“Internet will extend electronic marketplace and make it the ultimate go-between, the universal middleman.” -         Bill Gates

e-Choupal is a classic example of social change using the enormous power of the internet. One of ITC India's sustainability initiatives are the e-Choupal, the world's largest rural digital infrastructure that empowers 4 million farmers, a case study that is often used in Ivy League business schools. What began as an effort to re-engineer the procurement process for soy, tobacco, wheat, shrimp, and other cropping systems in rural India has also created a highly profitable distribution and product design channel for the company—an e-commerce platform that is also a low-cost fulfillment system focused on the needs of rural India. The e-Choupal system has also catalyzed rural transformation that is helping to alleviate rural isolation, create more transparency for farmers, and improve their productivity and incomes.

Cuurently ITC is leveraging its e-choupal outlets set up in rural India in partnership with local entrepreneurs to source raw materials, to sell ITC’s FMCG products in rural markets. ITC’s e-Choupals also offers farmers value-added services such as crop advisories, advance weather forecasts, output price discovery and direct communication tools. There are 6,500 e-Choupals currently. ITC plans to scale up to 20,000 e-Choupals by 2012, covering 100,000 villages in 15 states, servicing 15 million farmers.

 Here is a video on the e-Choupals:

Here is a report: http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/sereport/ser/stdy_ict/4_e-choupal%20.pdf

Link to the e-choupals website: http://www.echoupal.com/

Google maps have been used in many constructive ways. Some of them include tracking the swine flu outbreak, discovering real estate deals on ebay, displaying bus routes, showing real time traffic and also using them for educational purposes. But its use has added an important and valuable service to the climate control efforts happening worldwide. The United Nations Climate Change Secretariat (UNFCCC) in partnership with Google has created a map that visualizes greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated by a number of industrialized countries. This has taken data analysis to another level and can play a very influential role in presenting important data to key decision makers. Using the interactive greenhouse gas emissions map, one can navigate varied levels of data starting from a global level all the way down to country levels. There is a lot of analysis presented visually including viewing by different gas emissions. This is also a significant device developed ahead of the December climate change talks in Copenhagen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 It is Friday afternoon and soon it will be happy hours. So what’s new you ask?

Mine started this morning as I was reading about safer drinking water access and sanitation to the developing world championed by http://www.water.org. Among its other plans, is to partner with local organizations to execute the projects and champion innovative business models. It is founded by Matt Damon and Gary White who is the co-founder of Water Partners.
I am waiting for their online experience that is slated to be released later this year. While a lot of non-profit sites are focused on raising donations, there seems to be a lesser focus comparatively for the for-profit social enterprises.

I am hoping that water.org will map an online strategy that will cover:

• Transparency to their projects
• Will create a participatory platform so that readers and change makers can participate in a productive dialogue with the team
• Will give a chance to provide services using B2B and B2C internet models to local companies, social change entrepreneurs and small businesses to offer services to the great projects. There are companies who are devoted to finding water from all sources and converting them to a form we can drink
• Apart from globalization, localization of their online presence is key here, so that at one level we have access to the global efforts, but at a micro level local communities can avail of the relevant news and ways to help. This is important for any effort that spans across all geographies. It not only creates a global momentum but exposes and thereby enables newer solutions by harnessing local talents that are hidden in the smaller pockets of the world but which can be effective at a larger scale
• They are already in the social media space and that’s a wonderful PR tool
• Like a job site, where skill sets are matched, there are various ways to use the web for voluntary work where skill sets and expertise can encourage advocacy

 There is enough water in the world but it is an endless wait for some to get pure safe drinking water. It is great to know that people with access to resources are intent in bringing about a change to the world. Now is my happy hour as I drink my safe pure drinking water and feel thankful.

What happens when you are a storyteller who loves to write, and who loves to cook?  You throw in a ladle of information every time on the history behind the ingredients, the story behind the recipe and just about everything you read written by this cook/writer energizes all your senses and you drift off to a storyland with streets lined with food and drinks. Not to mention that the writer is also busy preparing a book. So what else do you need to reach out to the hungry public?

Yes you have a blog (http://disciplineddestiny.blogspot.com/) already and friends and family gather around to see what’s happening in your side of the world. But you have another promise to keep; to feed more souls who love food and stories and all those comforting things. So you start sprouting in more places like Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed.

