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News & Opinions
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Social Media 101 for the Business to Consumer Environment
November 8, 2012
Part 2 Part 1 of Social Media 101 for the Business to Consumer environment sets the scene for the theory behind social media, looking at: The purpose of social media for business The challenges faced and what businesses are getting wrong Why users join or disengage from a businesses’ social media page What communities expect from a brand’s social media presence and who should manage this presence In part 2, we look at best practice...
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Social Media 101 for the Business to Consumer Environment
November 6, 2012
PART 1 NOT all social media channels are suitable for your brand! The social media revolution has forever transformed the manner in which people communicate. The advent of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, initially embraced by ‘early adopters’, now have a tremendous following with over 1 billion users on Facebook and a 140 million actively on Twitter. These days everyone aspires to be digitally ‘switched on’ and businesses have certainly not fallen...
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No ‘Eish’ moment when doing business in Africa- well it depends who you know
October 29, 2012
Media in Rwanda are easy to work with and they are more likely to attend a media launch if there’s some degree of government involvement. A PR campaign in Zimbabwe will require planning well in advance as the execution phase may take longer than expected – for some reason things tend to move slowly in this market. Kenya is the opposite; the country has an advanced media industry which employs very astute journalists who know...
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Death to PR
October 24, 2012
“Rise and rise until PR becomes reputation management” Earlier last week I had the privilege of attending the IMC 2012 Conference. And I say privileged as there were certainly some clever people sitting in the room. The content ranged from the latest trends to successful campaigns with a focus on digital and social media. Many of the keynote addresses included case studies of successful digital (or what they termed integrated) campaigns and one of the...
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Taking your Digital Strategy from Good to Great
October 22, 2012
“Everything that can be digital, will become digital and everything that can be connected will be connected”. This was the headline message as Joshua Ross opened his keynote for Fleishman-Hillard at the IMC conference last week, defining what it could possibly mean to be great in digital activities. From fridges to light bulbs, every industry is seeing a digital revolution. It is in this context that it comes as no surprise that organisations are placing...
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Who Should Own Social Media Within an Organisation?
October 16, 2012
Depending on who you pose this question to, will depend on the answer. More often than not, the question reignites the possessive debate between marketing, communications, and brand departments on who should own the social media of a business or brand. The answer? Anyone. Anyone who represents the brand and who interfaces with the stakeholders of the business should have a vested interest, and be given the opportunity to contribute to the social media footprint...
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Learn to Blow Your Own Horn Mr. President
October 12, 2012
South African president Jacob Zuma last month defended the ANC government’s performance track record, saying it had made “substantial progress” in delivering services to the poor. Having lived in both apartheid South Africa and in what we love to call the New South Africa, I can attest to the truth of what Mr Zuma says. Millions of people, especially in the rural areas, now have electricity and access to telephones. Between 1996 and 2010, the...
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Your Reputation Precedes You – And What Does It say?
October 8, 2012
Someone meets you in person for the first time, and they say: “I’ve heard a lot about you.” What’s your instant reaction? “All good, I hope.” Often with a nervous giggle. That, in a nutshell, is the current state of reputation management. As individuals and companies, we know that people think certain things about us. We may even want to change that reputation. But all too often, we don’t do much to manage the process...
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When Does a Blogger Become an Influencer? Where Is the Line When Paying for Their Voices?
October 2, 2012
In the PR industry, a new trend is to “create” ambassadors sometimes with well-known South Africans and more often now bloggers. The objective is to drive conversation online among the targeted audience. Much like pitching a story to the news editor, we relay these stories to the identified influencers, who have strong social networks, with the aim that they will in turn tell the story through their own personal experience. And so the new form...
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Give Me Technology, in Simple Language
September 22, 2012
So it seems technology is taking over our lives, and making us anxious and depressed. That’s only half true: technology is indeed taking over our lives – but we’re loving it. And once technology companies realise that people don’t so much care what’s inside the gadget as what it does for them, and market their goodies accordingly, then the takeover will be complete. We’ll have computers for everything from walking the dog to brushing our...