Xhosa Proverb of the Day

English (metaphorical):  You are late!
Xhosa:  Imfene yakho indala!
English (literal):  Your baboon is old!

Taken from the Learn Xhosa UBuntu Bridge newsletter I received today, by Craig Charnock (learnxhosa.co.za)

More from Craig’s newsletter:

DID YOU KNOW? 

It is usual for Xhosa folk to be taught to not look elders in the eyes, but rather to keep their eyes low, and to only make occasional eye contact to show that attention is there, but with humility.  In contrast, I was taught as a child that this implied dishonesty, and that direct eye contact was considered respectful.   Some say humans have become arrogant to ignore the wisdom of nature.  Well then, our salvation will lie in our humility and the humility of Xhosa people is inspirational!

They have courses starting in July: go there

Social media sites are creating a new dot-com bubble

We all remember the infamous tech boom and then bust of the late 1990s. As long as a stock had an “e” pre-fix and a “.com” suffix, it was considered a triple-A rated investment by financial advisers — something you couldn’t afford not to bet your IRA and your kids’ college education fund on. Then came the revelation that — whoops! — a lot of these stocks represented companies in website-name only, not actual revenue-producing businesses, and down went the market… and a lot of portfolios with it.

Despite the losses, this cycle of investing in companies whose value was a matter of pure speculation and hype nonetheless pressed on, subsequently creating the Enron debacle and, later, the Wall Street collapse. Only at that point, after more than a decade of financial rape and speculative pillaging, did we finally seem ready to reject an economy built on Bubblenomics. As bailouts drained the treasury, our righteous anger could have been summed up by that famous Bushism: “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me [twice]… can’t get fooled again.”

And yet, somehow, here we are again, watching the speculative class now using the hype around social media technology to try to reinflate the ol’ dot-com bubble that started the whole debacle. To know it’s a bubble is to look at the difference between what speculators are doing and what advertisers are saying.

On the speculative side, the Bubble Reinflation Project has most recently focused on the initial public offerings of LinkedIn, a weak version of Facebook, and Groupon, a website that offers daily consumer discounts. According to Reuters, the former has only about 1,300 employees and generates only about $2 in revenue for every user it claims, but after its stock’s first week of public trading, the company’s “market value per employee was almost $7 million and about $87 per user.” The latter, set for an obscene $30 billion initial valuation, has revenue growth of 2,241 percent last year (only its second year in existence) but “its operating expenses ballooned even faster at 5,732 perecent,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

Read the rest of the article on Salon.com

Creating an online video for your company

Online video is another option for the marketer. Using social media sites, the format offers a great way to reach large audiences, and provides a nice bit of interactivity to viewers, along with conveying your video message.

Before starting to shoot, you need to clearly define your marketing goals and objectives which will in turn, define the direction of the video. Here are some typical goals companies set for their videos:

• increase traffic to the company website
• educate viewers about a (newly launched) product line or service offering
• communicate the company’s work culture
• demonstrate a diverse service offering
• demonstrate a diverse customer base
• build credibility with client & employee testimonials
• build incoming links to the company website

When creating your video, here’s some tips:

• keep it short!
• show the URL of your website throughout the video – this can be done at the end, but I always advise clients to show the URL throughout the video as a constant call-to-action.

And then once you’ve finished your video, it’s time to get it out to the world … here are a few suggestions for placing your video:

• Youtube: an absolute must! Create a Youtube channel, change the channel settings so the look-and-feel matches that of your brand and upload the video.
• Facebook: post the video to your company’s Facebook page
• LinkedIn: put your Youtube video link on your company’s LinkedIn page
• Twitter: send out a tweet to your followers with the title of your video and a link to it.

Ideally, I would recommend you hire a professional for the shooting and editing of your video. However, if this is out of your budget, then pixability.com has a great Learning Centre.

TPO will be handling press registration at Social Media event

The Press Office / Fran will be exhibiting at the Social Media World Forum Africa 2011 & Apps World Africa 2011 events at the CTICC from the 1-2 June 2011.

We will also be handling press registration for both events – find us at stand 3.

Groupon has come to town

In case you haven’t noticed … Groupon has come to town. A deal-of-the-day website started in the US that sells discounted gift certificates (called groupons), Groupon recently bought Twangoo, a local group media buying website, and since then has embarked on a massive online advertising campaign. The bright and zany ads are featuring everywhere, not surprising considering they’re currently spending R3 000 000 a month marketing through Facebook, Twitter and Google Ads.

Groupon’s customer demographic in the US is the following:

• the majority are college-educated single females
• they go out two or more times a week
• they’re avid users of social media using blogs, Facebook & Twitter.

