Social media

While I believe that many marketing fundamentals remain the same, there is no denying that in the fast-paced social media marketing world, you need to keep your wits about you to stay on top of the game.

Here are my top five social media trends from the past couple of months:

1. Social is mobile

For some time Facebook has been saying that it is fast becoming a mobile company. And the latest stats show that more than half of its 900 million odd users access the network with a mobile device. In South Africa, according to Social Bakers, 80.5 percent of 4.6 million SA Facebookers are mobile, while in Nigeria slightly more, 81.5 percent of 4.3 million users, are mobile. This is hardly surprising, seeing as we are such a mobile-only continent.

Indeed, according to the latest stats from research house World Wide Worx, 7.9 million of South Africa’s 8.5 million internet users go online using their cellphones. 2.48 Million only ever use a cellphone. Smartphone users are forecast to rise to 11 million + in 2012, from 8.5 million today.

What is surprising though, is that according to its IPO documents, Facebook has not earned any revenue from mobile. To be sure, the mobile Facebook user experience is not the best, and has no advertising or application integration. But it is likely, especially after a raft of acquisitions in the mobile space – notably Instagram earlier this year – that Facebook will be upping the ante when it comes to mobile and making money from mobile.

2. Business links up

Businesses have discovered LinkedIn – especially the financial services, recruitment and property sectors, based on the requests I have received to link up. But they could do better. While pretty much all connections on LinkedIn have some sort of professional networking element to them, I usually have met the person or it is very clear why they are wanting to connect: we’re in the same industry, for instance. More recently, there seems to be a very passive trend emerging, where the estate agent, finance advisor or recruitment agent doesn’t bother to explain why they are wanting to connect and never engages again, which seems like a bit of a waste of time. I’d suggest these online networkers would do better to browse the Q&A section of LinkedIn, where they can actively engage with a potential customer by answering a question or providing information and so building a relationship. Another good resource is Quora, a dedicated question and answer site, is starting to be used more often in South Africa.

3. Brands get pinning

Thanks to its integration into Facebook, Pinterest has grown by leaps and bounds this year. And where there is a gathering of consumers sharing their likes and preferences – as they are doing on this social network organised around shared online pinboards – brands following very soon. Some brands, such as Yuppie Chef in South Africa, are getting this right. But others, based on the communal groans that seem to be coming from the Pinterest fan corner, too many are getting it wrong.

4. Brands are slowly starting to close the loop

Social media campaigns are starting to move beyond generating “likes” and retweets for their own sake, to actually generating sales in the real world. One competition which has just started using the Evly platform on Facebook asks customers to enter by sharing a recipe using a certain type of Spekko rice, along with a photo of the dish and the rice. Unfortunately however, there seems to be little integration across the marketing teams – my local supermarket didn’t have the specific rice in stock, and there was no point of sale tie in to the Facebook competition. It will be interesting to see the results of the campaign, but one suspects these could be improved with some real world tie in.

5. QR codes and location services

The trend here is that we continue to see little take up of either of these services, which seem to fit so well with both social and mobile. There was a brief flurry of excitement amongst SA social media commentators in May around a clever QR code campaign launched by Guinness, but it doesn’t seem likely this will be launched locally any time soon, if at all. To be fair, QR codes are starting to creep onto the backs of wine labels and other consumables, but really as little more than a clever way to provide more information about the product. I’m hoping there is more to come from both these technologies.

This article was first published on African Business Review

Kony 2012, the campaign started by US-based NGO Invisible Children to stop Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, serves as a reminder that in the bright and shiny new social media world, we shouldn’t forget the basics.

Kony 2012. Depending on your point of view, anything from the most skillfully executed viral campaign in history, mobilising people across the planet to demand governments do something about the world’s most wanted man; to a dangerous example of modern-day internet-powered colonialism, perpetuating the helpless African myth to further self-serving ambitions and arrogantly disregarding the voice of the people supposedly being helped.

This has already been discussed very eloquently by people far more qualified than me to comment on the complexities and dynamics of the Kony 2012 campaign. Writing in the week after “Cover the Night” – the culmination of the campaign – it strikes me that there are a number of important lessons that marketers can learn from this online sensation. And, ironically, most of them are to do with not forgetting good marketing and communication practices, irrespective of the medium you are using.