How do you use the web and social media to push useful content around and build a network?

- Build a blog that is devoted to the subject you want to share (http://disciplinedfoodie.blogspot.com/)

- Be visible in the right places and contribute towards giving feedback and answers. Forums and online communities are places where people post questions and your expert feedbacks can earn you a fan following

- Build a network using social media sites, but be very wise in choosing your friends. Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed are more popular. Registration is easy and with sites like posterous.com, you can post content once and publish them to these sites, after configuring them. This way you can aggregate content to once place

- Be proactive in the online space by not only joining groups but also by creating groups in the social media sites. Facebook groups are very popular

- Measure, measure and measure all the time so you know where you see the most activity and responses to your content. Google Analytics is a great tool and it is free

- Use other communication mediums like webinars, videos and podcasts to distribute your content. Posting videos to YouTube and incorporating them in your blog and other sites is very easy. Flickr.com is great for putting up pictures and pulling them into your site

- As you are expanding your presence online, maintain the same persona wherever you are pollinating your content. This will help affirm and build your brand presence

- There are too many choices out there on the web. Start small so you can get an attentive and focused audience

 These are just some baby steps. As Alan M. Webber who co-founded Fast Company writes in his book "Rules of Thumb":

"Start small. Do what you can with something you care about so deeply that you simply can't not do it. Stay focused, close to the ground, rooted in everyday reality. Trust your instincts and your eyes: do what needs doing any way you can, whether the experts agree or not. Put practice ahead of theory and results ahead of conventional wisdom.

 Start small. If it works, keep doing it. If it doesn't work, change what you are doing until you find something that does work. Start small, start with whatever is close at hand, start with something you care deeply about."

Now how do I ask an entrepreneur who has spent his entire life building meaningful sustainable energy products, who helps rural communities be self reliant, to hop on to the chaotic web and move to a more efficient way to market his company?

The web is too chaotic. He has a point. The frenzy over getting “online” and building “social networks” is driven sometimes by a fear of not being on par with peers who have armed themselves with the latest web ammunition and are shooting mindlessly at their audience with spam and useless content.

Now that the social media is picking up all the steam and with hundreds of new tools joining the bandwagon to do the same stuff again and again, I have a greater challenge to keep it simple for him and still make the web look meaningful. So here's my challenge: Convince my client that we will find the right kind of people who will find his products useful (networks?), that we will find a good place to write about the products (blogs?) where his audience can also subscribe to his content (RSS Feeds?). We can also constantly update his new audience with new product releases (Twitter?) and more importantly we will definitely be measuring how all this has worked out (Google Analytics?).

So now that we have a plan, and we have filtered out all the tools that can drive the actions around his simple requirements, we also figure out he does not need to pay for any of these. That's the power of the web. There are solutions for all kinds of necessities, if only one can learn how to sort and sieve what we need the most.

Now the entrepreneur is happy and here is a simple plan:

1. We will start by introducing his company through the World Wide Web:

The Plan: Start a Blog

2. We also want to announce news and updates and other company snippets

The Plan: We use Twitter and Facebook. We also add RSS Feeds to the blogs so his readers can subscribe to the content

3. We want to find the right web audience for him:

The Plan: We need relationship tools. Join similar web groups and networks and share his blog and twitter site. He now starts building his network.

4. How do the rest of the people get to know this company?

The Plan: Invest in wise keywords and connect with search engines. Keep the designs simple and the content clean.

5. Now how does he know where his audience came from? How does he measure the performance?

The Plan: Use Google Analytics

Now these are just baby steps. Now that his company is on the map, we can talk now.

6. Its all working great but I want to add pictures:

The Plan: Flickr

7. Can I add videos too? I don't have the expertise though.

The Plan: Why not use YouTube's new "Video Volunteers". YouTube announced the launch of an innovative new program to help nonprofits to find talented video production help to support the development of new videos.

We are online now, and the challenge now is to not distract ourselves towards the chaos. The challenge is to stay simple and meaningful, to distill the noise and that is not unthinkable, when you are already doing a good cause in a chaotic world.

The blog: www.servals-group.blogspot.com

Catch the social entrepreneur on twitter: http://twitter.com/pmukundan

Content by ameaningfulweb.posterous.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.