There are 40 250 000 total subscribers and a total of 45 250 000 groupons have been sold overseas.

It’ll be interesting to see if the customer demographic is the same in South Africa.

• Read more about Groupon South Africa
• Groupon South Africa’s CEO is also speaking at Social Media World Forum Africa 2011

The most reputable companies in South Africa – 2011

The 2011 RepTrak™ Pulse survey, conducted annually by Reputation Institute South Africa, is now in its sixth year and it measures the reputation of the ten largest South African companies based on revenue. Excluded are those companies not easily recognisable by the general public, as well as those that are wholly owned subsidiaries of another company.

Turning to the drivers of corporate reputation in 2011, Reputation Institute’s South African Managing Director, Dominik Heil said that while products and services remained very important, leadership is now the second most important issue that people care about.

“It’s a sign of the difficult economic times that leadership is really important now. People want to know about and see the person with whom the buck stops. The message from this year’s survey to companies is that their CEOs play an increasingly important role in driving and protecting the reputation of the company, and must be visible in their communication with the public,” Heil added.

The survey is conducted annually in January and February and obtains over 3,000 ratings from the economically active segments of the general public – LSM 6+ in four major provinces (Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Western Cape, Eastern Cape).

The scores of the top ten listed companies in the 2011 RepTrak™ Pulse were as follows:

1. MTN – 73.91
2. ABSA – 71.86
3. Old Mutual – 70.82
4. Standard Bank – 70.10
5. Sasol – 69.10
6. Nedbank – 67.66
7. Sanlam – 66.91
8. Anglo American – 62.97
9. Telkom – 62.75
10. SAB Miller – 58.26

A RepTrak™ Pulse score is a measure of corporate reputation calculated by averaging perceptions of four indicators – trust, esteem, admiration, and good feeling – obtained from a representative sample of at least 300 local respondents who were familiar with the company. Scores range from a low of 0 to a high of 100, RepTrak™ Pulse scores that differ by more than +/-0.5 points are significantly different at the 95% confidence level.

• Click here to read more
• Click here to go to the Reputation Institute website

Ethics in PR

Excerpt taken from a speech by Theo Coggin, Executive Chairperson of Quo Vadis Communications, on Ethical Public Relations in a Multi-cultural context, Indaba Hotel, Johannesburg, Tuesday, 19 April 2011.

The words of Martin Niemoller, a prominent German theologian who opposed the Nazi regime in World War 2, are thought-provoking in this regard: “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out.” Niemoller spent seven years in a Nazi prison.

So we are faced with the issue of whether ethics are important in a society in which the Information Age is rampant and ever increasing numbers of people are able to conduct their own PR campaigns, and publish with freedom on the many social networking sites open to them.

In talking about the need for ethical public relations in the contemporary environment, one has to be on one’s guard not to be seduced by the many opportunities available for one’s messages to be published. While our modern communications environment provides exciting and hitherto unknown possibilities, the fact remains that ethical PR has to be conducted within the ambit of the age-old values of truth, honesty and transparency, to which I have referred already on a number of occasions. That is a greater challenge than we might think. For those three words, truth, honesty and transparency, often tumble off our lips with ease, and our eyebrows are raised heavenwards in shock to imagine that anyone should question that as PR practitioners we are not always gospel pure.

• Click here to read the full speech
• Click here to go to Quo Vadis Communications’ website

Facebook has added a Send button to their Like button

Rather snazzy (see below), it now enables a user to not only click the Like button but also share the content via Facebook Mail (or any other email account).

The only downside is it doesn’t work with the <iframe> tag, only XFBML (which requires the JavaScript SDK). Oh, and it also doesn’t allow the user to select the thumbnail to associate with the content that’s being shared, so the image that shows might not always be relevant (as in our case).

Try it out! http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

Facebook now requires you to be a verified developer

I’m a big fan of the Like button available in Facebook’s Developer section.  It’s rather thrilling to watch the Likes grow over time and see the different faces associated with the account.

Up until yesterday I’ve been able to go to the plugin, select my options and get the code. Now, Facebook requires you to verify yourself as a developer – either by credit card or cellphone. Apparently this requirement has been around since June 2010 but it’s the first time I’ve come across it.  Fortunately it took me a few seconds to verify myself via my cellphone, which was a relief … the thought of my credit card details sitting on some Facebook server somewhere is not particularly comforting.

What to do when grumpy employees rant on Facebook?

And when customers groan on Twitter? And moan on their blog? And what happens when this distorts your brand’s reputation and competes with the message that you’re putting out there?

Richard Telofski, author of Insidious Competition, has the solution, and he’s offering a FREE Vocus webinar on 19th May from 20:00 – 21:00 (South African time).

Click to register: http://bit.ly/itl8Mg