Why? Well, two main reasons. The first being that after deciding to create a social media agency we realised that providing social media services simply wasn’t going to cut it. We knew that we needed to offer more and we needed to really focus on digital strategies rather than digital implementations. The second reason was that in April we acquired the business and client side of Entelligence – a leading development company started more than 11 years ago by Sean Riley of Ad Dynamo and GT Ferreira of FirstRand.

The Entelligence acquisition was mostly about being in the right place at the right time but nonetheless, strategically it was a brilliant move for both parties. Since April we’ve been streamlining and integrating the Entelligence business into Social Code and it’s been an interesting and challenging experience in itself. We decided to keep a lid on things until we had gotten the entire operation functional and until we were ready to take on more clients.

So, here we are. Social Code just moved into new offices, we’re hiring new staff and currently service 91 clients from all over the world. The growth and potential for Social Code has blown my mind away and I know that in 2011 you’re going to be hearing a lot more about us.

Many people have asked me what this means for Afrigator. Well, in short, it’s business as usual but if you want to find out more about Social Code and the impact on Afrigator I suggest you listen to the latest Digital Edge podcast where I spill the beans about both businesses.

It’s no secret that I love Apple and I’ve owned many of their computers and accessories for the last six years and to be honest I simply don’t see the issue with pricing in SA. I also have to concede that the Core Group have actually done a fantastic job at distributing and growing the Apple market share in South Africa.

With the advent of the Internet and more recently the adoption of Social Media many people would have forgotten or are not contextualising what it was like six years ago in the SA market. I remember when Beeld bought an Apple computer for almost R500,000 because it was the super-computer that would take them to a new level in production. Today, however, pricing of Apple products have dropped considerably and the company has positioned itself away from publishing and graphic design to the more lucrative consumer market.

I also remember a time when the Core Group had a lot of competition. Many years ago Apple granted multiple licenses to companies in South Africa yet despite this open market the only distributor to survive was the Core. At that time gaining market share was near impossible yet despite it they’re still around to tell the tale hence why Cupertino decided to award the Core Group with the sole-distribution rights to South Africa.

Granted that the Core Group have benefited by Apple’s overall positioning and mass global adoption but irrespective they have seen the best and worst of Apple and stuck to their guns.

So what’s the point of all of this I guess you’re wondering? Well the point is that not everyone is Social Media hates companies or are out to hurt reputations. I’ve sat in countless meetings with potential Adgator clients where I’ve explained that when a blogger takes the time to write something bad about their company it generally means only one thing – they care about you.

In fact not only do they care about you but they’ve taken the time to write something about you in the hope that you will respond. Most of the time, no one ever does.

It is because of this that I encourage people to engage users, no matter how tough it may seem, because by turning a negative response into a positive you start to create brand champions for your company. These brand champions will take your company a lot further than any marketing initiative could ever accomplish because quite simply put, people value their friend’s opinions more than they value yours!

From my experience, dealing with the negative responses in the right way is sure to change perceptions however the issue is that most companies have no idea how to go about this.

The Core’s situation is a case in point. RJ van Spaandonk retaliated, via Twitter, to the angry lynch mob which really just fueled the fire even further. While he tried to highlight similar pricing strategies from countries outside of SA it wasn’t handled in the right way and his strategy, or lack thereof, backfired badly.

The bloggers now hate the Core Group even more and RJ van Spaandonk is now recommending that companies stay far away from Twitter, bloggers and Social Media in general. In the end everyone has lost.

Had I been the Core I would have sought help from professionals before publicly making statements and retaliating. If you don’t know how to deal with this medium, ask for help – there are many professionals today who can help and advise you on the right Social Media strategy and how to mitigate negative responses around your brand(s).

For any company the message is simple. People are having conversations about you all the time and you really can’t afford to not be apart of it. Seek help, build a good strategy and above all – #DLFS*!

* Don’t Look For Shit! (this is Afrigator‘s corporate motto and we stick to it, religiously! We learned our lesson the hard way.)