1.       Audio-visual is the key to something going viral.

But, this applies primarily to developed markets with fast, affordable bandwidth. Ironically, only around 2 percent of Ugandans have internet access, so viewed the video en masse in makeshift cinemas, and certainly were unable to forward it.

2.       Viral doesn’t come from nowhere

There seems to be a perception that the holy grail of a campaign going viral springs from nowhere. In fact, as Kony 2012 demonstrates, an awful lot of planning, budget and an already mobilised community goes into creating an “overnight success”. Reports put the production budget for the first Kony 2012 video – at the time of writing seen almost 88.5 million times on YouTube alone – at $1 million. In addition, this video was seeded into a US-wide community of church and college-goers, who had been primed to be receptive to the message.

3.       Viral goes nowhere without real-life organisation

By all accounts the “Cover the Night” event, which was intended to make Kony famous by plastering posters of him all over major cities, was at best a damp squib according to most news reports. While personally I only saw a single Kony banner in Cape Town, the Mother City event was singled out by Invisible Children as a success – possibly thanks to 18-year-old Michel Comitis picking up the baton and running with it – at his own expense.

4.       Do your homework

As any events organiser can tell you – check out the date you have chosen for any potential conflicts. In Invisible Children’s case, “Cover the Night” fell on the anniversary of the Atiak massacre in northern Uganda by Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA); the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday; and the informal celebration of “Weed Day”. If this was intentional it was an insensitive, problematic and bizarre choice; if unintentional it was arrogant and sloppy.

5.       You only get 15 minutes of fame

Invisible Children’s idea was to make Joseph Kony famous. They probably meant infamous or notorious – but the differences between these are becoming increasingly blurred in today’s celebrity culture. Nonetheless, fame is a fickle mistress and quickly moves on to the big thing – the follow up Kony video has only received just under two million views on YouTube. In an unfortunate double whammy Jason Russell of Invisible Children, the director and “star” of Kony 2012, exacerbated the situation by becoming the next big thing with his peculiar and very public breakdown.

6.       If you start a conversation, you need to finish it

Even if it doesn’t go the way you planned. Invisible Children started off handling questions and critiques well, especially when it came to funding, with a dedicated web page and some slick infographics. Unfortunately however some of the feedback became ranty and emotional, which is neither helpful nor attractive.

7.       Be humble

From Russell single-handedly saving the world on behalf of his little boy, to Invisible Children’s lack of acknowledgement of other organisations’ efforts to stop Kony and improve the lives of those affected, to an arrogant assumption that a military solution was the only option – the Kony campaign displayed very little humility. Marketers can learn that humbleness at the outset can stand you in good stead when things start to wobble.

 

8.       Don’t only have one ace up your sleeve

So “Cover the Night” wasn’t the success it set out to be. However a campaign is seldom a slam-dunk affair and usually the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts. Unfortunately, apart from sketchy details about a pledge event at the United Nations in June and no details at all about something happening in November, there is not much left to hold people’s attentions.

9.       The internet is global

The general response to the Kony 2012 campaign in Uganda seems to be unease, offence and anger. While Invisible Children might have set out to create a campaign aimed at mobilising people in the developed world it was inevitably going to reach the people of Uganda – despite the limited access to the internet in the country. The arrogance of Invisible Children speaking on the behalf of Ugandans aside, several commentators have pointed out that Kony 2012 was perceived by the people it was supposed to help in the same way a campaign encouraging New Yorkers to wear t-shirts emblazoned with Osama bin Laden’s face would be.

This article was first published by African Business Review

 

What would you do if you had a cool $1 billion in spare change lying around? Well if you are Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, you snap up Instagram, the 15-month-old social networking/photo sharing/mobile phenomenon and its 30 million users.

This was only days after Android users had finally been able to access the service thanks to the newly launched Android app. I was quickly getting addicted to the various filters you can apply to your pics as well as the ability to tag your images and then browse through related pics from all over the world.

So I didn’t feel any of the rage and frustration that the die-hard iPhone users felt at the announcement that Instagram was now part of the Facebook family. (I guess the iPhone users were also still reeling from the shock of us low-brow Android users moving into the neighbourhood .)

