Imagine getting invited to a business networking event to launch a business network and a business networking portal for SMEs. You accept the invite graciously and even invite a fellow business associate along to the event in good faith. Thinking of course that because the event is all about business, your associate can also benefit because he – like you – is in business.

As you get to the entrance of the hotel you notice the tags worn by the welcoming team. You recognise the name of the business on the tags from some interaction. You think.. you wonder.. you ponder.. and BAM! The lights go on. YOU HAVE JUST BEEN SCREWED. HARD TOO.

The name on the tags are that of a business you know. You know that business because 7 months ago you sat down with the owner of that business. You and that person had a common gripe about how a certain annual business event in your city is executed. They saw your public outcry on a social network about the ineffective aspects of this particular annual business event and invited you to their office for a meeting. At this meeting you poured out your heart. You spoke about how passionate you are about business in your city. You spoke about forming a business network that will be backed up by an online portal. You excitedly expounded on how you envision this portal working and contributing toward establishing and growing a vibrant business community. You just spoke and spoke.

Now here you are, at the launch of the very business event you so passionately spoke about to this person – as a guest.

The realisation that everything you are going to see and hear on that evening is actually your own vision brings tears to your eyes and a feeling of something cold and sharp stuck in your heart. Then you get inside the venue where the business networking event is being held and you find that a former protege of yours – obviously unknowingly – is part and parcel of the proceedings. His business is facilitating the multimedia side of the night’s proceedings. You stand in the auditorium and you witness your vision for business in your city being spoken about as if you wrote the script for that business networking event yourself.

And on realising that someone just screwed you hard, you vow to never share valuable information with fellow business persons ever again. From that point on everybody that requires your expertise or time will pay for the privilege. You will never divulge your vision for your business or any other business again unless there’s an invoice and a payment involved.

It is after all just BUSINESS; never PERSONAL

You see social media is THEEEE most dynamic and evolutionary of all media channels and platforms. Whatever is hip today may evolve tomorrow through the introduction of a plugin or a complementary application, rendering what you learnt today futile. And so there will always be new applications introduced. Just today I started using Twylah – a new application that creates branded pages with your tweets. Just this past Friday I had no idea Twylah existed. Such is the nature of social media dear friends.

So where was I again..? Oh yeah. On Monday 29 August 2011 we will be launching The Social Media Starter Pack. This is an interactive online course in the basics and the fundamentals of Social Media. We will start right at the beginning, l-o-o-o-n-g before you follow the first person on Twitter or make your first Facebook friend (for those fortunate enough to still have their individuality intact). We’ll start in the “Garden of Eden” of Social Media, and systematically take students through the foundations, laying your first few bricks for the walls, building and fortifying and eventually the roof, i.e how they all work together as one massive brand catalyst. What’s great about the course is that it will be facilitated using the very platforms we will teach you about. There are no physical classes or timetables that you have to adhere to. You learn at your own pace and have access to your facilitator at all times – via the social networks we will teach you about. So in essence this is a course about social media that you will learn using social media. The course is 6 months long, of which 3 months will be spent learning how the tools work and the remainder actually applying what you learnt in real world branding, marketing or promotion. There will be no tests and assignments – as you know it, however you will be scored on the Google CV you manage to put together over the duration of the course having used nothing but what you learnt in the course.

We have already signed up individuals that were close enough to the agency to know about the course. We’ve also just signed up the entire staff component of a small import/export company too.. and guess what? They’ve all paid their deposits already. So we believe there is a hunger for this information and know-how out there. We aim to sign up 50 people a week in month 1 and a further 400 by month 2. We’ll also be doing free talks and free one-day workshops on The Social Media Starter Pack, but these will merely serve as introductions to the actual course.

So if you feel you can benefit from what our agency’s about to launch, get cracking right now and make contact with us by clicking HERE.

Fast forward to 2011. Marketing has changed. A lot too. Those 4 Ps are not a relevant as they used to be. Take for example Product. Do people still buy as much based on the name or the packaging or do they buy more based on who’s behind the product and what they know about them?

It is for this reason that I’d like to offer an alternative letter. One that’s become more and more relevant as marketing evolved between 1995 and 2011 (which is also how long I have been involved in internet marketing). That is the letter C. Let’s look at why it’s more relevant than its predecessor, Mr. P:

Content

Conversation

Connect

Consistency

Community

Then in 2008 I got really upset, having done loads of spec design work for people who never paid me for time spent, when emarketing agency Quirk launched Ideabounty – a crowdsourcing tool that aggregated creative ideas and rewarded the person that submitted the best one – monetarily. My heart went out to the designers and creatives who submitted ideas because I knew first-hand what it was like to conceptualise and spend time creating and then not get paid for your efforts.. and I believed with all my heart that the guys at Quirk had no idea. After Ideabounty was up and running for about a while and I had read two books on the subject, I started “getting it”. I really got it… this thing called crowdsourcing.

So what does Eran Eyal have to do with a crowdsourcing tool ?? Well.. A lot actually. Eran Eyal and his partner Eric Edelstein are mere days away from launching South Africa’s (and the world’s.. I just love my country that much) very first CROWDSOURCING SOCIAL NETWORK, and they’re calling it “Evly”

According to their official press release, Evly will use “a custom built drag and drop website builder available for free to registered users.” It is a network of communities that will respond to user-created challenges and by doing so create solutions for the creators of those challenges. Crowdsourcing- for those not in the know – is a way you can go about picking the individual brains of many in a collective.. knowing that many is a whole lot better than one. Not only does this method create countless options, but stimulates the possibility of ideas going viral at the same time. Each website on the platform works pretty much like the fan pages on “you know where”, with the difference being that here you get your own website that could enable you to grow your own network based on whatever need you want to find a solution for.Evly will provide the “crowd-ing” and “social-ing” functionality you will need to grow a community.

The site uses the insights harvested from the existing t-shirt business’ crowdsourcing model. These insights contribute to the distinctive-ness of the evly platform in a major way. The site gives any Tom, Geek and Harry the opportunity to harness collective intelligence, skills, talent and collaboration.. this with access to a humungous network of people. Eran Eyal asserts that “The social web is going to be about a world of PRO-active website creators and community members constantly looking to solve new problems and build solutions in an environment saturated by the right tools.” Evly has all the the tools to enable anybody to achieve their desired objectives. These include community engagement, sourcing answers to any question, raising funds, and researching your market through things like comment analysis, direct feedback and voting polls.

evly CEO Eric Edelstein lets us know that ‘evly.com allows interaction with a purpose rather than people just interacting for the sake of it! Companies and individuals from all across the globe are now beginning to see that they can solve problems by tapping into a larger knowledge base, at a fraction of the price and in a much shorter time through the Internet.” Evly will open up a world of communities to every evly user. By joining evly.com or a community built on evly, each user will be able to explore the evly network through their own personalised dashboard. Here they can search, discover and participate across the entire network of communities. Predictions for the growth of the platform currently sits at 35 million in its first 3 years.

The evly network has these levels users can operate on:

Level 1: Starter – Individuals and companies can set up crowdsourcing websites and pose challenges for free. All evly websites will benefit from participating through evly.com’s ‘network
of networks’ in order to utilize collective knowledge.

Level 2: Customisation – Building on from Level 1, the first premium model of evly will give the website owner more control over the design and branding of their website. Website owners
will be able to create a fully customized website in minutes.

Level 3: Independence – Will afford website owners the option to remove themselves from the evly network. Website owners will also have 100% custom branding, as well as ownership of
all member information.

Evly.com is currently opening up 450 spots for BETA testers. If you would like to be one of the select few to test this revolutionary platform register now at www.evly.com