Psychology of Technology Blog
Lee Lefever has done it again with an excellent 3 minute video clip introducing Blogs to the lay audience. If you have seen his other Commoncraft videos you’re gonna love this one…
And so if you are keen on blogging register for my monthly Blogging for Business seminars across South Africa or request a private training session for your company.
This is a column I wrote for the Institute of Directors’ Directorship magazine – Download the scanned article here: The Cluetrain to getting Cosy with your Clients. Here’s the full article.
“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.” Cluetrain Manifesto
The term “Cluetrain” stems from a quote: “The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery” from a veteran of a firm now free-falling out of the Fortune 500. The clues are embedded in the conversations people are having in more prolific ways than ever before on the Web. And the question is – are you listening yet?
Today it is much easier to listen to your clients, and prospective clients than ever before. Thomas Friedman outlines three great eras of globalisation:
Given this you can assume Globalisation 3.0 = Web 2.0 / Social Media. And using the tools like blogs and social networking website you can begin to monitor the online conversation that is taking place right under your nose. The real beauty is that the listening can be automated by using RSS technology to be notified whenever certain keywords of people, products, brands or company names are mentioned. You then have to respond or participate in those conversations.
You can also use services like Google Alerts to keep track of both news stories, online discussion groups and blogs. There is a growing list of companies who have shot themselves in the foot by ignoring the conversation like the Kryptonite lock fiasco from back in 2004. When online conversation are ignored you run the risk of heated debates between bloggers and readers spilling over into the mainstream media. And the authority of bloggers are growing every year vs mainstream media according the quarterly study, The State of the Live Web by Technorati, the leading blog monitoring service in the world.
In South Africa the most severe example how damaging online conversation can be is in the widely reported case of Independent Democrats’ Simon Grindrod being named on the “SA Male Prostitute” blog as an alleged client. Now if the ID party was listening to the conversation by just placing Google Alerts on all their most important people’s names, they would have found out about this – literally within minutes of the information being posted. And on the flip side you can also monitor your competition using these tools.
And so I propose a radical idea to corporate South Africa: Set-up your own blog and allow your clients to come to you and post their feedback on a platform that you control. When you do this, you start to move beyond CRM because you have entered the conversation and begun to listen. There is an old Indian proverb, “Listen or thy tongue will keep thee deaf”. The number of South African companies employing this technology for marketing and public relations purposes is growing, but the real value lies in the elusive obvious: customer relationships.
People complain about the service levels of the banks, the Post Office, Home Affairs or Telkom. And when dealing with the biggest organisations, consumers may indeed feel helpless. And yet a growing number of online vigilante’s are emerging. For example the Hellkom website, which has challenged the mighty Telkom, to the point where Telkom sued the owner. The publicity generated by this action has turned this website into a very popular advertising platform because of it’s new popularity. A better approach would have been to engage with this person in an online dialogue. Using your resources to counter all the objections or complaints raised. Bring customer testimonials and feedback to the front line to presents a positive image of Telkom. No, the mighty, needs to assert its power and show that it can stamp out a silly website. Think again.
As you gain access to the inner thoughts or true feelings of your clients you can begin to create products with their input. This is a revolutionary way of creating new products and services because you have in your clients, a testing team, unpaid, and eager to contribute to the creations, they want to own and posses in the future. Fiat, the Italian motor manufacturing giant has returned from the brink of bankruptcy by using social media to listen and take those suggestions and feedback to heart in the design of the new 5007 model.
So what do you do when you are not even sure of your boss will listen to you? Gather the research, study your competitors, and look outside your industry for ideas on how you can leapfrog your competition. It’s easier and easier to replicate and duplicate so you have to continue to differentiate yourself. It’s been said that attention has become the most valuable resources and not time for individuals. And certainly it is true for companies that clients, or prospective clients who are paying attention are the most valuable. And the easiest and simplest way is to allow them to participate in the creation of new products and services. The old top down approach is something of the past. You can die a slow death or you can begin to resurrect yourself, your company, your products and services. It all starts by being open and listening for the grasshopper at your feet.
A while ago I joined the Blog Action Day campaign and I wasn’t sure what I may write about. However, as I’m in Durban, sitting in my hotel room, I’m feeling exceptionally relaxed. You see in Johannesburg the stress levels are likely to be among the highest in the world.
Crime is one of the biggest culprits for the cause of stress and next to that I reckon traffic problems is a close 2nd. Personally I am extremely averse to being stuck in peak hour traffic and working from home is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. And having lived in Johannesburg I can avoid most of the highways and using back routes to find my way to my destination when I do have to go and meet someone.
On the dating front I’ve set-up my relationships so that my girlfriends come over to my place most of the time. This has been a real logistical triumph because so much time is wasted go out, having drinks, dinner, and trying to get a woman to come back to my place. So when I got to the point where women come over to my place I retain the power. You can read being more efficient in your dating life from dating coach Brent Smith.
Anyway back to Joburg traffic my advice to you would be to find a way to work from home, or to begin early and leave early. Worldwide there is a trend to more and more teleworkers and this should be encouraged in South Africa as well. I’m keen to hear your ideas about more efficient living in Johannesburg.