Within hours people were announcing that they were moving their pics off Instagram before Facebook ruined the service. I for one think that Facebook is far too clever to mess with such a simple, elegant and well-liked service. But whenever Facebook’s name crops up, you do need to stop and think about privacy, if only because the social networking site seems to own so much information about individuals already.

CNET quoted Chris Conley, an attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, as saying: “Part of the concern is that it’s Facebook. And their history of privacy and respecting user choices is mixed.”

“The larger issue to me is that Facebook is adding Instagram data to its own,” said Ryan Calo, a privacy researcher at Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, in the same CNET article. “Instagram users thought they were signing up for a simple service, of relatively little utility to advertisers or government. Now that data is likely to be combined with an entire social graph. I picture the consumer happily paddling down a data rivulet only to find themselves suddenly on the open waters of the social sea.”

Like I said, I’ve quickly become a big fan of Instagram for a couple of reasons, but mostly because it seems to make the world a smaller place. For example, I tagged my picture above with words like #coriander, #lime and #chilli. Then I could click on those tags and see pics from other people all around the world posting similar photos. See something you like, take a look at that person’s Instagram stream, follow another tag, and before you know it you’ve been viewing the most amazing photography from Tokyo to Tulsa.

But, if a picture says a thousand words, we need to tread carefully around what we share. A smartphone and a camera can be a disastrous combination – what seems like an hilarious idea at the time, can backfire very quickly.

So what should parents, and any Instagram user, for that matter, consider if they want to stay safe online?

Read the rest of this blog post on the Mobiflock site.

Africa and mobile technology are a match made in heaven. Mobile technology has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to leapfrog traditional, and poorly implemented, wired telecommunications to be able to communicate over vast distances. Add in to the mix the necessity to find innovative ways to get around constraints, plus the MacGyver-ish ability to take bits and pieces of one thing and build something else, and it’s not surprising that so many mobile inventions have come out of the continent.

Here are the top five mobile inventions we recommend you take a look at:

1. M-Pesa

   Even though M-Pesa had a pretty disappointing start in South Africa, with only around 100 000 registrations in its first nine months, it definitely ranks up there as one of Africa’s top mobile inventions, and has been deployed as far afield as Afghanistan and Fiji. M-Pesa was launched by the former CEO of Kenyan mobile operator Safaricom, Michael Joseph, in 2007. Today, 15 million of Safaricom’s 17.5 million subscribers use the system to transfer US$700-million per month, according to Joseph, speaking before the 5th Annual Mobile Banking and Emerging Application Summit.M-Pesa gives people who do not have bank accounts and previously only dealt in cash a way to safely and cost-effectively transfer money via their mobile phones. Safaricom, in partnership with Kenya’s Equity Bank, also allows customers to earn interest on M-Pesa balances.

2. Fundamo

   Mobile banking golden child, Fundamo, announced a cool US$110 million (R750 million) acquisition by Visa this month. The company, founded by Hannes van Rensburg, ex-Sanlam CIO, in Cape Town’s northern suburbs, provides mobile banking infrastructure to mobile operators and financial institutions.Like M-Pesa, Fundamo proves that cellphones are key to providing banking services to the large number of people around the world who don’t qualify for, or have access to, a bank account. Fundamo has more than 50 active mobile financial service deployments in more than 40 countries around the world, including 27 in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. These deployments currently have five million registered subscribers, and have the potential, the company says, to reach in excess of 180 million people.

3.  MXit

   Arguably the bane of many parents’ lives, MXit, founded in Stellenbosch, South Africa in 2003, is the free online instant messenger and social networking platform that allows users to instant message via a cellphone at a fraction of the cost of a text message. For a small fee, as well as your data charges, users can also buy goods such as wallpapers and ringtones, or have conversations in the MXit chat rooms.User numbers are tricky to pin down, but are understood to be in the region of 10 million active unique users and 25 million registered users — primarily in South Africa, but also in Indonesia and other countries around the world. Increasingly marketers, educators and professionals in the healthcare industry are realising that MXit is an effective way of reaching the youth and young adult market. Next on the cards for MXit is a mobile wallet in partnership with wiWallet to allow purchases of larger items such as airtime, electricity and retail goods.

