Podkamp comes to Bloemies Cause Blogging is Kief!

The first ever Podcamp started on the 8^th September in Boston, USA and since then, the brilliant idea has spread across the world like bird flu with the last Podcamp being in Sydney earlier this month. Now believe it or not, the concept has proved so successful that less than 2 years after its inception, Podcamp will be coming to BLOEMFONTEIN! Yes, I was also surprised that Bloemmies has Internet access. When speaking with the key event organiser, Nico Baird from Dreamagineers.com, he assured me that he didn’t have to drive to Joburg to check his emails.

The first South African Podcamp was held in Cape Town in November last year and now the second ‘Podkamp’ will hit Bloemies on April 19^th this year and, stereotypes aside, is a great location to host a Podcamp as it is right in the middle of the country: an easy drive from Jozi, Durban and the Groot Gat. The Cape Townians are used to being far from everything so they can just team up and drive together and do their bit for carbon footprints.

What to do in Bloemies

All I know is that there is a monument to the women of the Anglo-Boer war in Bloemies but I’m sure there’s a Dros and a Spar which means beer and chips at least! But maybe that’s the point really: Who of you have been to Bloemfontein in the last 10 years? It might be a great opportunity to visit a new town with some like-minded peers.

Who Should Attend

Bloggers, Techies, Geeks, Gadget freaks, posers, peepers, curiosos, media students or anyone else who wants to know more about social media etc.

Why Podcamp?

Podcamps are an un-conference which means they will be a lot less formal than normal conferences. The lack of form allows for a lot more conversation and interaction which is oh so Web 2.0! This will be the first un-conference I will be attending in person and am really looking forward to it. I might even get the urge to stand up and talk randomly which you can do at an un-conference! Podcamps are also free by definition and this is no different for this one. This is great news as some conference fees are extortionate so you could travel all the way to Bloemies sleep over, buy your mates drinks all night, drive back and still only pay 20% of what it would cost to go to a conference in Jozie!

For more information and to register on the Wiki go to Podcamp SA’s shiny new website.

The First Fully Integrated African Micro Travel Blog Attempt

Okay so I’ve been thinking about what to call this post for days and that is the simplest title I could come up with. I apologise profusely but the truth is what I am attempting is quite complicated and I’m pretty sure ground breaking in terms of Micro Travel Blogging (if someone can think of an example before this, then I will humbly apologise). The idea is to come up with a simple (for my readers), media rich blogging experience accessible across all the social media platforms that I have a presence on. So let me explain how I it works and maybe you can try it out with something interesting.

The Trip

The idea for this whole micro-blogging system was born out of a long chain of thoughts when I was planning for my African road trip through the Okavango Delta, Poppa Falls, Caprivi Strip, Katimo Mulilo, Vic Falls and Makgadigadi pans with a few more unplanned stops I’m sure.

Me and my dad have wanted to do this trip for ages as my dad served in the SADF on the Caprivi Strip during the ‘Silent War’ of the seventies. He hasn’t been back since. So as I am finishing work for good at Netcare this Friday and my dad is self employed, the opportunity for this trip re-emerged. We decided to take the gap “before my dad was too old to do it.” A few phone calls later and three of my dad’s mates, who served with him in the Caprivi, were on-board as well as two fully rigged 4x4s with roof tents and all important beer fridges.

On the morning of Sunday 2^nd March, we depart from Joburg for a trip that is roughly 3500kms but we will zoot the first 1300kms through Botswana to get to the Kavango River where we will find somewhere to set up camp. From there on, we will take it easy and stop and sleep where ever we feel like it, no accommodation has been booked, but like the humble tortoise, we carry our house above our heads so where we stop is where we sleep. As the only planning we have done is route knowledge (distances, towns, petrol stations etc), we also can’t say how long we will be gone for (imagine the wives’ responses to that!) so we’ll just trickle along until we see what we want to see and come home a week or two later.