Early in September I was a speaker at the 2nd Digital Citizens Indaba. Last year this conference was immensily valuable to me because it presented an opportunity to meet many of my fellow bloggers from across the African content. This year for me I realised the greater need to teach people how to use blogging to generate income. In 2006 I spent many, many hours discussing this with Emeka Okafor, before he was selected by TED to host the first TEDAfrica conference, which may turn out to become an annual conference.
So this year I spoke with Mathew Buckland and Laurien Clemence on spoke on the Marketing & Moneytizing panel. The problem with DCI is that the bulk of discussion is about online activism and citizen jouranlism. This is not a conference about serious business blogging. So I’m making this public call for a conference that would focus on business blogging. This conference would propel blogging to a new stratosphere in South Africa and Africa as a whole. TEDGlobal’s Fellow’s who included many, many bloggers are a testament to the value we can add to business. Such a conference would appeal to large corporates to introduce them to social media, and web 2.0 business strategies, which will be an imperative by 2010.
My dream panel of speakers would include the following Technorati 100 heavy weights:
I’m looking at doing this during September/October 2008. It would take 4/6 months to secure sponsorships for this event. And another 6 moths to do all the planning and organising with sufficient marketing and public relations building up to the event. These two activities can run in concurrently to some extent.
Who’s your international business blogger of choice for this conference? And how can you help me organise this conference? Post your feedback or contact me privately.
It’s been a week after the 2nd annual DCI event in Grahamstown. This event is a sidekick to the much larger and more established conference Highway Africa. As with all these types of events it’s layered with good intentions. However, the practical side of it sometimes leaves much room for improvement. The highlights were certainly the keynote by Ndesanjo Macha and my friend Daudie Were. During the later sessions Vincent Maher delivered the geekiest presentation I’ve ever seen at a conference. And he’s well on his way to becoming everyone’s favourite geek in South Africa.
There was some miscommunication between DCI organisers and Highway Africa as they initially asked me to conduct some workshop with DCI delegates. I could not track down anyone from Highway Africa to confirm it but based on the programme I realised it was not worth the effort. I had so much more to share with the delegates. My own talk was more aimed at inspiring bloggers to think beyond just writing and specifically how blogging can bolster their careers. Much of the investment is upfront and the pay-off is over the longer term. There are excellent online role models emerging in South Africa with the likes of Laurian Clemence, who spoke with me on the Moneytising and Marketing panel, launching her Wibble project recently.
What I would like to see more of in the future:
This will be my first podcast of many to come. And this one is a real gem. It’s my presentation / talk on on how to blog your way to becoming an expert from the recent Digital Citizens Indaba. So go ahead and download this podcast (3MB, 13 mins).
This is a summary of the talk and presentation that I delivered at the 2nd annual Digital Citizens Indaba on the Marketing and Monetising panel. My fellow presenters were Laurian Clemence and Matthew Buckland.
I started out telling the story of how I attended the 1st DCI conference last year, met Emeka Okafor, and ended up being awarded a TED Global Fellowship. It’s very difficult to place a monetary value on the experience gained from this event. Simply put the money for my travel, accommodation and conference fees are approximately US$10,000 or more.
Next I showcased my personal development blog, some of the structural elements like the Aweber email subscription form, the TAG cloud, the notable plugin that allows readers to submit my blog postings to Digg, Reddit and other social bookmarking websites. Inside the WordPress Dashboard I pointed out the growing list of incoming links from Blogrolls as the quality of articles has increased over time. There is a direct correlation between this narrowing of my focus, writing more original content, and the increase in traffic I’ve experienced since January 2007.
Next I showed how easy it is to include your blog’s RSS feed into your Facebook profile. There is a regular amount of traffic coming from Facebook users and I’m looking into merging my feeds using Yahoo! Pipes so that I can get even more exposure through Facebook. My LinkedIn profile brings high quality traffic to my this blog.
Next I displayed a awesome graph and quoted some research on a blog entry about how to become an expert. The essence of this is that you need to have persistence and specifically look to continuously improve what you do to set you apart from the drop-outs and the amateurs in your industry. The best example of this Steve Pavlina’s blog and I highly recommend the two articles: Confessions of an A-list blogger and How to make money from your blog, as well as all his podcasts.
Ansbert Ngurumo spoke about blogging in Kiswahili in the Fractured Identities session of the Digital Citizens Indaba 2007. This was in some respects one of the most inspiring talks for me because it is in sync with my own views that one of the best solutions to reducing the digital divide is translation of software and websites into indigenous languages like Kiswahili.
Here’s my podcast interview with Ansbert using my Sony Ericsson w880i:
My friend Daudi Were spoke in the Fractured Identities session of the 2007 Digital Citizens Indaba. We first met last year at the DCI and also at TED Global in Tanzania. Daudi is currently organising a African Bloggers conference to be held in Kenya in April/June 2007.
Professor Fackson Banda opened the 2007 Digital Citizen Indaba. This is turning out to be an annual blogging conference. He welcomed everyone and introduced the keynote speaker, Ndesanjo Macha. Ndesanjo is a blogger, journalist, lawyer and digital activist. He is the sub-Saharan Africa editor of Global Voices. He runs Jikomboe, a kiSwahili blog, and Digital Africa. He is a newspaper columnist for the Tanzanian newspaper MwananchiHe’s opening was so powerful: you can’t tell stories if you can’t explain things to your mother or your grandmother. And there is a great quote from Steve Biko, “I write what I like” in honour of the anniversary of his death next week.