4. Ushahidi

   Ushahidi was born during the Kenyan election riots in 2007, when blogger Juliana Rotich wanted a way to allow people on the ground to report on violence, with the information primarily being captured by cell phone. Since then the Ushahidi team has built a powerful platform that captures information during a crisis, and displays it on a map to allow emergency services and other parties to get a crowdsourced view of what is happening.It was recently used as quickly as two hours after the Japanese earthquake earlier this year to identify locations where people might be trapped, dangerous areas, and the location of food and water supplies. Ushahidi has been used around the world during both political and natural crises in the USA, Haiti, Libya and India, amongst others.

5. JamiiX

   Another messaging platform, JamiiX grew out of a mobile instant messaging service used to counsel teenagers affected by drugs, alcohol addiction, and HIV in the Cape Flats area of Cape Town. The JamiiX platform was developed by South African, Marlon Parker, to effectively manage multiple mobile chat and mobile social networks streams. It allows eight counsellors to have 300 instant messaging (IM) conversations in one hour, massively increasing their ability to assist those who need help.It was released for third party use in 2010, and the WHO (World Health Organisation) has deployed JamiiX, in conjunction with MXit, in Indonesia to aid communications after natural disasters. Deployments are also underway in Nigeria and Malaysia.

First published on Vomo.

So the sky didn’t fall in after all, nor have we reverted to drawing on the cave walls with charcoal, or sending each other messages with smoke signals since Steve Jobs’ retirement as Apple’s chief executive last month.

Instead, let’s all take a deep breath and start to consider what Jobs’ departure — strictly speaking a change in role, he is now chairman of Apple’s board — means for mobile marketing.

For a start, Jobs is undeniably the great disruptor when it comes to the mobile industry. As Justin Siegel, CEO of MocoSpace said Steve Jobs was responsible for making voice calls a peripheral feature of a mobile phone. And despite the limitations of the iPhone, there is no denying it is a thing of beauty when it comes to usability.

Then enter the iPad. Clearly not a phone, and can do a lot of what you usually use a desktop or laptop computer for, but very definitely a mobile device.

Last year the third piece of the puzzle fell into place. iAds is a closed mobile ad delivery platform that allows iOS developers to monetize their apps, and brands to engage with users of Apple’s mobile devices — in a more exciting way than previously possible with mobile advertising, according to Jobs. The key, apparently, is entrenching mobile advertising into iOS4. Generally the jury appears to still be out when it comes to the success of iAds and how innovative it really is.

According to Jeff Hasen at analysts Mobile Groove: “[iAds] has been a large disappointment for many advertisers and others (like me) who looked at Apple’s move into mobile advertising as a milestone and much needed push to move the industry along.”

Hasen continues to say though that if iPhone is also sold via Sprint and T-mobile in the US, as is expected to happen this year, the critical mass needed for advertisers to see real returns might become a reality. And if we know one thing about Apple fans, they are willing to wait while bugs get worked out of products and service.

So what’s next?

Steve Jobs continues to be involved with Apple as chairman of the board, and industry commentators say he is expected to remain involved in product and strategy development. Tim Cook, former chief operating officer who now takes over the chief executive reins from Jobs, has sometimes been dismissed as an accountant and lacking Jobs’ flair, passion and charisma. However, general consensus seems to be he is a solid pair of hands and can execute the current plan well.

Cook himself said in an email to Apple staff: “I want you to be confident that Apple is not going to change. I cherish and celebrate Apple’s unique principles and values. Steve built a company and culture that is unlike any other in the world and we are going to stay true to that – it is in our DNA. We are going to continue to make the best products in the world that delight our customers and make our employees incredibly proud of what they do.”

The market seems to be calm so far as well, after a few shaky days immediately after Jobs’ resignation announcement. Gartner analyst Van Baker said: “My suspicion is that Apple will do just fine. There are so many talented people there and Steve’s attention to detail is baked into the culture.”

