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"!

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!

Lessons Learnt from the Fake Storm

Marketing in Rambles 2: Lessons Learnt from the Fake Storm

Now that the media storm (he he!) has died down, I feel I can talk about the fake tornado incident without putting my head on the block.

It’s amazing what one email from a seemingly credible source can do. It created one of the media events (maybe anomalies is a better term) of the year: the tornado that never was. Even I, a fellow colleague of the guy who will probably be sacked for his email prowess, hit the tarmac at 3pm and burnt that diesel all the way home, closed all the windows and brought in all the outside furniture. In my defence there were some ominous dark clouds around, very rare for a warm Joburg afternoon!

So anyway, the economy grinded to a halt, the radios went mad and the roads jammed up, all because of the year’s most effective viral marketing email; whether the author knew it or not. Could this be turned into a case study on effective email marketing? I think so.

The recipe for a successful disaster:

Take a relevant topic, send it from a trusted source, at an opportune time (there was a tiny tornado just outside of JHB the day before) give incentive to pass it on and hey presto you’ve got a successful viral campaign! How can you use these parameters to create a successful campaign in your environment?

Were the results measurable?OK, asides from the panic, chaos and doomsday comparisons.

Some of you will know what I do for a living and will know that I have access to the Netcare website stats so without giving away too much information, hits for the day went up 750% compared to the averages, the webmaster’s mailbox got jammed, and the search facility, press release and emergency section of the site have never seen so much love. The search words around the website were pertinent as well: ‘storm’, ‘freak tornado’, ‘traffic chaos’, ‘are we going to die’? Now if he was selling something on these emails via the website, the email originator probably would have got a promotion but instead he will probably get the sack which is measurement enough of a successful viral campaign under such circumstances.

What do I think of all this? I’m not loving it, some dude in the admin department pulled off the company’s best viral campaign ever, doesn’t say much for my skills.