My new blog on saving electricity

I've started a new blog wherein I will collect tips from around the Internet so help individuals in South Africa to be part of the solution to our current power crisis via information and communication. The idea is to have the information conveniently delivered to you via RSS feeds, email and Twitter feed (as soon as I have set it up!)

 

For more details and to subscribe, go to Power Up South Africa

Yes you can build Widgets… soon

If you are like me and have been dying to try your hand at creating a widget but know nothing about coding beyond basic HTML tags and are too cheap to pay someone to do it for you, then you will want to read this article.

Sprout Builder has arrived in all it’s glory and is set to make widgets accessible to a much wider group of ‘creators’. I imagine will mean a lot more niche widgets and hence a lot more widget users/viewers. For example, I enjoy a leisurely paraglide on the weekends and I have had an idea for a widget for the 100k + registered paragliding pilots worldwide. When you estimate how many of those are online, we are talking very niche. How many of them have used/seen or bothered by a widget, even more niche.

Confused
Please note that all the positivity I pour out above (being my optimistic self) is based on the promo video on the site and I haven’t actually given the tool a go. Confusingly, their blog says the tool had launched yesterday but when I try to use the app, I am asked to give my email address, to which I duly abided, as they are in closed beta phase. But, much like my potential card fraud query at the bank, I’m sure it will sort itself out in a few hours or days.

Either way the video shows off the interface a bit and seems simple enough. It reminds me of Swishmax’s linear editing style interface as well as Synthasite’s drag and drop building style interface. I’m hoping it’s more like the latter!

Marketing in Rambles - Is a Widget a Web 2.0 Trojan Horse?

I was just reading an article about widgets as a powerful marketing tool when it dawned on me: the most successful widget campaigns use the Trojan horse strategy.

Allow me to explain:

Four things were needed to make the Trojan horse attack successful:

1. Odysseus and his boys needed a place to sneak into, Ilium in Troy in their case.
2. A gift (the big wooden horse) to sneak into the realm of the unsuspecting victim.
3. Odysseus’s soldiers to carry out the objectives of the mission, within the gift.
4. The result – the enemy was annihilated.

So a few thousand years later, the Internet is born, a few years after that, the term web 2.0 is coined and shortly after that Widgets arrive on the scene creating the scene for the Web 2.0 Trojan horse:

1. Odysseus, your brand, needs to sneak into Troy – blogs, website and social networking pages etc
2. A gift – The widget with appealing, dynamic content.
3. Odysseus’s soldiers – your branding or brand message displayed on the widget, carrying out the objective of boosting brand presence or whatever other reason you had for doing the viral widget campaign.
4. The result – your objectives are measured by trackers etc.

The reason this observation inspired me to write a blog entry about it, is because it might be a useful way of explaining the basis of a widget campaign to those non-techie clients and colleagues of yours.

I think the focus of explanation needs to shift away from what is a widget to how we can effectively use widgets for our brand objectives because we need to accept the fact that some of the people ‘just don’t get it’ but they do get branding strategies and measurements which can all be done with Widgets.

Got QDOS?

I am the 4^th most popular miss world contestant on the Internet according to QDOS. This stat disappoints me somewhat as I don’t even recognise the names of the other three contestants above me.

QDOS, it seems, is the miss universe pageant of the Internet or at least it aims to be. Basically, what happens is you join the service (of course) and then specify your profile names on all the services you are active on such as Facebook, Digg, Youtube, EBay, Twitter and even Tripadvisor to produce a score of your activity and influence on the Internet. I’m not entirely sure how it works the score out but it seems to be able to tell how many friends you have on Facebook, and connections on LinkedIn etc. This surprises me a bit as I thought data was not allowed to be pulled from Facebook, but hey what do I know!

QDOS uses four pillars of measurement to influence the score: popularity, impact, activity and individuality somehow pulled and aggregated from all your profiles. I do wonder about their scoring criteria though as I score low on individuality because my name is Jon Bishop (common as muck) and not Moonstar Ringo or something which seems a silly measure for popularity and influence.

What’s it useful for?

If the service takes off and hits mainstream bloggerville, it will most likely become the key gauge of popularity amongst petty bloggers.

It’s also useful for comparing your Internet popularity to people like Lee Evans, Jo Brand, Eva Mendez and David Moyes, all of whom I am more popular than and Cherie Blair, who unfortunately is kicking my arse all over the web. So I’m off to join Tripadvisor and write reviews of Joburg as a tourist destination until I beat Mrs Former Prime Minister or at least until I become a first princess.

Marketing in Rambles: Welcome 2008, we’ve been expecting you

I’m always amused at how surprised people are that yet another year has arrived. “I can’t believe its 2008 already” or “This year just snuck up on me”. My response to such frivolous commentary usually refers them to the task bar on their computer screen, where they will find the time and if they double click on this, they will find a calendar. Amazing this technology isn’t it? There is nothing surprising about how a calendar works: every year after December 31st, the 1st of January of the next year appears the very next day without fail so why is that people are surprised then by this anomaly?

So indeed, welcome 2008, I at least have been expecting you. In fact I have been planning for your arrival since sometime in the middle of 2007. This is also the year of the Rat which doesn’t sound nearly as auspicious as the year of the tiger or the dragon but still somewhat appropriate as I will be moving back to London in 2008 where apparently you are never more than a few metres away from a rat. Either way, I will have my own dragons to slay in 2008 which include a wedding, a honeymoon, moving abroad, finding a job, learning to Paraglide and talking at a marketing conference for the first time. Hard to tell which dragon there is the bigger!

Now I’ve never professed to be some sort of marketing guru that can predict what 2008 holds for the industry and would never be foolish enough to attempt this as the rate at which technology is influencing the industry means that all we can expect, as the old folks say, is the unexpected.

So instead of a list of things that will happen in marketing this year, here is my list of things that will probably happen or to be more accurate, this is my list of things that I would like to happen in the year of the rat:

- Social media marketing and advertising goes mainstream and shows it’s worth or lack of worth for that matter. I don’t mind which way it goes but as long as it goes somewhere and the hype dies down a bit so we can just get on with it.

- Podcasts go mainstream. Just as there is no doubt that server/hard drive based television and movie services (where the viewer chooses what they watch and when) will dominate the TV market, so will podcasts revolutionize the radio industry offering the same joys of variety, choice and targeting. Every time I turn on the radio in the middle of a 15 minute advert marathon followed by five minutes of over-opinionated, under-humorous Deejays and S Club 7 triple plays, I kiss my MP3 player and thank it for all the Podcasts and music wonder it contains within.

- 2008 will undoubtedly be a big year for the Internal Communications job market. The value of the function is now undoubted across pretty much all national and multi-national companies and this year will see them scrambling for the cream of the comms. I already see the heightened activity in my job alerts.

- Facebook will survive the Google Open Social onslaught / hype. I say this purely because people who generally don’t spend much time on the net (and of course those who do) are on Facebook and nowhere else. This is simply because it is low maintenance and easy to use and all their friends are on it. These people are also not very tech savvy so they couldn’t give a damn about open social and all its platforms, even if we tell them it is a good thing.

- Go green or go home. Consumers seem to be now actively seeking out companies that are green and not pretending to be so. The fact that interest is starting to grow in South Africa and there are even a few early adopters around, is a solid indicator that the rest of the world is in rapid uptake phase already. Yes SA always lags behind by about three or four years and quite often misses the window of opportunity because of this. But hey in Africa, the time is African!

If you are such a consumer and if you aren’t, jump on the bandwagon mate, it’s the best one going around at the moment, check out www.evo.com where you can find all sorts of eco friendly suppliers and products such as solar powered bicycles!