. It does solve a lot of problems, in that it's a very powerful tool, but by no means is it going to make your job easier.

Correct. What I've found now, the Meatrix came out before Facebook. I don't know if MySpace was around yet, but we weren't aware of MySpace. YouTube wasn't around yet. And now that all these social networking sites are out, if you do any campaign even or a video, there's so many things that you need to sit down and think through. People need to make marketing plans. One thing I've found is a lot of people just go, "I want to get it to everyone." And you can't do that. The more you niche and the more you target your market, the more successful you'll be. You need to start with a really small group that you target for, and then, let it roll from there.

I think that's really good advice. And like I was saying before, people want to know how to make a viral video, whereas, I think people really should be focusing on figuring out what they want to say first, and just saying it well.

Exactly. And if you figure out what you want to say, I think how you're going to say it becomes much easier because a viral video might not be the right way. And once you really know what you're doing, there are pros and cons to doing something like that, and it can become very expensive. I'm not saying don't do it, but there are so many things people can do now, it is confusing, itself, to me. And I'm sorry I didn't know about NetSquared earlier because I'm going to be your biggest fan now. People need something like NetSquared where they can go to and learn what's out there and what they can use.

Nonetheless, there're so many things you can do and so many tools to choose from, no matter who's guiding you. Like you were saying, you have to know what you're going to say first because that'll make it so much easier to figure out what the right tool is to use after.

And a lot of people who aren't really comfortable with all this technology and social networking and stuff, don't understand Facebook, MySpace, even YouTube, Flickr. It's really time-consuming, really time-consuming stuff. So, maybe when you figure out what you're going to say, MySpace might not be right for you. Facebook might not be right for you. You need to really hone a marketing plan and a promotion plan for a campaign before you look at what tools you're going to use.

Right, like you need to have your objectives first. Beyond knowing what you want to say, you need to know who you're going to say it to, right?

Correct. You need to have your audience defined, and you need to know your budget, too. I mean, I know a lot of this online stuff is free, or Flickr's like $25.00 a year for unlimited, which is great. But, you might need to pay someone to keep it up. Or, you might need to write stuff. There are other added costs. For us, we sent out DVDs to schools and we did it all free of charge, but that's in our budget because we wanted to do that. So, people need to really think. Personally, I think that it's going to be way more difficult to do another Meatrix in 2008 than it was in 2003. So much has changed in five years. Maybe what you want to do is get the number one video on YouTube, or get yourself the number one ranking in Technorati or Digg, but it's not going to happen everywhere at once.

There's so many options now. I haven't had anyone e-mail me a link to a video virally in a couple years. So, I'm not saying it's not valid, I'm not saying it still can't be done. I'm just trying to put out there that there are so many other things people can do now that, again, it goes back to knowing what you want to say, who you're saying it to, and generally, what you want to do with it, how you want to get it across.

Right, because if your strategy is "I want to be all things to all people," your odds of failure are much greater.

Yes, correct, they are extremely high. If you just do this, I want it for everyone, you're really making it difficult for yourself.

I talk about connectors, which is the term these days. I try to reach out to people who can connect to other people. So, we try to get the teachers, even the parents because they have children, or the parents' groups. And we have found if you have a small non-profit and you have a few resources, it's good to look at community leaders or people who can get your information out. What we do at Sustainable Table is I try to put together handouts and guides, things that other people can take and share with their friends and their family. And we've found this to be extremely effective.

What you're describing right there is the same idea of any viral media online. You're creating something that people can pass along to one another.

Correct. I mean, I think that's the beauty of something like Facebook and the way it's set up. I have my friends. They'll join the group and become a fan of something and then, it comes up in my news feed. I'm like wow, Barack Obama, I want to be his fan, and then that goes out to all my friends. And that's how stuff can spread really quickly virally on Facebook, maybe quicker than e-mail now because I don't know about you, but I get so much e-mail, I can't get through it all. I have 1,200 unread e-mails in my box at work right now.

But, you read mine, that's great!

Yes, I did, but I was three days late.

But, I get so many e-mails. We have a newsletter and we have a fairly good 30,000 or 40,000 people on our newsletter list, which is great, but there's people that drop off. Everyone has an e-newsletter now. And it's sort of like you have to do it, but that's not going to make you rise to the top. So, what do you do after that? Everyone's putting a fan page on Facebook. Pretty soon, we're all going to have that. I guess my question for someone like you is where does it end? There's a point where a person or a group is not going to be able to get information out to everybody.

They're doing aggregators now, where you can go to one place and be able to update your MySpace and Facebook and all your social networking sites. I read that somewhere.

