The second session for the day focused on inviting Women Entrepreneurs across the globe to participate in a Workshop Session by Google’s Women Entrepreneurs on the Web team. The session was presided over by Ms. Pooja Srinivas, Manager, Product Quality Operations & Project lead, WeOW India.

The session started with a quick overview of the WeOW programs, its methodology, aims and objectives. The program was initiated by GOOGLE earlier this year in January with the aim to create awareness among women entrepreneurs about the mediums to connect with their customers. The program aims at providing tools to the women entrepreneurs so that they can make their enterprises more effective with the given resources and efforts.

Ms. Pooja Srinivas started this workshop session among an audience of 50+ women entrepreneurs & shared that the approach they have adopted in this program is called the ‘5-Circle Approach’. The first circle is “to build your online presence”. This is the very foundation stone of the program. As the name suggests this part helps you build effective online presence, including a website, a social networking page such as on Facebook and a video channel. Now one question from audience was that why they need online presence? Especially when they have niche audience & so their market is very confined or small. Query was logical, but WeOW team was all set to have this. Ms. Pooja shared a very relevant video of Ms. Archana Doshi, started with a simple blog to share recipes of her mother. Obviously a small initiative if compared to Market but she tried to enhance the online presence using the same concept and now, is a proud owner of a catering business, offers online classes and runs a video channel for those who are interested in making vegetarian dishes.

She continues to share the second circle “collaborate effectively”. In today’s scenario your contractors, customers, suppliers etc. need not be concentrated in one geographical location hence it becomes quite necessary to collaborate with them effectively. Program acquaints its participants on how they can collaborate better with documents, presentations and other milestones of the project. She explained ways that can be used to collaborate with the other stakeholders of the company and in the same regard highlighted features such as Google Docs and Google Hangout; a video chat application and provided details.

Further she explained that the third circle “how do you connect with your customers”. To demonstrate this she present a picture of school in Hyderabad whose students were interacting on a video chat with a doctor in New York. It is needless to say that our next generation is going to be much more tech savvy than us. This step is very important because out present customer base is already online. They are looking constantly at the mobile and other Digital tools to explore the various opportunities thus it is important that we too are online to cater to their needs.

The next circle is concerned with “promoting your business”. One can easily understand that this segment tells you about both free and paid versions to promote your organization and more importantly which medium is more suitable for you to promote your business. She used another video to demonstrate this. The video demonstrated as how the Tanjore arts were preserved by using Google Ad words as a promotional tool. And the last circle was about “tracking and optimizing”. Whenever we put any advertisement we are keen to know its effect in terms of how much customers took notice of that ad and how much sales we received as a result of it. This calls for the need of tracking and optimizing. This proves to be an effective tool for measuring the success of your online presence and also the virility of your product or business.

She also discussed basic tools that can be used for tracking and optimizing. (Please check Video)

Ms. Srinivas then asked audience to put up their queries about the WeOW concept & broad outline covered in 5 circle theories. The questions were variety including how to reach the correct audience, starting from- how to create a very specialized website and even how to reach your prospective customer if they are somehow not very active online. The workshop session started to gather momentum through this wonderful interaction. Ms. Pooja gave a deep thought & attention to understand the queries and giving relevant solutions. Although she said & audience would agree that ‘one hour training’ could not solve all the issues & queries but she assured that she will try to respond to all of the audience queries. For the ones, WeOW team did not respond they request the audience to take some nuggets of wisdom and try all the helpful points and apply them to their own website. This hands-on experience will definitely help them to understand the concept better & in case of any issues they can get back to WeOW team (weowindia@google.com) on how further it can be improved.

People believe that having only a website or a social networking page or having a video channel is enough for claiming their online presence, but usually it’s the other way round. People need a comprehensive online strategy and they should better focus on including all of the elements mentioned above in 5 circle theory. In this workshop Ms. Srinivas detailed out the basic dos and don’ts for ‘creating a website’ and analyzing the right time to launch it. Audience has also been guided that website navigation is important; website should offer the clarity of action so that the customers know where they can find their relevant content once they reach the website’s homepage. Similar insights were shared for creating a social networking page and video channels.