Herewith my reponse. Let me know what you think about it.

Dear Monique

Someone sent me the link to an article you wrote on 8 June titled “Social media: Is it worth it?” (http://gatorurl.com/qmi3mg). Let me begin by saying that while I see your view-point regarding big social media sites such as Twitter & Facebook being unable to monetise their websites and become profitable I strongly disagree with most of the remaining article.

Let me disseminate some of your statements and highlight my perspective on the issues you raise.

But somehow I have difficulty accepting Powell’s suggestions: how many microcelebrity’s are there? Does it not come down more to the year you were born in, your culture, your history and being dealt the right hand at the right time, as Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers illustrates?

I too have read Gladwell’s Outliers and agree with everything he wrote in the book. I am a strong believer in the principle’s of the year you were born in, your culture, your history and more importantly the 10,000 hour rule but I struggle to see the relevance in the context of your article. If you look at Evan Williams, Mark Zuckerberg and Biz Stone you’ll see that they all form part of the culture that defines Outliers and I’m pretty sure we’ll find that each one of them have been granted extraordinary opportunities that have helped define their individual, personal success.

How much value can there be in a service that spews out so much information that if you have prolific tweeters and many follows on your profile you see hardly any of their entries?

Value is in the eye of the beholder but from my personal experience this prolific information has helped determine a new way to spread information that is both useful, relevant and real-time. There is no other platform in the world that really highlights how real-time interaction can change perceptions, influence brands and drive revenue than Twitter does. Even Google is now trying to look at how they can plug into the real-time data that is Twitter.

Social media firm Facebook is yet to make a profit. It failed to deliver on Reed’s promise for Cope. Cope’s Facebook group had over 20 000 members before the elections, but only managed to get 7% of the vote.

This statement is laughable and taken completely out of context and I find it quite sad that you’d even try to relate a Facebook groups membership directly to COPE’s inability to obtain more than 7% of the vote. While COPE’s Facebook group may have attracted 20,000 members you failed to contextualise that COPE entered the political sphere with a bang and created a new sense of hope for voters in South Africa who were fed up with the ANC’s inability to deliver on their promises. However, by the time election day came round COPE’s decisions and actions started to highlight their flaws in their initial strategy. While 20,000 members may have supported them on a Facebook group what isn’t clear is just how many lost confidence as and when COPE started to lose support.

By contrast, the DA’s social media strategy was very aggressive and molded off the Obama election campaign and they had a very successful voting day which won them the Western Cape. The DA group on Facebook only has 25,000 members and Reed’s promise may have delivered for them because their message never changed along the way. It just interests me how you chose to highlight how Reed’s promise and Facebook failed to deliver for COPE but at the same time ignored the effect this may (or may not) have had on the DA.

I am yet to meet or hear of a South African who has used social media to make money, influence people or change their career. If you know of any Saffers who have, share your story below…

Your lack of understanding and knowledge in social media is clear to me when you make such a sweeping statement to an audience (Moneyweb readers) that is struggling to come to terms with how social media can benefit them. I run a very successful company that has been built entirely on the ability to use social media to help grow our business. We use no traditional mediums to market and grow our company yet despite this we managed to take a garage startup to part-acquisition when MIH Print Africa, a division of Naspers, bought into our company.

Then let’s look at how Storm Hoek wines (www.stormhoek.co.za) used only social media to market and promote their brand. They targeted bloggers and social media platforms to promote their wines and had massive success along the way. They export wine all over the world.

The list goes on and I can write a book on the amount of people, in South Africa, that have used social media to grow businesses, influence other people and change their career path. I myself used my blog to get a new job which would ultimately set me on a course to start Afrigator.

I would, in all honesty, re-consider your initial approach of this article and look to write a more detailed one that includes some basic research and perhaps trying to explore how South African’s are using the medium successfully. Your readers deserve as much.

