What does the growth of CarrotMob/Virgance indicate for the future of “for profit activism”?

It’s great to see the increasing attention and coverage of the initiatives behind Carrotmob/Virgance, as noted in The Economist on January 29th, 2009.

According to co-founder Steve Newcomb: ““I started looking at activism as a potential start-up industry”.  Right on Steve!

“Virgance’s role is to find campaigns that it can help to succeed through a four-pronged support strategy that Mr Newcomb says draws heavily on the way in which Barack Obama motivated and managed his activists.”

The four pronged support strategy includes a potent blend of:

• volunteer network on the ground level
• social networking initiatives
• word of web from blogosphere
• leveraging youtube as a distribution platform

“Carrotmob is suitable for paid sponsorship by firms that want cause-related branding,” according to the article.

Another option they’re exploring is creating a socially driven venture fund open to microinvestments–what an outstanding idea.

“Mr Newcomb says being a for-profit company enables it to grow faster and achieve more social impact than a non-profit, because it can afford to pay its employees competitive salaries and can raise capital from investors, rather than relying on donations.”

This reasoning makes sense, especially from a budding social entrepreneurs perspective.  Ironically, I’m in the middle of forming a legal entity and have toiled with for-profit vs. not for-profit.  It seems that the NFP format has failed to evolve with the market; it’s current structure is too limiting and cumbersome to serve the very goals it aims to achieve.  As a result, we’re about to enter a completely new space in American business: the for profit built on a foundation of social responsibility-a completely innovative hybrid of profit and social value.

In short, I believe that part of the solution to rebuilding our economy is to create more corporate transparency while re-establishing  corporate social virtues/intentions.  Trust is in very short supply and the next generation of start-ups that can address the inadequacies of the full-fledged profit based outfits that have been running the show (into the ground) for last era of business are poised to benefit as the tide turns.   The pendulum will swing back the other direction at an accelerated rate due in part to the networked effects of the web.

Some questions worthy of exploration include:

What other companies, outfits, initiatives, orgs, and people also share similar thoughts and outlooks?

Although this concept is relatively new to the US, are there other business cultures in other parts of the world that are also pioneering the cause?

This is a fascinating time to be in business.

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