Celitronica
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
FUTURO BOLIVIA - Envisioning a better future
Now, however, starts a new cycle in FUTURO's life. The son of the main lady that was in charge of the project together with my mom, is working with me trying to make FUTURO a sustainable micro-enterprise capable of generating income and providing fair employment opportunities for even more women in the city of La Paz. Specifically, FUTURO's vision and mission are as follows:
Vision:
- To strengthen the social and economic development of each member of Futuro and their families through an improved and guaranteed access to health and education services.
- To become an entity of economic cooperation for patients in the Hospital de la Mujer with low resources by paying for their medical expenses.
- To become a self-sustained microenterprise with the goal of creating new jobs for people with scarce resources and to push the economic and social development of Bolivia forward through the manufacturing and sale of innovating and high quality products.
- To allocate a percentage of the income generated to the Hospital de la Mujer.
- To introduce the work of Bolivian artisans to both local and foreign consumers.
Specially now in the times of the groundswell, when there is an infinity of (free) online tools that can help you make your brand everyone's brand. I've learned quite a bit in this Social Media Marketing class about how to use the web to increase visibility of one's projects and this is an attempt to apply my new knowledge into something that I care about. So, let me get started.
Our website (that we actually paid quite a bit of money for) is quite nice, but there are some minor mistakes that haven't been taken care of and I don't think anyone really knows that we have a website. So, I went ahead and used Weebly to edit our website. Fortunately, Weebly allows users to keep its website domain so I could keep the domain we had paid for: www.futurobolivia.com.


Much better, right? (Also, bear in mind that this new website is still work in progress! It takes so much more than I thought to create a cool website...).
Within the groundswell one cannot forget that customers' opinion is the most important element of success for which both Twitter and Facebook are crucial. In her blog post on this topic, Trista reminds us that it's not longer an A+B conversation and that it is soo important to listen and to respond to what the customers have to say.
I went ahead and created both a facebook and a twitter account for Futuro. And although it is too early to really see the impact of these accounts, I have no doubt that my newly acquired social media monitoring skills I will have no problem assessing the progress that we make online. So far, there is only 3 people "liking" the site and only one comment (from my brother...) but you got to start with something. I'm sure at some point in time Lady Gaga also only had 3 "likes", right? The class has also taught me a lot about how to make your online media presence more effective: we all made recommendations about what to do for an improved online presence so I will refer to those as much as I can.


A cool thing that I did was to link Futuro's facebook and twitter accounts (still trying to figure out how good of a strategy this is) so that my Twitter accounts gets the updates I have on my facebook account.

I've also created a blog because it is important to create rich content that people can benefit from. As part of my new Weebly website, I can create a blog to keep our users updated and share about some more in-depth insights with them. I still haven't posted anything but I'm hoping that in the future I will be able to generate some interesting content on the following topics, among many others that I can think of:
- Personal stories of the people involved in the project
- The history and tradition of Bolivian textiles
- Our progress (including difficulties and problems to be as transparent as possible)
- The phenomenon of social entrepreneurship
- The situation of working class women and their families in Bolivia
- Collaborations with designers and similar organizations
There is a multiplicity of factors that I have not been able to cover on this blog because of time and space limitations. However, there are a bunch of things that I would like to touch on in my presentation in class next week. I'm going to go a little bit more into detail about the interesting things that I learned by using Weebly, creating a Facebook account for an organization that means to use the account for more than socializing purposes, and more about this experience of creating an new image for FUTURO.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
It's not as easy as it seems

KIVA, the first online micro-lending platform in the world, knows exactly what I'm talking about. For this blog post, I'm going to be focusing on how it is that KIVA's staff is developing its capacity to keep up with the ever changing challenges that the Web 2.0 brings about while also exploring how they deal with the controversies present in contemporary micro-finance debates.
One of the things that I didn't get to write about in my last blog about KIVA, was its facebook page. There is much being said nowadays about the importance of using facebook as a (free) marketing tool with endless capacity to reach fans around the world (Mashable's facebook week is a great example of this...they have a bunch of great ideas, check it out!). This is what KIVA's facebook looks like:

While most of the comments are positive, I came across a couple of negative ones...and unfortunately, did not see KIVA addressing them! Very unusual for a marketing staff that usually gets things right. For example, a very angry user posted the following:

Nevertheless, on their facebook page there were a couple of instances in which users posing difficult questions were ignored...only when users post about how to make a loan does KIVA respond...That to me, seems like they are "shouting", rather than embracing a main tenement of the groundswell which is to talk, converse with the audience. This, therefore, would be my recommendation # 1 for KIVA: read chapter 6 of the Groundswell and apply the concepts presented therein.
Another analysis that I did of KIVA's facebook page was based on the tips given by mashable (yeah, my obsession with mashable is now fully disclosed). In this article, mashable provides a breakdown of elements of a successful facebook page. Does KIVA have these elements? Well, sort of. I looked at a few of them.

