Yes I am back

But why exactly am I back, because I’ve always been here, running Fluence New Marketing, Durban’s only full service digital marketing agency. The story goes like this:

In May of 2010 – one month before the FIFA Soccer World Cup could kick off – a certain blog aggregator agency ran a promo to have bloggers blog about a certain automobile brand and the author of the best post would win some prize or the other. I proceeded to blog about this automobile brand and even helped a few people who didn’t quite “get” what was expected of them. So I wrote my post and after about 2 hours of just checking and double-checking, I was happy with my work. The post wasn’t that long, but I was very satisfied with what I had crafted.

24 Hours go past and I decided to check out what some people whom I had assisted the day before had done.. you know.. just bloggers comparing notes. To my absolute bewilderment a fellow blogger had decided – disgustingly – to copy my post word for word and submit it to the aggregator agency as their own original work. Boy was I pissed.. I then notified the agency that I am withdrawing from the campaign and clearly cited the reason why. The ass on the other side of my email then told me there was nothing they could do because the blogs belonged to the individuals who participated. What an ass! I never asked them to act. I just cited my reason for withdrawing.

That experience – knowing someone whom you know and respect (up to that point yes) has just shamelessly stolen from you – was enough for me. I went cold to blogging. Completely cold. To the point where I almost turned the lights out – but didn’t. Gladly so. Because for some strange reason I have the urge to blog again – 27 months later.

So here’s to being back in the blogosphere and churning out post after post after post. Cheers!!

If you would like to learn more about best practices around database acquisition, growth and management. How to optimally design your email communications. How to improve your email delivery. How to gain insights from your email analytics and set benchmarks then this workshop is for you.

Durban Workshop

Date: 15 May 2012
Time: 11:00 am
Place: Belaire Hotel, 151 Snell Parade, North Beach, Durban

The workshop will focus on the following topics:

Database Management
Email Design
Email Delivery
Metrics and Analytics

Book your seat to the workshop by clicking HERE!

I have spoken and facilitated workshops in both the other two major cities of South Africa (won’t call them by name). I have addressed crowds of great diversity and from a wide variety of specific industries. Never before have I addressed just a group of my peers. Never before have I been asked to speak at an event where I did not have to prepare anything at all. I am to speak of my journey as an entrepreneur, which should be fairly simple right? Right.

It started when a client of our agency, Khuzmag Trading, declined to pay us by debit order when they signed up for our digital marketing services in January 2011. The conversation then jumped to who we’re using to debit our clients. By this time we have just heard the news that our existing provider has been acquired by a bigger finance software company and I was in great anticipation of higher fees. So after agreeing to accept payments via EFT, I enquired from Njabulo Magubane (the Khuzmag CEO) who their provider is and that is how I got introduced to Three Peaks.

Fast forward to 2012. Three Peaks is now also our debit service provider and Njabulo Magubane a trusted client and friend. Then I get invited to a workshop where Njabulo will be speaking. As his company’s digital marketing service provider I paid for and attended the workshop. I found it simplistically fascinating. Njabulo spoke for around 20 – 30 minutes on his journey as an entrepreneur. It was great listening to a fellow business man speak about things other than what his company does, their clients or their staff.

It is called the Interactive Entrepreneurial Workshop for a very good reason.

I absolutely loved the concept of a business person speaking at a workshop without punting his company. Just straight talk about the life journey to where he or she find themselves at that very moment. It was at this workshop where I met Cheri, Debbie and Nomvula of Three Peaks – all people I’ve been speaking to digitally for months at that point. Cheri and I then spoke about the possibility of me addressing the workshop at some point in future and I agreed.

And that’s how we arrived at the “Interactive Entrepreneurial Workshop with Arthur Charles Van Wyk”, scheduled for 20 April 2012.

On the morning of Friday, 20 April 2012 just after 8am I will be addressing a group of my peers, i.e business men and women from the city of Durban and surrounds (everybody from outta town are also welcome to attend). The subject matter is very simple. All about the personal and professional journey I undertook to get me to where I am today. I’m not sure they know that my telling this particular story could take a full day. And it would be a full day of intense listening cos my story is fascinating – even to me.

So here’s looking forward to fascinating some, mesmerising others and even educating one or two at this month’s Interactive Entrepreneurial Workshop hosted by Three Peaks.

