Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Posted on October 28, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

State of the Afrosphere - my presentation at 27dinner Cape Town

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Here is my short presentation I gave last night at my first Cape Town 27dinner. I tried to have a look at the state of the African Blogosphere as reported by Afrigator.

Disclaimer: This is not authoritative. It simply highlights the data that we have available on Afrigator and is not meant to be conclusive in any way.

Posted on October 23, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

SAAsucks.com

What do you get when you…

• …install a brand new WordPress instance on a fancy new domain name?

• …steal FlySAA’s home page banner and insert it into the WordPress default theme?

• …do a Google search for other people who’ve complained about SAA?

The answer… SAA Sucks.

Seriously though, the whole getting ripped off experience I’ve recently gone through with South African Airways has really hit me hard. What’s more is that I’ve realised that not only do most people feel the same way but many have gone through similar experiences.

Added to this, my letter of demand to Khaya Ngqula (CEO of SAA) seems to have fallen on deaf ears and I’ve been left with a bad taste in my mouth ever since.

Thanks to Gregor for giving me the idea to do a site around this and in a short space of time I managed to get SAA Sucks up and running. The idea behind it is to dedicate space on the interwebs for anyone to go and complain about SAA.

It is clear that SAA are living in complete arrogance and have a total disregard for their clients and I think we need to take a stand. I’ve been a big pundit of the power of social media and now we can really put it to the test and see if we can make any difference whatsoever.

So while SAA Sucks is now live it’s up to you guys to help me spread the word. Write a blog post about it, send the link to your Facebook friends, post it on Twitter, Google bomb SAA with a link to SAA Sucks, frankly I don’t care - just spread the word.

Finally, If there are any designers out there who’d like to do a proper theme for this site let me know - it could do with something decent!

Posted on September 23, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

Trevor Manuel’s Wikipedia page already updated

Picked this up on Twitter thanks to Nadia Padayachi. A group of people have already updated Trevor Manuel’s Wikipedia entry with the news of his resignation only a couple hours ago.

The new text now reads:

“Trevor Andrew Manuel (born 31 January 1956) served as South Africa’s Minister of Finance. He was Finance Minister from 1996 until 2008, making him one of the country’s longest-serving finance ministers.”

The power of social media I guess!

Posted on May 30, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

Social Media in Plain English

Yet another classic from the guys over at Common Craft. This one explains Social Media to all the layman’s out there - me included!!!

Posted on April 8, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

The Ultimate Web 2.0 Tag Cloud

Posted on March 26, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

New Media Marketing Presentation

Well it’s done. My presentation on SEO and Social Media has been delivered and if you’re interested you can now view it below or on Slideshare.

Posted on March 26, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

Following the New Media Marketing conference via Twitter

If you’re attending today’s New Media Marketing conference and are planning to Twitter from the event then I’d like to suggest that you all use Hashtags in your twitter posts.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Using hashtags will not only enable better twitter following for the event but it will also allow users who are not attending the conference the opportunity to watch the events unfold and using hashtags is really simple.

1. You’ll need to follow hashtags on Twitter so that hashtags can pick your tweets up. Visit the hashtags user and click follow.

2. When you tweet from the event add #newmedia08 to your tweet so that hashtags picks your tweet up.

When you tweet with #newmedia08 in your post it will automatically appear on the newmedia08 hashtags page which any user can follow.

Let’s try it out and see how successful hashtags could be.

Posted on March 19, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

New Media Marketing Conference

Next week I’ll be presenting at the 2nd Annual New Media Marketing conference at Gallagher Estate in Midrand, Johannesburg. This four-day conference features an impressive lineup of speakers and I have to say it’s an honour to be presenting at such a great event.

I’m going to be talking about incorporating SEO and Social Media into a company’s marketing spend and it’s a perfect topic for me as I feel very passionate about both areas. These days I find myself working with Social Media more and more but my initial passion was always search.

I’ve long felt that while Google is an awesome company and I highly respect their ethos, one company should not control so much of the world’s data. Personally I’d rather have Google own my data than say Microsoft but I still maintain vertical search is a necessity in this ever dominant market.

When I developed Grabble in 2006 I thought I was onto a winner. Sadly it never took off (it’s almost dead in fact) but what I did gain out of this project was an appreciation for search and the technologies that power it. Grabble evolved from open source Java applications, Perl and then I settled on PHP.

There’s a reason why Google have a couple hundred thousand servers collecting, storing and processing information but none of this I could understand, contemplate or appreciate until I tried doing it myself.

What’s even better than talking about some passionate topics is the fact that I’m the second presenter which takes a lot of the pressure off me to really enjoy the remainder of the conference.

If anyone is still interested in going to the conference I have a whole bunch of vouchers which give you 25% discount off the conference price. Get in touch with me and I’ll happily hand them out.

Posted on March 14, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

Storm in a Hoek

Last night I had a great evening with both Stii and Simone at Doppio Zero in Greenside. Lots of fun was had by all but more importantly we discussed some very serious issues ranging from work, life, parenting, blogging and the Stormhoek saga.

Erik has a great post about the pothole theory and part of this theory is how we find it easier to care about those matters closest to us and why fixing a pothole in your road is seemingly more important that addressing some of the larger issues we are faced with today.

This kind of sums up why I haven’t written about Stormhoek before because I’ve been unsure of how I could contribute. Also, I wasn’t sure if blogging about this would actually make a difference but that’s a naive take to things.

I’ve learned in the last few days just how powerful blogging can be and hey, let’s face it, Stormhoek grew into the powerful brand that it is through the use of blogging and social media.

Many people feel very passionate about this issue as real jobs are at stake here and the future of Stormhoek is in jeopardy. In particular I’ve been impressed with people like Stii and Eve, read this great article on Bizcommunity, who’ve really tried to make a difference.

I think that as an online community, who’ve all benefited from Stormhoek sponsorships, we should try our level best to help Graham, Chris and the rest of the team by helping them recover some of the R6 million that is owed to them. Unfortunately I can’t afford to Own a Vine but I hope that others who can will help fight the cause and help save the company.

At the very least, let’s get the message out there!

Posted on March 6, 2008 - by Justin Hartman

Twitter in Plain English

I love the Common Craft website because they simplify a lot of Web 2.0 services for the layman in an easy to understand format. Today’s video is on Twitter and seeing as my post yesterday was all about the new Twitter application I found, Twhirl, I thought it would be good to post this short 2 minute video. Enjoy.