First element, networking with other sites: building a large following requires a network of other platforms, working in conjunction to drive visitors to your fan page ( your organization's website). Unfortunately, KIVA's main website does not have a link to its facebook page. Second element, creating a resource: use the information as added value to have consumers

Fourth element, targeting the proper demographic. Let's not forget that understanding the demographic present can help you decide if Facebook is worth it for your business. The mashable article describes how based on data from Quantcast, a tool that allows one to estimate the demographics of a site (among other things), Facebook's users skew towards female youths...53% of users have kids...a majority make over $60k a year salary... 50% are college kids. But I was interested in looking at age:
One of the things I'm really curious about is how KIVA is dealing with some of its users concerns about the high interest rate of the loans disbursed by the MFIs that they work with. My attention was caught by KIVA's response following a New York Times article that called out MFI's for making a profit by charging high interest rates. Interestingly, Premal Shal posted a whole article in response providing what I found to be a really helpful Q&A section about the questions raised in the NYT article and particularly about the MFI, LAPO, featured in it. I found this an important response by KIVA, a good way of addressing the issues that can make its users mistrust the organization. It seems that KIVA understands the challenges of high interest rates, but they try to make the users understand that they are trying their best.

I also went on KIVA's new online forum, KIVA friends, to check out if there was some fuzz in there about interest rates and wasn't all that surprised to see a thread that read like this:
Topic: MFI's Extortionate Interest Rates ... up to 58% ! (Read 16296 times)
And, yeah, it was read 16,296 times! This means that KIVA is providing lenders to access a platform in which they can discuss any issues that are relevant to their experience with the organization. Even if they might be fed up with people complaining about high interest rates for borrowers, they are ready to listen to what people have to say.
They are also on board with the whole WIKI revolution. The have their own KIVApedia site, look:

On my previous blog about KIVA I wrote about KIVA's great response to concerns about transparency. I found another blog that describes the issue a bit more in depth and draws this very important lesson that describes that KIVA is in many ways, doing a good job in terms of its social marketing work. The author of the blog "Beyond Profit" states that when there is some problem "it really matters how you clean up the mess you have created. And Kiva did it with the utmost dignity. Kiva may have erred in its self-representation, but at the end of the day, they handled the criticism admirably. They have changed their communication to improve clarity for donors and have taken a proactive approach to rebuild trust with lenders". In class we discussed the importance of being open and transparent when issues come up...and it seems that KIVA handled what could have otherwise been a PR disaster really well.
What is more, I came across this really helpful powerpoint presentation by Premal Shal, KIVA's co-founder and current president:
Shal talks about how KIVA embraces 4 main tenants of the Web 2.0 principles:
- Create an "addictive" user experience
- Be "radically transparent"
- "Crowdsource" against constraints
- Build in "increasing returns on data"
- How and why to make sure users stay engaged. Addicted.
- Why is openness important (PR strategies). Why trust matters. A lot.
- Networking, partnering, sharing resources...more important than ever.
- Measure your success...and use it to be even more successful.
So far it seems that the organization is still the most successful one at what it does. Increasingly, however, others are copying its model. For example, Vittana is taking a similar approach to helping fund education in developing countries by allowing you to lend directly to students in the developing world. As other organization's emerge, it will be crucial to see how KIVA differentiates itself from them. Of course, being the organization that revolutionized the microfinance world they have a head start. But given that things nowadays change at a very fast pace, KIVA will have to work hard to ensure that it's place as the world's largest online lending platform remains untouched.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
"The groundswell is about to become embedded within every activity of our lives"
Chapter 11 describes the opportunity that lies ahead of businesses to make use of social media tools to advance their goals. The chapter focuses on the premise that a company's development is everyone's task and that listening to what employees have to say does not only keep employees satisfied, but it also can help the company be more successful. An example that was brought up in the chapter and that I believe we had discussed briefly in class already, is Best Buy's Blue Nation initiative which is an internal social network for employees of the electronics super store. The following video shows the reasoning process that Best Buy went through in order to put this initiative together and explains how it works and what are some of the positive things that came out of it.
Best Buy: The Company As Wiki from peter hirshberg on Vimeo.
The idea is to use social media tools and technologies to foster improved internal communications (without a doubt, as Li and Bernoff show us, one of the most effective activations of social media in the enterprise). There is no doubt that (especially) for large organizations, tapping into the underground conscience of the company through open feedback from employees has changed the culture of running a business. It's provides a great opportunity to keep your staff satisfied, engaged, motivated and contributing to the creative process so that the company can create a better product that is better suited for the public - and therefore that can have better profit margins. Other companies initiatives include creating wikis for their employees to share information relevant to the company's operations such as Intelpedia.