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

I started working for Sytech Supplies as their Head of Brand Marketing in March 2008. When I got there I did a thorough assessment of what the company had in terms of brand collateral and what they did not have, so as to give me a clear idea of what to do and where to start. So after spending my first week doing this, I had a meeting with my manager John Tellis and the owner of the company to discuss the way forward. One of my first suggestions to them was a multi-domain web strategy. I suggested we get the local and international domains for the full company name Sytech Supplies and just for the word Sytech. They both refused point blank. I went back to my office with my tail between my legs. After days of pondering, I thought: “Screw the both of them”, and I registered the domains anyway. Long story short.. I carried the cost of registering and hosting those 3 domains from April 2008 until January 2011 without even telling anybody in the company that I did that. I did it because it needed to be done. So when I left the company in February 2011 – after I realised my season has come to an end – the company owner Malcolm Groger refused to pay the little bit of money I was owed and sign my provident fund forms until I hand over (listen to this shit) “THE COMPANY’S DOMAINS”. I kinda had no choice cos I wanted to get closure to the quagmire that caused me to leave in the first place. Besides I had no use for the domains. But that was a great lesson in spending your own money thinking you’re helping someone else with more money than you.

Then in 2010, after a whole lotta back and forth emails between myself and Lelo Boyana, my company started hosting the Just Curious website – www.justcurious.co.za. I quickly realised that the amount of traffic the website was drawing would grow phenomenally fast, so without telling Lelo I started renting additional server space to accommodate her website’s traffic. This cost me an extra R400 per month (in dollar to rand exchange.. it would fluctuate some months) and I collected only r120 per month from Lelo for hosting. By month 6 I started talks with Lelo about getting her website’s advertising business (her site’s traffic is hotttt), but she had some guy who she has a deal with even though he wasn’t doing squat. So I held out for the advertising business and in the meantime continued paying the R400 extra to host her site and collecting the R120 from her every month. I then started talking to her about getting a Virtual Private Server or Dedicated Hosting for her site because her traffic was really going through the roof. She and her co-bloggers also were not familiar with how to optimise images for loading time and minimal bandwidth consumption, and that was a real concern I shared with her. In addition I had to adjust her site’s available bandwidth every single month too because her traffic just grew and grew. I even offered her the low price of a VPS for R900pm – which she declined. Long story short.. in December 2011 our provider in the States blankly refused to host a site with that level of traffic on a shared server and shut her site down. I conveyed the news to her (same thing I preached to her for 9 months prior to this happening), and she instead opted to move her site to another hosting provider (from whom she moved again less than a month later). I now pay R400 less every month and that R400 expense now gets split between my daughters’ bank accounts. The great thing about this is that on the same day I lost that R120 monthly income, I won two pitches that gives me a monthly income of 18 times that R120 she paid – per client. Still the deed is done. I have paid more money than I made for something i was hoping would materialise – and never did.

So here’s something all you young entrepreneurs and uber ambitious business people can learn from. It’s not a bad thing to bend over backwards for your client or your boss, but make sure the person you’re doing it for knows and understand what you’re doing for their benefit and make sure your efforts are rewarded – in whatever way you deem satisfactory. DON’T JUST BEND OVER BACKWARDS. IT’S TOO EASY TO GET BITTEN IN THE ASS.

Then on Monday morning I swung by the bank to collect my new cheque account card, which Carino Singh at FNB Musgrave Road was kind enough to get me in record time. I also saw Mahomed Akoob – the business banking manager, and he emailed me the form I need to complete to get this done. I am submitting the form today and expect that before the end of this week our digital marketing agency should be a member of the Durban Chamber.

This is probably one of the best things I’ve seen happen for businesses of any size or shape in the South African commercial space. Well done FNB.

Whoever develops the copy for business documentation suffers from a serious sense of misguidance as far as their target or captive audience is concerned. Take as an example these lines from the website of a business organisation based here in Durban:

“…aspires to be a thought leader in the area of efficient, holistically aligned business and investment vibrancy.. creating a thriving and inclusive economy through leveraging the organisational capacity of the private and public sector..”

I can’t begin to imagine who wrote this, and even less who it is written for. What does it say to the first time reader of business documentation? Instead of that first line would it not be easier to instead say: “We are middle-men for investors wanting to invest and business owners seeking investment”. The idea is to write in words that humans can understand because the objective is for humans to read it, understand it and act on it. How then will we get people to act on something that can’t comprehend?

So the question to ask ourselves is whether “business English” really work in business, or whether it is more a burden than a benefit. Are we really communicating when we verbally regurgitate dictionaries at people in the hope they will be impressed enough to want to do business with us because we appear smart?

Do we absolutely have to say “Mr. Anderson” when all we really have to say is “Neo”?

It is now a lot easier for companies to communicate with their audiences on Linkedin whereas in the past you had to first “befriend” someone that works for the company before you can get acces sto any company information that is not available online. Now you have a direct line to companies. It is also easier for small business owners to reach their constituents who are active in the social space. Information dissemination has been made much easier as well, especially information targeted at a “switched-on” audience with a direct interest in a company’s products and services. It also makes it easier to keep tabs on your competitors.

