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Telkom Media – riding the new wave

2 May 2007 16:322 commentsBizLike
Telkom has finally woken up after a few years and has concluded that online communities are a key element of its planned online service offering. This includes social networking, news, photos and video communities. I would really love to see how it gets this right.
Maybe I am being too critical but given Telkom’s reputation regarding its Internet services, and with online communities, this will be a challenge.

I would like to go a little further and expand on the four elements Telkom mentioned: social networking, news, photos and video communities.

Social networking

Please tell me why I should switch from Facebook or MySpace? There are also other local alternatives such as Blueworld, Digspot and Vrinne. Is Telkom going to compete with all of these? At the time of writing this, Facebook had over 28 000 South Africans.

News

What kind of news? We already have News24, IOL and iAfrica. We also have plenty other niche news sites. Is it going to compete or aggregate? Will it include blogs?

Photos

Photos are very vague. Does it want to emulate a Flickr service? This would have to be done very carefully. 24.com Albums didn’t take off too well and I can’t see myself moving from Flickr. However, Zoopy doesn’t seem to be doing to bad, regarding its photo service.

Video communities

YouTube has been done already, what is Telkom going to offer that is any different? MyVideo and Zoopy are taking the market as well. What is its strategy for this? Do it want to pump more ridiculous advertising down our throats?

This is going to be really interesting to see. If Telkom has a brilliant social media/web 2.0 team then it might just be able to pull this off. I am not sure who really wants an all-in-one package but the new web is a wave – surfs up!

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    About Tyler Reed

    Tyler Reed is a young entrepreneur and blogger (www.tylerreed.co.za). He is also the chief strategist at Younique (www.younique.co.za), an interactive youth marketing firm specialising in online marketing and social media marketing.
    WH
    Watching videos with a cap?-
    I would be interested in how Telkom plans to let people watch videos considering how bandwidth hungry that is. The connection needs to be faster, cheaper and with a larger cap in order for this to work. Posted on 3 May 2007 10:25
    Grant
    Telskom - watching video with a (getting screwed) bandwidth cap.-
    Irony. Catch 22. Posted on 19 Feb 2008 09:39
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