Providing a springboard

‘Providing a springboard for women entrepreneurs in India’ is what the official Google blog reads. Srpingboard is what you will find once you get a hold of what the Google’s Women Entrepreneurs on the Web (WEOW) programme has to offer.After a relatively simple, online form fill up here www.womenentrepreneursontheweb.com, you are taken through a few steps like the moderator’s approval to use the services and then joining the Google group.What might bug a few of the ‘new-to-social-media’ women who have sworn against Facebook is that the service uses Google+ (Google’s answer to Facebook) to give out information about its services and arrange ‘Hangouts’. “The programme is open to women entrepreneurs of all levels and skill-sets. For those who’ve never been online, we’ll help them build an online presence, show them the basics of maintaining their presence and take them through the rest of the programme once they are ready for it. The goal of the programme is to bring women entrepreneurs online and help them build their businesses with the available tools,” said a Google spokesperson.The Google+ page of the website has plenty examples of how the women have soaked up the entire process to max out benefits from it. The jargon mentioned above are simplified through the programme. Weeks within applying for the programme, one of the Google representative approaches the entrepreneur and walks them through the various essentials.“The programme is a 5-circle approach. It starts with building an online presence and moves towards collaborating effectively, connecting with customers, promoting their organisations to then tracking and optimising their online presence,” explained the Google spokesperson.The good part, the service is completely free and the only expense incurred will the domain charges, if at all one finds the need to buy one. The one bug may be the use of social media for enhancing the services. But one always has the option to filter in the people they want to interact with. And after interacting with the colourful array of ideas and the passion of the women entrepreneurs, one will be hard to resist to keep going back. The programme is open only for women entrepreneurs of India.