The Micro Blogging Idea

I was thinking of how to keep my friends and family updated on our progress and then I thought maybe my readers would like to know and maybe my blogging peers would like to know and maybe even random readers curios about any or all of the destinations on the trip would like to know. So of course my immediate idea was to blog it, that way everyone could read it. But the thought of lugging my 17” HP through some of the roughest parts of Africa as well as my oversized digicam didn’t really appeal to me and is probably contrary to the spirit of the adventure (Captain Morgan anyone?). The same day, I had set my Nokia E50 to roaming for the trip which then sparked the notion that I could use my camera as a micro and picture blogging tool. I also decided that because of my attempt to access a broader target market than I normally do (most of my friends don’t have a clue what I talk about in my normal marketing posts) it should go across a lot of platforms to catch everyone who wants to follow it. It was also important that everything gets updated automatically from my phone as I will have no PC access and to be honest, I don’t want to see one. A few hours of tweaking a myriad social networking services including my blog, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr and I was ready for a world first (I think)!

How it all Works

As the graph explains: I take (hopefully highly interesting and unique) pics on my E50 and write a short description. Shozu (on my phone) then sends this info to Blogger (www.jonin60seconds.com) and Flickr. Blogger creates a post with pic and description. The post is then sent to my subscribers via Feedburner, Twitter via Twitterfeed and Facebook via Flog Blog. Flickr sends a tweet to Twitter via Twittergram and the pics to Facebook via Zuport. A big thanks to uber blogger Rafiq Phillips for pointing out the joys of Shozu to me and saving me from an undesirable death by roaming MMS bill.

A side note for the semantically prone readers:

Yes I am still calling it a micro blog even though I’m sending the posts to Blogger as the descriptions will be short just like when micro blogging. And yes I am doing a travel blog on my marketing/web 2.0 blog as this is travel 2.0 my man, and my readers can get great ideas on how to use the services I have used.

What can go wrong?

The only things that can go wrong are phone related:

• Inability to charge phone
• Breakage by phone (for example dropping it in a Gnu stampede, being chewed by a lion, swimming in the Kavango river)
• Losing of phone (for example drunkenness, darkness, somewhere between all the supplies, dropping it in a Gnu stampede)
• Lack of adequate reception, it is Africa after all.
• No backups: I don’t do phones so I only have one simple Nokia and my dad refuses to let Shozu near his phone (he’s just coming to terms with not suffering from internetless-ness anymore so lets not push him!). So if something like chewing, water or a stampede happens to my phone, that’s it, micro blogging all over!

So if you stop hearing from me, one of these misfortunes have consumes my poor old E50.

Macroblogging

I will be taking my proper camera, armed with polarizing filter and many SD cards, with me in hope of picking up some awesome shots (mental image of me kneeling over a scorpion, cellphone in left hand big camera in right hand) so I will do a proper blog story equipped with full a write-up and some hopefully good quality pics. If I’m feeling energetic (remember I am getting married, going on honeymoon and moving to the UK when I get back) I’ll even track the route on Google earth or something.

Where to follow my progress:

Perhaps the easiest place will be to go to my blog where you can leave comments etc:

www.jonin60seconds.com

Otherwise:

www.flickr.com/photos/jonin60seconds

http://twitter.com/jonin60seconds

My Facebook profile but friend me this week while I can still accept!

9 Rules for Creating a Successful Widget Campaign

Pic source Dan

Widgets have only recently caught the attention of forward thinking marketers. And of course being good marketers, everything must be put into a campaign and this is becoming more and more apparent with Widgets. So I have started compiling a list of best practices for Widget campaigns which help me with the outlines of a successful campaign. These rules might also be useful to know when engaging an agency, helping you to not feel completely useless!

1. Content must be free (duh!) engaging and relevant

So yes the content must be free, no need to add to that. It must also be relevant and engaging which means if you're selling a toasters, having a widget with a hot new chick pic everyday is not going to work. Now if you are FHM or Pirelli, then that widget might very well work.

