Socialist media continued: Habari 2010 – Oh, the places you’ll go!

This post is in answer to a tweet from @h0bbel, aka Christian Mohn, from Bergen, Norway ... who asked: "Are there any well hidden #Habari themes somewhere, that I might have missed? Im soooo out of the loop..."

I have sneaky feeling that @h0bbel might have wandered into the wrong twitterhall and could well have been enquiring after updates on the open source blog engine which gets its name from the Swahili greeting habari, which means "what's news?".

But, in any case, the following trending themes as aggregated by me from the 2010 Habari Media Digital Symposium at Spier, go out to @h0bbel in Bergen.

South Africa is a very different market to many places - those kinds of case studies that cite stats like 6.1 million active Starbucks fans on Facebook are just there to make us feel inadequate. But don't let the numbers fool you; the serious will and intellectual equity within the SA digital community, coupled with the inalienable fact that our industry is poised for massive growth, makes keeping an eye on the Davids a mandatory strategy for the Goliaths. They are even nice enough to offer us all the tools of empowerment which turned them into global giants - it would be a shame for us not to take advantage of it.

Facebook

Trevor Johnson: head of strategy and planning at Facebook, EMEA, offered us clear pointers to going social. 2.5 million South Africans are already "active FB users" and there are numerous opportunities for absolutely anybody to engage with them in meaningful conversations. Each conversational strategy should obviously be tailored to unique brand objectives. To achieve these kinds of social aspirations, we need to ask questions like: Um, like what are we gonna say?

Communicating brand activities, events, polls and special content via new media such as FB is called publishing into streams and, if you do it well, the viral element will lead to viral impressions and before you know it you'll be a brand that is sharing ideals and user-generated content with your audience, rather than one waving from the sidelines. You'll BE the conversation, not trying to interrupt one.

Digital is really just plain old-fashioned direct response advertising, except now even better in that we no longer talk of one-to-one, but many-to-many marketing. Don't let the Facebookish environment scare you into thinking your brand won't be welcome; all the world's major brands and media such as BBC.com and CNN.com as well as more and more of our local players are on, so you'll be in good company.

Ads for TGIFridays Woody campaign are so viral you need to be innoculated against them.

Fantastic news for agencies is that platforms like FB can support video footage that is not limited to 30 seconds! In this regard I posed the question "Why... is the South African advertising industry... still wasting their talents on the 30-sec format?" last December in my Dis' content post.

Brand stories

Apparently a foolproof strategy for sourcing a respectable sized crowd is to tell a brand story - people can't resist them, they are to online what 7de Laan is to TV.Nike Man vs Woman and the Apple ads on the NY Times site are memorable examples. These are the type of case studies local digital outfits have at their fingertips to encourage the collaborations with traditional agencies and clients that will facilitate taking the plunge into the social media arena.

Angus Robinson of Brandsh Media shared some of the trade secrets such as:

• Tell your brand story - eg we all know Steve Jobs started in a garage etc
• Understand and own your brand rituals - what happens, how, when, why does my customer engage with my product or service?
• Have a charismatic leader - Richard Branson, Steve Jobs etc

Perhaps one of the problems is not the digital medium per se, but that many brands have lost their mojo. They don't do garages, charisma and ritual, @h0bbel, they do drywalling, market research and middle management. That's why they need creative input.

Thirteen-year-old digital marketing agency Stonewall+ also presenting at the symposium, achieve digital critical mass for its clients via some serious storytelling, a strategy that has seen it build a reputation as one of the top three agencies in ZA in terms of size and billing.

Transaction and traction

Two hot terms in the pursuit of viable online models. Gary Hadfield, the brains behind local success story www.Kalahari.net, predicts that the 0.2% that is SA's share of global online retail spend - which is far behind our developed and developing market peers - is in a state of evolution. With ongoing investments being made by key retail stakeholders in a range of top online platforms to support new growth categories and payment models, we will soon see the clicks driving the bricks and online a vital aspect of the future success in many retail categories.

Adserving

What is becoming known in the trade as refinement and optimisation -call it the R&O on your ROI - refers to the ability of all online advertising to be accurately tracked and measured. The general opinion is that to properly insert the cookies, that will milk the returns on your online activities, requires the allocation of a portion of media budget.

According to Richard Mullins, MD for Acceleration, a digital media schedule should make provision for measurement and optimisation in addition to planning, buying and execution. You don't want to use up all your budget on placement and execution, only to find you have none left over to optimise the very measurable benefits that the medium can provide. You can even measure via fun shootout=style games, and mobile tracking via tags is on its way within the next six months.

Tim Bishop of Prezence Digital [which developed and designed the website for SHOUT, www.shoutsa.com] had also touched on the R&O trend in an earlier panel style forum.

The "digivangelism" at these kinds of events is infectious, but it's also making more and more sense. I believe Habari MD Adrian Hewlett may well be correct in predicting that the digital and social media in our region have finally reached an undeniable tipping point.

Speaker Isla Mcleod, digital business development manager for BBC worldwide - also perhaps on our shores for not entirely altruistic reasons - asks "Is the Internet the greatest power the world has ever seen?" Undeniably it has changed our lives, business models, the media and the way we share information. It has forced companies to look at their products and services in new ways - are they mention-worthy, trash-worthy, inspirational, making a difference?

The size of the ZA online market, if not up there with the big US case studies, holds its own among many of European countries, weighing in at a conservative estimate of ±7,5 million people. From our Afroentric perspective, @h0bbel, the value in online initiatives in our region might be most simply expressed by this statement from Robinson: "Questioning your ROI in digital is like questioning the ROI of your phone." LOL :-)

All the Habari Symposium presentations are now available at http://symposium.habarimedia.co.za/index.php/symposium/speakers.