Would-be dogooders know how tough it is to figure out whether a company’s “good” or not. Sure, Whole Foods is all about organic (and I shop there) — but what about its alleged union-busting practices? Sure, Walmart says it’s going green — but do solar panels excuse “always low wages”?

This, I’m guessing, is the inpetus behind the relatively new site, Dotherightthing. This site wants you to add your 2 cents on companies — by adding news stories about companies in Digg-like fashion. The stories then get aggregated via a point-based system for each company during an “evaluation period” — and at the end, you have a numerical ranking as to how good or bad a specific company is overall. Starbucks, for example, has a 9-day evaluation period left.

Useful? I’d like to think so, but at the moment, I’m skeptical. Yes, this is the second post in what appears to be a string of “it sounds good but I’m dubious” posts.

Socio-economically successful (not to be confused with actually socio-economically conscious and caring) companies tend to have loving customers who may or may not care to really look into the deep down issues of a company’s practices but will input positive stories — ramping up positive points for these companies. The reason? People like to defend their consumer practices, and will do so without actually bothering to find out if those practices are really worth defending on a “dotherightthing” level.

Moreover, these companies also tend to have well-funded PR and marketing departments, members of which can input positive stories into databases such as these on a regular basis, as part of their paid jobs.

These tactics often leave activists who’ve actually evaluated these issues on a more serious level outnumbered, skewing the “good” ranking of the web-media savvy companies. Seriously — Inputting stories about specific companies on a regular basis — especially on a start-up site like dotherightthing — is often tedious, time-consuming, and tiring (on a “what’s the point?” level) for the activist. It’s like trying to keep track of and respond to comments on a YouTube video — something many intelligent web users are wary of doing.

That’s my jaded opinion, which explains why, after browsing the stories on Starbucks, I haven’t signed up yet. My opinion is that my time’s better spent evaluating companies for myself, and writing about it on this blog. If you disagree, gimme your best argument, and you might convince me to get a login.

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