Max Gladwell

OsoEco founders sit down for Max Gladwell’s first social entrepreneur interview.

Caroline Cummings (CEO) and Katie Wilson-Hamaker (President) are co-founders of OsoEco, a wiki-driven online community for healthy, sustainable living. They are innovative social entrepreneurs at the nexus of social media and green living. These are their seven questions.

1. How did the idea for OsoEco come about?

We were originally going to buy an existing green company. We spent nearly two years looking at various companies – organic food, organic personal care, organic baby clothing, natural home cleaning products, and biodynamic wine. We came to the realization that all five of these companies had a different idea of what they thought it meant to be green, healthy and sustainable. This inconsistency is how the idea of OsoEco came to fruition. If businesses with eco-friendly products and sustainable practices were confused, we knew that the greater consumer market would be even more confused – not to mention, feeling misled. Especially when there are new green products, green businesses, green Web sites, and green certifications entering the marketplace at rapid rates.

We wanted to build an online community where citizens can socially shop and socially research products, services and information with their peers – and with third-party trusted sources like Climate Counts, CSRwire, and Grist. We are currently enhancing tools on our site to allow citizens to research with one another. We’ll soon have a research widget that will allow citizens to quickly research the company behind the product and “take the search out of research” by using a widget called Hooze™.
Photo: Wilson-Hamaker, left; Cummings, right

2. What is the mission of the site?

The mission we share with investors is “to provide free interactive and educational tools that allow consumers to recognize their collective power as related to economic, social and environmental equity.”

We’re not all that thrilled about mission statements – especially since many of us here at OsoEco come from the corporate world and know they really don’t mean diddlysquat. We’re more a fan of mantras – like “making healthy choices easy to find and fun and rewarding to share.” Since we’re citizen driven, we intend on hosting a contest down the road where our members submit mantras they feel represent the heart of the community.

3. What type of user is OsoEco looking to attract during your soft beta launch?

This phase of beta is mainly about learning. We’re building OsoEco for citizens who like to find and share green/healthy solutions, and we want to make sure we’re building a site that is valuable to our users. We’re taking this soft launch approach because we want to make sure our site is truly citizen driven; so we need our community to contribute content, feedback, and shape the flow of the community. After we’ve populated enough valuable content we’ll then be prepared to launch OsoEco to a wider market interested in quickly finding green and healthy solutions. Think of Wikipedia – they have a very small portion of their user population that actually contributes and cites articles. The majority of the users that visit Wikipedia reap the benefit of the bulk of work developed by Wikipedia’s power user population. OsoEco is taking a similar approach in that we want our citizens to determine what the key personal and planetary health issues are – as opposed to OsoEco making that decision for them.

4. What types of social media technologies is OsoEco using?

We’re building OsoEco using Ruby on Rails. This allows us to quickly test and implement interactive technologies. Currently citizens can propose Eco Matters to the community, which allows them to propose eco dilemmas and offer healthy solutions. Citizens can also respond to the community’s Eco Matters by attaching Finds they’ve brought into the OsoEco community using our Add to OsoEco bookmarking tool. Our TAGriculture™ [see below] is also central to the social interactivity within the OsoEco community.

Citizens will soon be able to enhance their interactivity by following people they find to be influencers. Additionally, OsoEco’ers can follow the activity associated with products and Eco Matters they’re interested in tracking. There are several other social media tools in development that will allow our citizens to find, research, organize, rate, follow and share healthy solutions.

5. Tell us about the TAGriculture. Why is that so central to OsoEco?

TAGriculture is how our community will create a fertile ground for growing healthy solutions by assigning keyword tags to their Finds, Eco Matters, and blog entries. Tags on OsoEco are seen as the “seeds” that citizens plant throughout the community while other citizens benefit from the work completed around a given tag word. Citizens can use tags to organize their activity on OsoEco. This allows them to easily categorize and track their activity. Tagged items also make it that much easier to find people and topics of interest as well as allow others to find the items they’re interested in.

The TAGriculture page will evolve over time. The intention is to provide a quick view of all the activity that is occurring around a given tag. For example, citizens can find which members are the power users of a given tag or which Finds and Eco Matters have been tagged the most or which conversations are using a tag the most. Each Tag Detail page becomes an organic group about that tag word – where users of that tag can begin interacting about that tag through a community definition, wiki, tag leaders, showcased products, blogs, articles, and videos.

6. What is the business model? How do you plan to monetize OsoEco?

OsoEco’s philosophy for building a sustainable community is three-fold: prove our community, prove our revenue, and become profitable. This philosophy works well in a social shopping/social research community. The value of our social shopping and research site is our community’s influence, as well as our ability to deliver relevant content and marketing messages to citizens based on their interests and behavior. This direct marketing strategy will allow us to monetize our site and gain revenue through advertising and sponsorships.

7. We noticed everyone is reading Natural Capitalism on the “About Us” page. What’s the significance or message there?

Natural Capitalism is a must read by any business leader who wants to build a sustainable business and maintain a healthy competitive advantage. One of the authors, Paul Hawken, is seen as one of the early influential figures in the environmental movement. It’s a book our entire team has read and we recommend to others – especially those who want to read about how to shift business to focus on a triple bottom line business model – that is, one that positively impacts the economy, the environment and the communities in which we conduct business.

The message behind our photos is to communicate that we operate as a triple bottom line business – and have fun while doing it.

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