Can We Engage Social Media to Pursue Social Entrepreneurship?
Before I begin exploring the idea of social media as a tool to pursue social entrepreneurship, I think one warrants an explanation the concept first.
Social Entrepreneurship can be understood as the concept of providing innovative an enterprising solutions to the society’s most pressing problems. It moves away from the concept of social work because social entrepreneurs like any other breed of entrepreneurs work towards creating a business value with their efforts. The Grameen Bank story of Bangladesh is an excellent example to understand social entrepreneurship.
Skill Foundation prefers to say that, “Social entrepreneurs pioneer innovative and systemic approaches for meeting the needs of the marginalized, the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised – populations that lack the financial means or political clout to achieve lasting benefit on their own.”
In basic, you are looking at getting entrepreneurship that will help the unprivileged mass or rather work with the weaker sections of the society, uplift them and do all this while still seeking profits. It runs similar to philantropy only in terms of an end goal or impact, and is far away from NGO/NPO efforts in terms of thought practice. In that way social entrepreneurship is higher concept considering it facilitates empowering people to create value than just generate facilities they can use. The difference is being enterprising.
Now how do social media come in to the picture of social entrepreneurship?
Social media in its truest essence works on wisdom of the crowd. You can involve and reach out to people beyond physical limitations. This will help build the knowledge pool of the social enterprise. So you can have your team split and half who sit in a different city, while the other can work at the grass root both catering to different departmental function. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Online mentoring, online volunteering, business alliances, the possibilities are endless.
You can reach out to newer markets for products and services developed from the initiative. Social media is essentially free and hence cost effective. Social media also powers interaction and hence knowledge sharing. It creates a new set of opportunities because now you are in the open and not restricted to geographical restrictions.
Tools For Social Entrepreneurs to Use
One can use video sharing very effectively in social entrepreneurship. Often due to the limited resource available, social enterprises can’t invest much into marketing. A video on Youtube about what the enterprise does, or what innovative product they have launched can spread awareness big time. It can attract investors, it can attract customers, it can help recruitment when people see a face and a demonstration of what you are upto. Heck it can even create awareness about social entrepreneurship itself. I for one came to know about it over a year back after watching social entrepreneur Mirai Chatterjee’s interview.
One can also use the powerful medium of blogs to engage people. Use it as a platform to showcase your products and services. Say you running a for profit educational venture in rural Orissa. Have stories of individual efforts and sacrifices each of them make to study while at the same time show how the business is creating value. Suppose you run a business which uses the local artisans to create magical artifacts, showcase them through a photoblog, make purchase available easy through the blog while also writing about how to use them effectively to gift or decorate. A lot of people blog about social entrepreneurship, engage with them because you share a common passion. Have a social entrepreneurship B-Plan contest if you want!
Facebook has 100 million users, Myspace has three times that. Those are huge numbers. Use social networks effectively to reach out to volunteers or recruits, and others interested in the social venture you establish. Seek out communities and groups that are related to your core business function and engage them. Use the platform to advertise and sell your product. Converse with them on the networking sites to get feedback and open new possibilities. Use bookmarking, use others’ blogs, use vblogs and podcasts to promote and advertise your products where you can also get feedback instead of a faceless audience in television and newspaper. I have written about how blogging and SNS can be used to propel social entrepreneurship on one of my blogs before.
The possibilities are endless and limited only by imagination.
Social entrepreneurship is fast growing popular and the opportunity in it is far beyond the buzz. Personally, I am of the opinion that growth in India will eventually move out of the big cities and happen in the rural confines of our country. I believe that the value waiting to be unlocked in our hinterlands is enormous. Of course social entrepreneurship doesn’t just mean you have to work in villages. It is about empowering the underprivileged wherever they might be.
I hope the two buzzwords of our time social media and social entrepreneurship work together and grow to completely alter the value chain and entrepreneurial eco system for the better.
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in a broad sense, google’s latest ‘ideas’ idea is also promoting social entrepreneurship…while writing on a similar topic, I think i came across a few other examples of social entrepreneurship- one by an organisation – philips, and another great effort – rang de.. (http://www.manuscrypts.com/brants/?p=381) the latter has a significant web component…