That's true, but the issue, then, is now we have aggregators of aggregators, too.

Correct, and that goes back to the really sitting down with your core teams, figuring out what you want to do. I'm also a big inventor of don't reinvent the wheel. If I was trying to start a campaign on saving the badgers, see if there's other badger groups out there. You might be local in your state and you might find one on the other side of the country. Contact them, find out what they're doing. They might be able to help you. You might be able to do things together. You might make it a national movement. But, I think it's really important that people try to research, also, to see what else is out there, or to go and do something that might already be done currently and be done well.

I absolutely agree. You're saying all these things better than I've ever said them, myself. And you have really good experience to back it up. I've gone back to my grad school to give job advice, and I'm always telling people, "Why don't you talk to people that are doing stuff that you're interested in? That'll help give you leads on where to find a job." And really, the issue comes down to the fact that a lot of people don't know what they want to do. So, having a clear idea of what you want to do and talking to people about what you want to do gives you a tremendous advantage.

Which leads me to answer your question from before, "Where this is all going to end?" The answer is that it's going to end at the beginning. Do you know what you want to do? Are you talking to people about it and can you explain it clearly? I believe that the medium, be it Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or email is secondary to being able to communicate your ideas clearly. I'm sure that's not a satisfactory answer though.

See, I agree with you. I think it's going to go back to one to one conversations. I might not be alive when this happens, but I think at some point, online technology will be such a big part of our lives, we won't think twice about it, but I think people will shut off and go visit other people. I think it will get back to conversations, and maybe the conversations will be on Skype, maybe the conversations will be different than our parents' conversations were. I think we're in a transition right now. What amazes me is when I go out and I see people at dinner, around the table, and everyone's on their Blackberry and their iPhone and they're all talking to other people and texting other people and they're not having a conversation with each other. And that fascinates me.

If you're looking at doing any type of campaign, people, their attention span's shorter, and it's different for different age ranges, too. If I'm going for Baby Boomers, they're going to read more. But, if I'm going for younger people, they're more like A to Z, where they do 10 things at once and they can juggle it all, but they don't want more than like a paragraph. That's important. I guess I just think eventually, people have to get back together, we're social animals.

I think you're right, and I think, in a weird way, the Internet's taking us there. Even though we'll also sometimes be right next to each other and talking to other people, as you've observed. But, at the same time, I feel like there are just more and more broader conversations happening all the time online.

Right.

And especially after this conversation, if I ever went out to New York or to the next Slow Food Nation, I'd really enjoy meeting you, so we're one step closer because of the Internet.

Right.

But, at the same time, I agree, there's that peril of becoming like too ADD and not taking the time to sit down and have much longer conversations.

I think what's important for people who are talking campaigns, the online component is essential, basically, but if you want to have a really effective campaign, you have to have an offline component. You need to get out and talk one on one with people or with groups. You have to maybe introduce people and back things up with online information. You need to have some type of presence out in the world, also. I think that makes a campaign much more effective.

I think that's great. One of the ways I've started explaining it is I can recommend that you see a movie that you may have never heard of, like maybe it's "Batman." "Oh, yeah, you should really see Batman." You're like, "Oh, that's great, I've never heard of it." I'm not going to go and tell you the cast and who the director is and all this stuff, first of all, because I can't remember any of it. But, online, I can be like, "OK, it's a really good movie, I'll send you the link."

Right.

So, there's this really easy way to transmit much more dense information than we could ever do one on one. So, being able to share online information, this dense information really enhances the conversations we have in person. And so, I'm really into sustainable food, but I can't recite the Omnivore's Dilemma to people. I haven't memorized it. But, I could send them a link to watch the Meatrix.

Right, or a link to Sustainable Table, where people could go and read about hormones, additives. We've had everything broken down by issue. What Sustainable Table tries to do is we try to make everything as simple as possible. I mean, I think about my mother a lot because she's just not into these issues, so she doesn't know what sustainable food is. One of the things we're doing now, I'm behind schedule, but I'm putting together a presentation kit. So, let's say you had to go give a speech on sustainable food at an event and you're like, "What am I going to do?" You'll be able to come to our website and push one button, and you'll be able to print out a speech, handouts, even table materials you can laminate. And you can do boards, presentations. You literally can have an entire display, plus a presentation, so you can just go out and do it.

That's fantastic!

If I get it done, it'll be fantastic, we're behind schedule.

Is there anything else you want to make sure that we know about?

If anyone's a blog reader and is interested in sustainable issues, we have a blog called the Daily Table (SustainableTable.org/blog). It's a great way to keep up on the research we're doing.