I figured that Bolton had a massive impact on the South African blogging community so what better way to illustrate this than by using him as a case study. I must say that I had massive amounts of fun putting this presentation together as it reminded me of the shenanigans that went on during that brief twelve day period. If you haven’t heard of Bolton then best you view the presentation below and get some tips on how to grow traffic to your blog!

My presentation was on Tools & Technologies, Filtering and Collaborating and while the start is mostly around education the end of the presentation got very interesting. I figured that while it was important to explain the different tools and technologies out there I also wanted to show delegates how to use the tools effectively.

Having been privy to the delegate list beforehand I knew that there were a number of Old Mutual people in the audience so I figured their company would be as good as any to do a small case study on. The results across the various social websites was interesting and I hope that it highlighted how companies are being spoken about online but also how the conversation is generally a one-way street. In my mind it’s an opportunity to engage users and customers in a very unique way.

What I really like about the podcast series is that it’s short (generally around 15-20 minutes), the content is relevant to the industry and the production quality is superb. In a time when information overload is a major concern this podcast series gives you bite-sized bits of information on the go.

To my embarrassment I’ve been meaning to blog about The Digital Edge for some time but as you can see from the lack of posts on my blog lately time has simply not been on my side. Today however I do have a reason as I’m featured in the latest podcast titled Reprobates and bloggers.

The latest installment looks at the state of the South African blogosphere to see what was really happening. It features top SA bloggers as well as Fred Roed and Afrigator‘s other brother, Mike Stopforth. This episode is quite long but I really won’t mind if you skip to the end to listen to me!

The Democratic Alliance today unveiled their new social media strategy to a small audience in Cape Town comprising journalists, party members and, believe it or not, bloggers. I was one of the lucky ones to crack an invite yesterday afternoon and I have to admit I was extremely excited to hear what the DA had up their sleeves.

Cape Town City Mayor and DA Leader, Helen Zille gave the first speech highlighting the DA’s progressive and forward thinking strategy. Mayor Zille said that,

this new digital strategy will reach South African voters in exciting and groundbreaking ways. Our approach is to build a personalised relationship with the DA’s supporters by involving them in our activities and campaigns.

The speech was followed by another from DA CEO Ryan Coetzee and he took us through the elements of the new communication strategy. This new strategy includes some of the following:

• Two Interactive websites
• Online advertising and marketing
• SMS communication
• Mobile web access
• Engagement with voters via social networking and in the blogosphere

New DA website launched

Then the two new websites were unveiled. The first was the DA’s main website www.da.org.za which has seen a major facelift and integration with various forms of Social Media. Some of this include videos embedded via Vimeo and Times Multimedia, a new forum component and various other social tools for sharing information. It’s cutting edge, usable and really puts the pressure on the other political parties. A job well done.

Contribute To Change

The new contribute to change website is equally impressive at first glance. The core of the website is to allow people the freedom to bring upon change in our country and the site has a strong social networking aspect to it that facilitates this process. In addition to the social networking you can pledge your support to making a change in the following ways:

• Build a team by recruiting your friends.
• Spread the word by sending letters to all the major newspapers and talk shows.
• Attend or host a DA event.
• Make phone calls and reach out to voters.
• Go door to door.
• Donate some cash.

Each of these allow individuals to take action and contribute to change as Helen puts it. I noted that while this website was extremely well put together I worried about what the value proposition was for end users and laymen like you and I. My first impression of the site was that this is very heavily directed to helping the DA and while this is positive I struggled to see how this benefited consumers – in other words, what were the DA doing for us in return.

For those who have heard Helen Zille speak you’ll know that she delivers a convincing and strong message and she was very quick to answer my concerns. The whole aim of the DA is to ultimately shift focus on opposition toward the focus on our country and how we as citizens could help make a difference. While I do respect this and it was a convincing argument I am still concerned that an ANC or COPE supporter wouldn’t use this website as it’s too heavily focused on the DA.

I wanted to ask, but thought not to at the time, whether or not the DA had given any thoughts to making this website agnostic – similar I guess to the new SA Elections website – as this could really bring the whole country together and not just DA supporters. If the Contribute To Change website was powered by the DA yet remained in the background I think this website could be far more successful in the long term.