2. Content must be Dynamic

Remember that when running Widget campaigns, you are playing in the social media space and in this mine field, you play according to the rules of the consumer (read one of my other posts here for more explanation on this. They are not going to blink an eyelid at your widget if the content is boring; in this space you have to give a lot more to get attention. So make sure your content offering is dynamic, encouraging the user to engage with it, or at least have it update often. Check out National Geographic's Pic of the Day Widget as an example.

3. Make sure the design is attractive and modern.

If you want the new influencers to embed your widget on their blog / website, it better look good. People work hard getting their blogs to look slick and stand out from the crowds so your Widget better not look like a fifth grader's artwork pinned on a fridge.

4. Distribute!

Like selling a book or a CD, distribution is everything. There are great websites that help you get your Widget all over the web. Check out Clearsprings, Gigya, Spring Widgets which are all purpose built distribution sites. Also have a look at download.com which, as you probably know, is a major site for software downloads but also hosts a whack of Widgets.

5. Make it easy to share.

Why make it difficult? Easy one to work out really. For an example of making a Widget easy to share, go to my blog and check out my TV advert widget on the top right hand corner then click the share button. I must note however in contradiction to my own rule, you'll note that not all the sharing works on that button as the system I am using is still in beta but you get the idea.

6. Put it on Facebook

Widgets don't work on Facebook and Facebook apps don't work anywhere else (for now) but fundamentally they are the same thing, so If you're going to all the effort to make a Widget and design a campaign around it, you may as well convert it to a Facebook application and make it available to another 60 million people. Remember you can also do targeted advertising on Facebook to better attract your niche to your widget or app.

7. Give it a home.

It amazes me how many great branded Widgets out there are so hard to find when you are deliberately looking for them, I usually end up finding them at download.com. So why not start a microsite for the widget: www.nikerunadaywidget.com or www.nationalgeographicwidget.com or something like that, where you can have a central landing page for downloading, embedding and sharing of your branded Widget. It is my belief that this practice would automatically elevate your quality Widget above that of all the other half assed attempts out there.

8. Include your Widget in your advertising campaigns.

Like it or not, Widgets are the latest accepted advertising and branding platform so add it to your product / brand's marketing campaign right up alongside your banner, mag and TV adverts, posters, and web presence. I can almost guarantee you that you can measure a much more solid ROI on your Widget than you can on your traditional medias.

9. Why not run an advertising campaign about your Widget?

Want to show that your company is forward thinking or at the edge of the latest technologies? Or maybe you have a Widget that can drive sales or will really increase brand interaction. Why not run a campaign in traditional and online media about this Widget? Having the landing page mentioned above will definitely help you with this campaign as a referral point or a call to action. If you position your Widget as the central point of your campaign, you will definitely get big hits but more importantly, you'll be able to track the ROI of all your efforts via the Widget's tracking.

Why Marketers Should be Paying Attention to Widgets

Just had my first article as a guest writer published on Bizcommunity. It's entitled 'Why Marketers Should be Paying Attention to Widgets'.

 

Go have a look at it here and if you have any comments, do so on this post. As always, I want to hear from you.

Get the inside scoop of what I will be talking about at the New Media Marketing Conference

This is my first foray into filming myself for online video. The Zoopy team asked me to create an introduction video of what I will be talking about at the New Media Marketing Conference so I thought I'd let my readers see it first!

And for those who have asked what I look like, this ones for you as well:

Why I think Web 3.0 is a Load of Nonsense

You know, I still hear a decent amount of people debating what Web 2.0 is and how to define it. The CEO of Google refers to it as a marketing term (this confuses me somewhat) whereas other people define it in many different way: ‘a shift in who and how content is created’ or ‘user-generated content’ or ‘new technologies and platforms that have revolutionized the way we use the Internet’ etc. So why are we even talking about 3.0 when we aren't truly sure what 2.0 is yet?

