My first post for 2012 and I thought I’d kick off by talking about the lessons I’ve learnt at the start of 2011 and 2012 respectively. It’s actually the same lesson but in two different contexts. That lesson is that WHEN YOU BEND OVER BACKWARDS, YOU’RE BOUND TO GET BITTEN IN THE ASS.

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.

So I hopped over to Biz Community this past Friday afternoon for my weekly read on what’s popping in the creative and communication industries and there it is in front of me – larger than life. “Durban Chamber of Commerce does deal with FNB”.

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.

This question has been popping up in my head everytime I read a company profile.

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”?

Well, I think the business community was pleasantly surprised last week Thursday when Linkedin made the announcement that companies are now able to update their status on the social network. This is a breath of fresh air in business social networking as the focus until now have been exclusively on Facebook as a marketing tool in the social space.

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.

I just stumbled upon what ABSA bank calls an “innovation” in banking whilst reading the Consumer Fair paper. I was appalled that they would call this an innovation, because this is just one more clever way of stealing from poor people. I can’t see this new “innovation” aimed at any other demographic.

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.

I just got back from a client meeting where it was agreed in principle that our agency will be the buzz creators and the official providers of digital evangelism for their product currently under development. So I hopped over to Memeburn to see what’s currently being coughed into South African cyberspace by those who spread the germs of e-marketing, technology, e-commerce and generally all things digital. Right at the top of the index page I found this article titled “4 Reasons your business shouldn’t be on Twitter”. I read it in its entirety and frankly I disagree with what Tony Seifart says. Here’s why.. my reasons why EVERY business should be on Twitter.

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?

I just had the most disappointing social media customer service experience ever. Yes EVER. E-V-V-E-E-R-R !!!

I have been let down by Amazon when I ordered 8 books on 2010 and only received 2, with no apology or explanation. Just a refund 4 months later. I have also been let down by Pick ‘n Pay in 2008 when I went to buy prepaid ADSL vouchers and the cashier told me – with a straight face – that they don’t sell Axxess vouchers. But today’s experience takes the cake and the party.

I was due to fly to Johannesburg in August to visit the Sign Africa exhibition and to meet a prospective business partner and a prospective client. So because of this I have been keeping tabs on the Velvet Sky website since early in July after I have been hearing radio ads claiming that the relatively new airline has tickets from Durban to Johannesburg available for as low as R200. After about 2 weeks of checking daily I gave up. They had no R200 tickets available. Long story short, I never went to Jozi due to business in Durban intensifying. But I was still disappointed that what I heard on radio and what I found on their website was not the same thing.

So this morning I logged what you see in the above image on the Velvet Sky Facebook Page – located at http://on.fb.me/pBn8hU and to my amazement not even 3 minutes later the post was “hidden” (yes you can hide posts you don’t want seen on your page if you’re the administrator of the page). They bloody took my post – a genuine concern I raised in the interest of people like myself that fly at least once a month – and removed it from where it cannot be seen by “the public”, despite the fact that they willingly chose to position themselves on this public digital playground called Facebook. My enquiry read as follows:

“I wanted to fly to Jozi from Durban on 24 August 2011 and I had a look at your prices in July 2011 already. There were no R200 tickets available (even closer to the date), yet your ads on Hindvani FM said “Fly from Durban to Johannesburg for as little as R200″. Explain?”

I could not believe what I saw. So the first question that popped up in my head was: “Why the dickens does Velvet Sky play in the social media space if they cannot hang with criticism and having their dirty laundry aired in public?”. Somebody over at the airline need to sign up for The Social Media Starter Pack.. cos they’re clearly clueless.

PS. JUST AN OBSERVATION AFTER I HAD A CLOSER LOOK AT THE VELVET SKY FACEBOOK PAGE. NOT A SINGLE CONVERSATION. JUST A WHOLE LOT OF SHOUTING ABOUT THEIR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES. THEY RESPOND TO NOBODY.