Linkedin is also now a whole lot more social, with this added functionality that encourages and empowers two-way communication.

Life on Linkedin just got a whole lot more interesting.

On their website it reads (paraphrasing):

Would you like:

• To not bear the risk of having to carry cash around
• A safe, convenient and affordable way of receiving money from your employer or relatives
• The convenience of being able to pay for goods or service by card
• To own a card that is valid for a limited period of time, but can be renewed

Firstly, crime has been with us since 6 April 1652 and we have found ways to deal with it legally and otherwise. So playing on people’s fears of getting robbed was used in the early 90s to force employers to force employees to open bank accounts. That way banks could get their hands on the money poor people work their behinds off for. And this was done without consulting the very people who would be affected by it. Now the banks have come with another clever scheme to get some more money out of poor people. The Prepaid Debit Card.

Here’s why I think it’s just dumb.

Just think about this for a moment. You have to take your CASH. Go to a bank and deposit this CASH. This CASH goes into a Prepaid Debit Card account. You then take your Prepaid Debit Card and buy goods and services with this Prepaid Debit Card instead of the CASH you had in the first place. Here already you could have saved yourself a trip to the bank and you might have already passed a few of the stores you buy from on your way to the bank. Now if you’re at risk of getting robbed, doesn’t it mean that you can get robbed on your way to the bank to deposit your CASH already?

Then they say you have the convenience of not having to queue. When last did an ABSA executive shop at Shoprite or Mr. Price. Let’s face it again. This card is aimed at people that shop at these stores. No high flyer in business is gonna take R10 000, deposit that into a Prepaid Debit Card account just so he can go to Game or Makro to buy a fridge with his Prepaid Debit Card. That’s completely absurd. So we agree the target market here is poor people – right? Having said that, when it comes to cost there is the cost of depositing the money. Then there is the cost of transacting via Saswitch or whichever networks are used when you swipe your card at Pick ‘n Pay or Shoprite. These are the things they don’t tell you. ABSA claims there’s only one fee for deposits, but we all know that the free lunch is a myth.

The, the chutzpah, they say that with your Prepaid Debit Card you have unlimited “ATM withdrawals”. Why would anyone want to take CASH, deposit it into an account only to withdraw it again. So not only are they targeting poor people. They are convinced that poor people are idiots too.

I’ll say no more on the matter. From where i stand this is yet another perfectly marketed and executed programme to suck yet more money from already poor South Africans in a bid to enrich investors, shareholders and executives. Shame on you ABSA. Today Tomorrow Together my behind.

1. Stay informed
People run companies and one of the ways we can stay effective in any position in business is to always learn new things, update ourselves with developments in our immediate and distant environment, industry and geographic location. Twitter is a great way to stay updated with what’s happening and you can do this simply by following people. You don’t have to tweet to learn on Twitter. The beauty of this is that you can also filter who you follow so that you don’t have to subject yourself to just any crap making its way into the Twittersphere. There is also the need to connect with like-minded minds, and this is made extremely easy on Twitter. Twitter satisfies a number of basic human needs, i.e to connect, to communicate, to learn and to share. Be human and tweet.

2. Brand Messaging
No business can survive without clients. And every client is a prospect before they eventually sign up for whatever you’re offering. And before any client signs up you have no idea whether they are a potential client or not until you reach out to them and communicate what you offer and they might need. Just like that you have no idea who on Twitter might need what you offer. So use Twitter as a messaging service to share what your company does, what your company’s about, who you sell to, who you buy from, who pisses you off, who makes you smile etc. It is through the messages that your company puts out into the ether – whether via advertising or otherwise – that people get to know what your company’s about before they make the decision to do business with you. Why not on Twitter as well?

3. Monitoring
With information on Twitter being generally honest, transparent and sometimes brutally so, Twitter is a great tool – perhaps the greatest – to find out more about your industry, your business environment, your product or service and perhaps even your company. Knowing what’s out there and the real-time nature of information on Twitter creates flexibility to manoeuvre and make powermoves that can save your company money, make your company money or just prevent mistakes that could be made had you not had access to such a rich, immediate source of information.

4. Traffic
Twitter can be used to send traffic to other online destinations, from where you can then send traffic to your products and services.. or you can send traffic directly there from Twitter. If you tweet good, valuable and useful content, chances are these tweets will be retweeted by others to their followings (which may be much larger than yours) and may even go viral.

There are a truckload more reasons I can spit at you right now, but I will stay with 4 for now. Twitter is a revolutionary communications tool and many downplay its effectiveness in business communication. So now that you’ve read what I have to say.. WHAT DO YOU THINK?