And while it appears to be business as usual at Apple, it is going to be interesting to watch what Apple’s competitors do. Shares in Samsung Electronics, the manufacturer of iPad competitor the Galaxy tablet, rose three percent, while LG Electronics jumped four percent after Jobs’s announcement, reported Memeburn. Samsung certainly seems to be upping the ante in terms of marketing and smartphones sales in recent months, so it wouldn’t be too surprising if it took this opportunity to grab market share from Apple.

As ever, it seems, mobile marketers need to stay nimble and on their toes, ready to respond to a constantly changing, but always growing, market.

First published on Vomo.

Is viral marketing really a category in its own right? Is it either accurate or feasible to say you offer viral marketing services, or have launched a viral marketing campaign? This implies that you can plan and predict a campaign “going viral”. Or is it more a case of the best a marketer can hope for is to set the scene, make sure all the right ingredients are in place, and then, if the timing is right, see the campaign go viral?

The latest piece of what I would consider truly viral content doing the rounds on the internet is ‘Buck Norris’ – the video clip of 17-year-old cyclist, Evan van der Spuy, being knocked off his bike in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa by a red hartebeest. At the time of writing, in less than a month almost 12 million people have watched the original clip posted on YouTube, not to mention hundreds of thousands of views of secondary clips, as well as spin-offs (you know you’ve made it on the internet when someone spoofs you), and international news coverage from UK daily Metro to online newspaper the Huffington Post.

Key to the clip was timing, both of the filming and the encounter, but key to the clip going viral was Max Cluer, owner of Team Jeep South Africa and organiser of the cycling event posting the clip up to YouTube immediately, while there was still buzz amongst the immediate audience about the incident. These Twitter and Facebook conversations were an ideal vehicle for making the clip spread virally around the world, earning Cluer’s Team Jeep brand unprecedented exposure, thanks to the logo on Van der Spuy’s cycling kit.

This is also crucial to laying the foundation for a piece of content to go viral: don’t be overly promotional. Team Jeep was seen in the context of super-awesome content that was worthy of sharing. It wasn’t a Team Jeep advert. Brian Mung’ei, Head of Business Development at Nairobi, Kenya-based web and marketing agency, Pamoja Media agrees:

“Don’t make the campaign an advertisement. A campaign doesn’t need to educate people about the product but rather on the benefits of the product. Think of a perfect online ad as a ‘behind the scenes’ version of a normal commercial TV advert. This means one needs to have a different mindset in that it’s not pushing a brand or product, rather about story-telling. The product does not even have to appear anywhere on the video for people to understand the ad and remember it,” he says.

Bozza’s Head of Brand Strategy, Catherine Lückhoff takes it a step further saying: “You don’t create virals – content either becomes viral or it doesn’t. All you (agency, client, marketing person etc.) can do is to know your market and create content that is sticky. Our experience is that contextually relevant local content is key. Content has to add value; be that through entertainment, education, a combination of, or giving users access to information.”

Bozza is a case in point. Dubbed a mobihood – a mobile neighbourhood – Bozza allows communities across Africa to share their stories and interact via a mobile phone. It launched a proof of concept on MXit in 2010, with hyper-local made-for-mobile video content. Within three days it had 40,000 subscribers and within three months, 170,000.

It can be pretty scary for brands to realise how little control they have over their brand anymore. But for content to truly become viral, they need to give up this control – or face an unpleasant viral backlash, as Brandhouse found out when it lost its sense of humour back in 2009 over user-generated spoofs of its Lou Gossett Jr. ad campaign.

Pamoja Media’s Mung’ei advises brands: “The web gives the audience greater control of how to interact with the campaign such that they can save, replay and most importantly share the advert within their networks. Ensure the video is free to access, download, embed and share online. This is basically the underlying essence of viral campaigns. If someone has to log on to your website to be able to view the advert and then ‘like’ your Facebook page to share it, someone needs to get fired.”

First published on African Business Review.

 

Just when you thought you had the interwebs sussed, Google+ comes along and rocks the boat.

Barely out of diapers, social networks Facebook and Twitter have changed the way we work and play. Companies don’t just have Facebook pages anymore; they have all-singing, all-dancing mini-sites, run competitions to drive “likes” and have creative teams dreaming up new ways of “engaging with the fans”. Twitter is no longer just for broadcasting what you had for lunch; promoted tweets are a regular occurrence in our Twitter streams, and celebrities can make a tidy profit by endorsing a brand of trainers in a tweet.