It was 2007. I had just started using Facebook and received an invite to Gmail from Vinny Lingham, whom I wanted to help by contributing to the Sekamo local custom search engine. I then happened upon the website for The Pavilion, a shopping mall here in Durban. The website was horrible. It lacked clear direction as far as UX is concerned and it was just cluttered and ugly. (I even had an incognito meeting with the sales guy for the company who developed the website to find out how they operate)

I then found the person in charge of marketing for The Pavilion and pitched her a website make-over, stating in no uncertain terms why I believe a make-over is necessary and what I would do to improve on the existing website. She was fully in agreement in me, however she was on the verge of leaving office to take a position elsewhere and would be replaced in days to come. I then waited and as soon as her replacement, Zenobia Ismail, took office I dropped her an email with the same pitch containing full details of how I believe the mall could harness their daily foot traffic and turn it into a branded community with content, technology, social networking and multimedia. Zenobia too was in agreement and had me know that a website make-over was definitely on the cards. She assured me that she would get back to me as soon as they are ready. I received an email from a junior functionary a few months later with some forms I had to complete to be part of.. wait for it.. wait for it.. a TENDER for the contract to develop the shopping centre website. And the greatest part of all is that I got this email 2 days before the closing date.

Needless to say my agency, which was a one man show at the time – did not get the tender. Having only 2 days to prepare documents amidst servicing existing clients was a rather tall order at the time. But that was miniscule when compared with the fact that I had already shared with these people exactly what they lacked and what should be done to improve. In fact I gave them a spec for sourcing and commissioning a web development agency.

So that was my first expensive lesson in sharing your ideas with functionaries in the corporate space before you have a contract in place. Just 3 years prior I had logged a suggestion on the MTN website for a voucher I tentatively called “Tenbux”. It would be a lower denomination that would sell virtually via USSD and a loose network of vendors. The idea was implemented in 2005 without a shred of credit coming my way, but didn’t last long because the people that implemented it were also just petty functionaries with no foresight on insight. But the lesson here is that we have to be very careful who we share our ideas with. People will jack your intellectual property and pass it off as their own. Only the long run will tell how much vision they really have, but by then that ship would have sailed for you already.

So watch yourself.

On Monday 29 August 2011 Fluence New Marketing, the digital advertising agency I am the CEO of will launch the first interactive online course in Social Media in South Africa. Yes we know there are other online courses and a number of them are interactive as well. However, after researching the social media education space, we found that 90% of the time people learn how to use social media from some guy standing in the front of a class explaining his touche off not knowing whether anybody actually grasps this staff. We also found that too many “experts” do 1-day and 3-day workshops and seminars on this stuff. Social media cannot be understood in a day. That’s theft. Bamboozlement of the highest order. But the cherry on the cake for me personally (and I suspect the staff at Fluence New Marketing as well) is that the companies and organisations that facilitate these courses actually issue course manuals. Ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

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.

It started one day when I jumped in taxi in the Musgrave area to go to Overport City, and the taxi driver tried to spark a conversation with me in Zulu – his mother tongue. I politely responded in English making known that I am unable to converse with him in his home language (I was partially lying because I can hold very basic conversations in Zulu, but I hate starting anything I cannot finish). I proceeded to tell him that I am not Zulu-speaking. His response to that statement was a classic. Here are his exact words: “So you are not African. You are from Afrika?” I almost burst out laughing, but for fear he might offend easily I refrained.

I had forgotten that incident until earlier this year when South Africa held local government elections and the ideologues came out to play. So we got to hear all the decade old political drivel that was instrumental in our ruling party’s failure to transform itself from a revolutionary movement into a well-run political party in a democratic political dispensation. (wow did you catch all that? I can be a politician hey?) Anyway.. the one thing that really hit me hard is when I read in the Sunday Times (the only publication I find worthy of my money these days) that the ANC agenda for liberation was for that of the Black people in general (Indians, Africans and Coloureds) and for Africans in particular. I felt betrayed. Simply because even though I was never caught, locked up and tortured by what we called the “SBs” in the 80s, I would have gone through that gladly – knowing that I’m doing it so ALL THE PEOPLE in this country can be free (yes white people as privileged as they were.. were also in bondage but that’s a topic for another blogpost). Not Africans in particular.

Which brings me to the nagging question I can’t find an answer to. What is African really? I’m from the Southern tip of South Africa – Africa if you will. History teaches me that the people that spawned me were traversing the mountains, coastlines, fields and plains of this country eons before there were even such a thing as Xhosas, Zulus, Pedis and Sothos. So despite the interracial procreation, from where I stand most Coloured people are the offspring of the Autshumaos of yesteryear. Does that not make Coloured people African? And what if I was Nigerian when thetaxi driver posed his question? Am I not still African? (as opposed to “from Afrika)

So with me being the offspring of a union between a woman whose forefathers inhabited the South since before 1652 (first recorded history) and a man from the Congo.. what am I? What is my ethnicity? And in the genepool of all South Africans.. What is my brand?