What has really impressed me though is that the DA are by far the most progressive political party in South Africa. The ANC’s attempts at social media have been dismal and these two new sites by the DA really highlight their commitment to long term change in our country.

Both the new DA and Contribute To Change websites are built off open-source technology, specifically WordPress, BBPress and BuddyPress, and it’s great to see the use of open-source to drive the DA’s campaign.

I have to commend the DA, their web development team and the guys running the social media strategy behind the scenes on a job well done. I’m only worried that the Contribute To Change website is a little too advanced for a South African audience but only time will tell.

The following screenshots (taken from the WayBack Machine) highlight the key design and functional changes during this period.

April 2005

There was very little detail available for April 2005 however what I did find interesting was the drop downs that indicate that YouTube may have been somewhat of a dating site. I can’t seem to find any reference to this apart from the screenshots and if anyone has any info I’d love to know.

June 2005

In June YouTube introduced search as a dominant feature on the home page and a new tag line, “Your Digital Video Repository”, is conceptualised.

August 2005

By August the classic YouTube is launched with search remaining as a dominant feature however more priority is given to featured videos. This is the first time that YouTube really looks functional and easy to use. Very smartly YouTube drops the stupid “Your Digital Video Repository” tag line and changes it to a more functional one liner, “Upload, tag and share your videos worldwide!”. What’s also interesting to note is that this new design highlights the start of the relationship with Google with the introduction of Google Adsense code in the sidebar.

September 2005

Not many changes in September from August but YouTube have now introduced the Recently Viewed functionality to the home page as well as a new Last 8 users online sidebar.

December 2005

While there are some minor design changes in December the highlight of this screenshot is the introduction of YouTube’s now trademarked tag line – Broadcast Yourself.

I love looking at the evolution of main-stream products and what I particularly liked about YouTube’s evolution is seeing how they struggled to position themselves with their tag line. In Afrigator‘s case we’re constantly trying to work on our positioning and we’re yet to find the killer one-liner. It’s good to see though that as a product evolves along with functionality and simplicity so does the positioning and I’m optimistic that we’ll figure this out with time.

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.

• …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!

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!

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.

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.

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!

HelloTxt is a simple service that allows you to post a message directly to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook and Plaxo at the same time. Now one has to ask why anyone would need this functionality but I find myself in a situation where I have an account with all of these sites and posting messages to each one individually is not only a mission but also not happening.

Over time Twitter has become my medium of choice simply because it has the highest adoption rate in South Africa for micro-blogging platforms. Personally I prefer Pownce over all these services but there are almost no people using the service that I know.

The HelloTxt service works brilliantly and does what it claims to however the down side to it is that you can only post messages from the HelloTxt website. This is a major issue for me as I prefer to post messages via Instant Messaging and after doing some research I found that there is no way to integrate this service into an IM client.

In a random set of events I stumbled upon Twhirl, the micro-blogging application to rule them all. Twhirl is primarily a Twitter application that allows you to post to the site and the latest version also includes integration with Jaiku and Pownce.

The Twhirl desktop application uses Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR) that enables a cross-platform experience that is gaining big traction with developers and users. One AIR application I use religiously is the Google Analytics Reporting Suite and I’m sure there are many more cool applications out there.

Twhirl features multiple Twitter accounts and once you’ve added one you’re presented with a super-cool interface with full Twitter functionality including; replies, direct messages, favourites and re-tweeting.

By clicking on the settings icon on your Twitter window you can change various settings including adding your usernames for Jaiku and Pownce.

What is really smart about this integration is that replies to Twitter users (i.e. @username) are not posted to either Pownce or Jaiku. As a user of all three services I quickly became aware that replying to someone with the @ symbol is a unique Twitter way of doing things and Pownce evangelists hate it when you try and reply to them in this fashion. This is sure to keep your Pownce buddies happy.

I’m loving Twhirl and I’ve finally found a micro-blogging application that works the way I want it to.