There is no doubt that the groundswell has reached every single aspect of our lives. Things are different now...and those that don't realize it will be left behind. A great example of this is the SuperMarmite idea which allows people to post the meal that they are cooking so that neighbors can come enjoy the food therefore creating a nice community, sharing resources, and doing something different. Rather than buying some cheap, nasty fast food, or microwaving a meal for yourself, using this website can guide you to someone else's kitchen or can help you meet people by inviting them to your place. Check out the video of the young French creator of SuperMarmite and learn more about this great idea...I loved it! What do you think ?
Monday, March 14, 2011
Social Media Monitoring Assigment: Kiva - Loans that change lives

But let's start with the beginning first, and then we will move on to more complicated issues.
First question: How does KIVA work?
Following the premise that small business entrepreneurs' access to credit can help eradicate poverty, Kiva.org makes use of the powerful tool of the internet to allow users to take a personal,very engaged step to help someone else across the globe. Through their website, one can review specific projects and entrepreneurs that one wants to support, and agree to give money that will go to the micro-entrepreneur of one's choice. The money (starting with $25 loans) lent will not earn any dividend for the lender, but will be used by a micro finance institution (MFI) to make a loan to the micro-entrepreneur (with interest rates serving to cover capital costs for the MFI in the country where the micro-entrepreneur resides).
Since its launch in 2005, KIVA has enabled lenders to fund over 564,410 micro-entrepreneurs in approximately 58 countries making this a total of $199M in loans to be distributed through 126 KIVA field partner MFIs with a 98.60% Repayment rate and the help of 450 volunteers around the world. On their website, KIVA explains users how the process of lending across the globe works:


In particular, I appreciated the input
from two users: MikeScalora


Going over what's out there about KIVA on Flickr seems to indicate that KIVA's users are active and engage on the picture-sharing online community. The next question, however, would be...what are people saying about KIVA? To answer to this question, I opened a new tab and typed in what might be one of the most commonly used words now a days: Twitter.


Graph # 1 Graph # 2


KIVA, in this regard, is not doing all that great. According to the data collected by Tweeteffect, KIVA is losing more followers than it is gaining new ones. Bummer. Check it out:

While this quantitative analysis is important and useful (particularly for KIVA's social media marketing staff...) I was also curious about what people were saying about KIVA on Twitter. My search on February 19th showed some interesting results. Especially, people being excited about their loans through KIVA. Here are a couple of examples of what people were saying about their experience:


What I found even more fascinating was that some people were encouraging ohter Twitter users to follow them (on Twitter) and if they reached a certain number of followers....they would make a loan through KIVA themselves! I thought that was an original idea: encourage people to follow you by telling them that you will do something positive if they do so (and at the same time, helping yourself stay engaged and motivated for your social media/social good endeavors!).
@EPicolotto, for example, did this.

Using TweetStats, I was able to see that, indeed, on International Women's Days, KIVA had more activity on its site

Another tool I used to get a better understanding of KIVA's presence on the web is Social Mention, a website that searches "for content from across the universe" to provide information about the consistency with which a name/brand/organization is mentioned on the web.

This information is updated continuously and therefore provides a good idea of how KIVA, in this case, is doing.
Other graphs help us illustrate the case better, such as this the sh

I figured that getting a real understanding of KIVA's presence on the web also entailed looking a little more in depth into what people are saying about it. While Twitter is not bad at all as measure of their online activity, there is definitively another tool to understand what people think about KIVA: blogs.
Using two blog search tools, Google Blog Search and IceRocket (which is also useful for finding news, images, videos etc.) I came across a couple of interesting blogs. While there were many that had insightful comments about KIVA and the microfinance world in general, I mostly enjoyed reading the Technbiz's blog, which is why I would like to share it with you.
In his blog, Paramendra Bhagat (who, by the way, is followed by over 2,000 people and over 40,000 followers on Twitter, and has been writing extensively since 2005) goes into contemporary debates on microfinance. His blog post "Microfinance: no substitute for good governance" touches on important aspects of microfinance. What's more, he endorses KIVA's work by stating the following:
Microfinance is not the only tool with which to cure poverty. And it might or might not be the best tool. But poverty is a big enough and complex enough problem that we have to throw all tools at our disposal. Microfinance is one of those tools. It just so happens to be the tool of choice for me. I believe that you can deliver revolutionary poverty alleviation through for profit, high tech microfinance.In another blogpost (he writes quite a lot about KIVA and microfinance) he states:
"I am a huge fan of Kiva They went from raising $5 million five years ago to raising over $100 million last year and are projected to raise close to a billion dollars in five years. But that would still be a drop in the ocean. Global poverty is no small challenge".His real passion for microfinance, however, comes out in a blog post where he questions why it is that KIVA doesn't operate in India (I think he's originally from there). He posts the question that Matt Flannery, one of KIVA's founders, responded to on Quora, an online space for people to post and answer questions:

Baghat isn't really satisfied with the answer, however. He posts that he "just sent an email to my top microfinance contacts in India asking her to look into the "license to transact debt capital cross border" thing that Matt Flannery, one of the founders of Kiva has raised in a Quora thread". He's definitely invested...I don't know what happened to that but I'm sort of curious. I'll definitely will let you know if I read anything else.
The organization also has blogs of its own -a rather complete array of blogs: blogs with updates from the organization, from fellows working in the field, from partners around the world, loan updates, and one can even see loan updates from borrowers in one's own portfolio (i.e. updates from the loans one has made). I think KIVA provides an interesting set of updates in their blogs - you can find them here if you want to learn more about them:

With 92 comments spurring an intense debate on this blog post, plus more controversy in other social media sites (including a couple hundred tweets, several other blog posts elsewhere, 10,000 hits to the original post), Roodman got a response that he perhaps wasn't expecting. He got a personal reply from Matt Flannery, but most importantly he got KIVA to revise their website.
First of all, KIVA updated the old diagram (the very simple one) to the more complicated one I posted at the beginning of this post and also added an entire section of its website dedicated to helping users understand how exactly KIVA works, including this video:
How Kiva Works from Kiva Microfunds on Vimeo.
In addition to that, KIVA also upgraded its website which got a lot of kudos from online users. The new website's main portal looks like this:

Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Darius Goes West

I was so inspired and curious by the video that I went ahead to find their website. Going over it, I realized that the Darius Goes West team was a great example of an organization that makes use of social media tools to advance its goals. This is precisely what this blog is about: studying how non-profit organizations benefit from the Groundswell to fulfill their purposes. The next step seems obvious: I used the knowledge gained in class to analyze, more in depth, the different ways in which the Darius Goes West organization uses social media. So fascinating.
The first thing that came to my mind when I opened the website was that it was full of gadgets. One can watch videos of very diverse things, such as Darius playing guitar and singing, or, of course, a trailer of the movie. One can also look at the recent updates posted by the organization and follow their blog posts (e.g. Darius's birthday celebration).

Or, one can "like" Darius Goes West on facebook (which an impressive 16,671 people did, including me!).Of course, there is also a link for making a donation or for buying merchandise. The power of visual communication, through pictures but most importantly through videos, is a key feature of the Groundswell. And this organization seems to have a good understanding of this: throughout the website one can find short, well-done videos.
With all these gadgets, the organization is making sure that the visitors stays engaged, a key aspect to making social media marketing successful. What is more, the organization encourages visitors to get involved and take action. For example, users are encouraged to host a screening of the movie. Or educators can receive a copy of the DVD for free to spread the message to their students. But, what I found the coolest, was that users have the opportunity to skype with Darius. That can be the ultimate experience for users. What's even coolest about this, is that Darius will skype with those who are able to have have a computer (duh!), make a skype account (duh!), but most importantly each skype group has to raise $100 to get to skype with Darius. Isn't that a great way to motivate users to be engaged? I thought it was brilliant. When clicking on the "skype with Darius" link, this very well-done video pops-up:
After visiting the website and learning about the organization and Darius's life and can help to feel hopeful for the infinity of options that the new social media phenomenon opens to the non-profit world. Kudos to the Darius Goes West team for embracing the Groundswell.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
When the customer becomes the designer and the tweeter the revolutionary


This is a perfect example of how a company is, using Li and Bernoff's words, embracing the Groundswell. They have also put up a video on Youtube about the IdeaStorm which has been watched by 13,461 people.
Not bad at all for one of DellVlog's 1,015 videos, right? Interestingly enough, one of the ideas posted on IdeaStorm is to encourage Dell to change it's website. This exemplifies what we have been talking about and what Li and Bernoff don't seem to get tired of telling us: the customer is driving the process of change. If a customer, in this case, iamnotjamesh thinks the website - a tool that he uses very much as a consumer - is not up to his standards then Dell opens up the opportunity for him to share these concerns. Dell knows that there may be many more iamnotjameshes that can benefit from a new website as well...therefore making sales go up and customers happy.


