What do people looking for alternatives to our debt money system, or looking for ways to build up their local communities search for on Google? Insiders seem to cluster around the term Bernard Lietaer coined, "Complementary Currencies" but ten years since the publication of "The future of Money", this term is only used by practitioners themselves, and has yet to enter the public vocabulary.
Similarly few people are searching for "alternative money", and "alternative currency"; Forget searching for LETS, or even "Local exchange". "Timebank" also is hardly used, except by projects themselves, (perhaps mindful of the fact that "Time Bank" throws up around 70% false positives). And speaking about false positives, forget "local money".
The awkward truth is that the movement has a de facto label, determined by the searching public, and to work against that is to marginalise ourselves.
That de facto label is "Local currency". If you want your work to be found by people who don't know the field very well, you should be using this term in your page titles and your headings.
You would also do well to consider that there are many more searches for "Time Bank" and "Virtual currencies", which can be piggy-backed!
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