But if there is one thing you can be certain of in 2011, as ever, it’s that change is the order of the day. And Google’s launch of its social network-esque site, Google+, in June means that business owners and consumers alike need to work out what this means for them.

At time of writing, Google hasn’t launched the business-focused side of Google+ yet, bar a few early tests with companies such as Ford and has been actively booting off any businesses that try to sneak in via a personal profile. But, apparently based on feedback since the launch, the search giant has said it is bringing forward the launch date of its Google+ business services.

Read the rest of my article on African Business Review

In Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Doolittle books, the Pushmi-pullyu is a rare animal from Africa with two heads, half gazelle and half unicorn. When it tries to move, it gets pulled in two different directions.

It wouldn’t be surprising if many marketers feel like this at the moment, trying to navigate the rapidly changing digital marketing world, and getting the balance right between push and pull marketing.

Digital marketing is touted as the great conversation between a brand and its customers, but someone has to initiate the right conversations at the right time for your brand. Happy days indeed if your customers are spontaneously saying the right things about you, but many of the most successful viral campaigns need to be seeded.

Read the rest of my article on African Business Review

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, right? That seems to be the case when it comes to social media marketing, both in Africa and around the world.

There’s no denying that social media, by many once considered a here-today-gone-tomorrow fad, is a key arrow in a marketer’s quiver. It’s word of mouth on steroids and free, right?

Or not.

Social media experts in Kenya and South Africa warn companies not to view social media marketing, on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, as free. Yes, these platforms are umpteen times more cost-effective that traditional advertising such as TV or print, but do need time, money and strategic thought to be effective.

Read the rest of my article on African Business Review.

After chasing my tail for a few weeks last month trying to register a page name on Facebook to set up a vanity URL I thought I would share what worked to save others from the same time wasting and head scratching.

Firstly, I had the pre-requisite 25 fans on the page to get the vanity URL but kept getting told the page name: www.facebook.com/mobiflock was unavailable. This seemed strange as we had researched the name thoroughly and were pretty sure it wasn’t duplicating anything else out there.

When I typed the URL into my browser, it came up blank – so it didn’t seem that someone else had registered the vanity URL  for the Facebook page either.

I tried changing the categories that I used to register the page, but that didn’t make any difference. I really didn’t want to start trying different versions of the brand name, eg Mobiflock123, as that seemed to defeat the object, especially as we are about to embark on a brand building exercise. Also, once you have selected a Facebook fan page name, you are stuck with it. Forever. Unless you start from scratch and build up your fan base all over again.

Next port of call was various Facebook help sites – both “official” sites and third party ones. What I discovered was that plenty of people are having this problem, and there are a range of suggested solutions, none of which helped me.

And as you’ll know, if you are reading this, it is almost impossible to contact a real person at Facebook. If you don’t find what you are looking for by jumping down any number of Facebook fan page help rabbit holes, you’re on your own.

Finally, tucked away in a related thread, I found a link to the Facebook “Notice of Intellectual Property Infringement (Non-Copyright Claim)“. (Update: an eagle-eyed reader spotted this has changed. See the comments below. Try this link instead: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact/360358877344441) This form sounds like and looks like a form you fill in when someone has maliciously hijacked your brand name and you want it back. Apparently though, it’s also for people like you and me, who are the rightful owners of a brand name that hasn’t been used before and want to get it released from some Facebook copyright corral in order to use it.

I’m guessing, but my impression is that Facebook seems to blacklist all possible brand names until you prove it’s yours. Not a bad system I guess, as it prevents someone coming along and potentially doing your brand damage by using the name inappropriately, and saves a bit of messy bother reclaiming a name already out there in the wild, and then building a community around it.

The system would work better though if you knew about it in advance, and it was easier to find out what you needed to do to unlock a brand name to use as a Facebook fan page vanity URL.

So, here’s that link again: www.facebook.com/legal/copyright.php?noncopyright_notice=1 (UPDATE: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact/360358877344441)

It worked for me, pretty speedily, and I got a reply from a real person!! Good luck!

Image source: Facebook