“Web 2.0 is a paradigm shift much like democracy is to a former dictatorship state”

I have a broader more sociological (ish) view of what Web 2.0 is (don’t worry, I’m getting to my point about 3.0): Web 2.0 is a paradigm shift in the way people interact with the Internet and it’s users, much like Democracy is to former dictatorship state.



Figure 1 below is the traditional information model and consists of the model TV, newspapers, magazines and even the Internet used to operate with. Basically, they held all the information at a central point to where everyone would come to view it. So basically they held the power and usually if you wanted a piece of the space, you paid handsomely for it. So content was controlled, skewed and biased and terms were dictated to you to a certain degree.




However in figure 2, Web 2.0 has opened up the game to allow anyone to publish content and be influential with it as well, I like to refer to this as the Lunatic Fringe Model as all the information and content movement resides on the outer edge of the model and there is little control over what is said and how it moves. So people dictate what content is online, much like a democracy. So in essence, Web 2.0 technology is not some new fangled way of thinking, it is simply a way of the Internet aligning with how everything else happens in the real world. Purchasing power has long shifted back to the consumer (the masses), who runs the country (in theory) is decided by the people (the masses), and online content is now created and approved or disapproved by Internet users (the masses).





Now people want to go and shift this entire paradigm again (only a short small years later) by coining the phrase Web 3.0? So if the Internet was a country, which has shifted from a dictatorship to a democracy and it’s all working pretty well and more people are interested, why on earth would we want to go and change it to Communism or something else?

Now I understand that the way Web 2.0 works has changed a bit since it first broke out but I don’t think it’s changed enough to warrant a new version. To me it sounds like a few glory hoggers have seen a ripple and called it a Tsunami just in case it turns into one so that they can say they were the first to spot it. For me Web 3.0 is another universe away, how about we take it easy and let 2.0 play itself out and if we really need to acknowledge some ripples, let rather call it Web 2.1. Not such a dramatic change but a change none the less.

10 Things I Hate About Web 2.0 in South Africa

1. Even on the best ADSL connection you can buy for home use, I still cannot watch a streaming video on Youtube without a break to buffer every 2 minutes, like a fat guy at the gym.

2. Of the measly 6 or 7 million people in South Africa using the Internet only about 35 of them actually know what Web 2.0 is about, which makes blogging about it from a South African point of view pretty pointless.

3. Too many of those 35 people 'who are in the know' think they are in some sort of special members only club and ignore people they don't know (I've heard of quite a few incidents lately) which is very ironic as some of the core principals of Web 2.0 philosophy is about sharing, engaging and being generous with your time. Worldwide web 2.0 practitioners like Neville Hobson, Anna Farmery and Vinny Lingham are great examples of being open and helpful and set an example that we should all follow..

4. There is life beyond Facebook on the new Internet. Try explaining that to 90% of the South Africans using the Internet.

5. Try explaining the benefits of Twitter to this lot.

6. While CEOs like Bill Marriott and companies such as Dell and Coca Cola are actively involved in blogging, I'm still explaining to my peers what a blog is. Not a single other person I have asked at my company knows what a blog is and why it is different to a website. How many years has it been now since the first blog?

7. Try getting a budget approved for bringing the ol' corporate website into Web 2.0 arena to this lot.

8. Laaikit.com sends decent traffic my way but it is so damn manual. Why can't I just click on a button like every other book marking type site?

9. In order to promote your South African blog, you have to focus on all the usual suspects: Digg, Delicious, Stumble but then also Laaikit, Afrigator, Amatomu and now I hear there are more in the pipeline. Eish!

10. You have major online retail sites such as Incredible Connection that 'should dispatch (DISPATCH, not even receive!) your Laptop order within 6 (SIX!) working days' yet an amateur businessman on Ebay UK will have the laptop same laptop at your door the next day at half the price. So we haven't even perfected Web 1.0, but we want to try and move forward with the rest of the world.

Get off my back Google

What the hell? Every time I try to search something on Google today, I get this stupid message. First time I've seen it so not sure what I need to do about it. Any ideas?

And no, I am not using bots, spyware or "spurious software"!