Not even!

I think the title of this post should actually be “Why Cell C’s marketing team should consider a career in sales”. Now, I’d imagine Trevor Noah (tw) to be a pretty smart guy, but to be sold into becoming the face of a widely considered struggling brand, they must have sold him the world. Not just in payment, but in the overall strategy going forward. And well done to them.

I don’t recall Cell C (tw) getting as much exposure as they have over the past few weeks, ever. It started off with praise and applause, then the ‘it was all a scam‘ fiasco when everyone (particularly journos who felt like their little feelings were hurt for being betrayed) slated the campaign at every opportunity. Now the logo story. When will it end? It probably has. And all Cell C can do from here is improve, because they are, essentially, starting from the bottom. And I have a feeling that they will.

Why? Because what the’ve done is completely polarise themselves to the market. You get the people who love what they’ve done, and the people who absolutely hate it. Both sides have the same amount of interest in waiting for what they’ll do next, and both sides are so passionate about their standpoints that they will vehemently argue over any platform, live or online, to try and prove their point. The result: A conversation about the brand. Awesome. So now Cell C has the whole country focussing on their next move, and when you have that much pressure to perform, you work your ass off to make it happen.

On the other side though, what if they don’t? What if this all came too suddenly, they’re not prepared for it, and Cell C loses everything? What does this mean for their new CEO?

Trevor has become the face, the captain of this huge faceless ship. It’s a lot easier for us to blame individuals when things go wrong, because shouting at a large cold building never helped anydoby. It’s exactly what they wanted to achieve with the new campaign: Speak to an individual (Trevor) and he’ll sort you out. People buy in to that. But it has it’s disadvantages too.

Bottom line: If the brand you advocate goes down, you’re going down with them. It’s the captain’s duty. Let’s just hope the powers that be (unfortunately I don’t think Trevor is one of them) can steer this ship past the iceberg and sail it to greener pastures.

A few months ago I was introduced to Fiverr, a service where you can either sell or buy something, particularly a service, for $5. The administrators make a buck off every sale and you get to pocket the remaining $4. Simple enough.

The services range from promising more Facebook fans to positively reviewing products to listening to your life story on Skype, the list goes on and on and they range from very normal to very, very bizarre. To date I’ve only used it for small translations for work, but then I found this guy: The young, Canadian Alex Buckingham. He said that he’d write and record a song all about YOU for a mere $5. So I thought “Fuck it, why not?”

With the brief “Have a look at my website and some of my vids to get a sense of what I’m like”, I paid the 5 bucks and this is the fun (auto-tuned) result I got the next day, too awesome. Thanks Al.

Now go and get yours done! Tell him Don sent you.

Following a conversation that Rich…! and I had, we decided to design and print a couple T-shirts for a few like-minded individuals, guys mostly. Okay all guys. And, as usual, what started out as a fun ‘couple tees for a few peeps’ built into a lot more dudes on the list, for them to be packaged awesomely (including a very wordy and poncey tongue-in-cheek letter about taking this step to corporate clothing to align with our 12 intrinsic organisational values) and sent to their doors.

The idea and design of the shirt was a collaborative effort by Rich…! and myself for a (hopefully) ongoing project for Thunk!, but ideas without execution is nothing. Enter Trevor Mey.

Trev came up with the idea of how to package it, and he made it happen. We got some really rad exposure from guys like Mike Stopforth, Marc Forrest, Erik Vermeulen, Craig Rodney, Justin Spratt and mad props from some very influential people in the online space. Awesome. They thanked Rich…! and myself, but the real rockstar is Trev for the tough task of making it happen. He’s a legend, and you can’t have him, ‘cos he’s ours. Get your own.

I managed to get (read: wangled my way in) an open seat at Nokia’s The Way We Live Next 3.0 gig this morning, partly to give Rich…! some man-love should the media/blogger attendees not like what he had to say (this of course did not happen – he rocked out), and partly to see what Nokia has in store for the world.

I started writing a recap of the event, but Paul Jacobson beat me to it, and probably did a better job of it anyway. Overall, I’m lank excited about the Nokia Maps Player, and the Nokia Booklet 3G, which is one sexy little piece of equipment.

Read Paul’s post here. Awesome.

While trying to make a name for herself in the South African social media space, Nadia van der Merwe found herself on the wrong side of the critics’ good books. She created a digital resumé that she, to my understanding, wanted to use to get her name out there, displaying her knowledge and love for the industry.

Some people liked it, most thought it was a bad move. But…

The objective was to make a name for herself in the South African social media space. Whether it started out well, or not so well, today not many people are unfamiliar with the name Nadia van der Merwe. I can almost guarantee that going this particular route (the bad press) wasn’t her plan all along, but Nadia really did make a name for herself.

Did it play out how I would imagine she envisioned it? No. Did she fulfill the primary objective? Absolutely. How she capitalises on this now, however, remains to be seen.

The boys at Jo’blog were kinda jealous that we didn’t have any online social media resumé of sorts, and thought Nadia’s video was great fodder for a vid of our own too. We don’t look this good in lingerie, but we make out alright.

Mobile social network The Grid today launches Mobikasi, South Africa’s first geo-tagged documentary for cellphones, which explores youth culture in Soweto. Mobikasi utilises The Grid’s LBS (location-based service) capabilities to tag real-life physical locations and link them to relevant documentary content.

Users can explore Sowetan youth culture on their cellphones from anywhere in South Africa through The Grid’s map interface, or by physically touring the famous township and watching documentary clips on their phones at the locations where they were shot.

The location-based documentary looks at people, music, fashion, social issues and places of interest. Instead of showing the twenty-five minute documentary in a linear fashion from start to finish, Mobikasi splits the content up into twenty-five inserts of one minute each. Each one-minute clip covers a different topic that is relevant to the youth in Soweto and is
geo-tagged to the location where it was shot. This means that viewers can now explore Soweto’s vibrant youth culture by virtually “travelling” through a mobile streetmap of the township and stopping off at various locations to enjoy the one-minute video clips.

The first Mobikasi ‘episode’ features, among others, a street fashion crew called the Smarteez, music producers Hempza and Vikinduku, a popular hair braider named Anna and the reigning Miss Soweto, Rochelle Mothapo. Also featured are Soweto’s premier hangouts Sedibeng, Back Room and the popular Sunday buy-and-braai spot Panyaza.

Vodacom’s Executive Head of Mobile Advertising and Social Media, Rick Joubert, says, “Soweto is a very exciting space. There is always so much happening and it’s often the youth driving this forward.

“We didn’t want to do the usual ‘township tour’ to showcase The Grid’s new LBS technology. We wanted to give people and the rest of the world a glimpse into the future of South Africa and what is hot and happening at street level. What better way than to launch Mobikasi, the world’s first geo-tagged doccie for cellphones?”

How do I view Mobikasi?
Mobikasi can be viewed on The Grid through your cellphone or through The Grid website. To get onto The Grid, simply SMS ‘Mobikasi’ to 33313 (SMS charged at 50c, normal VAS rates apply) or visit wap.thegrid.co.za/mobikasi on your phone.

Once on The Grid, visit the Mobikasi group to watch the documentary clips and explore the excitement of Soweto youth culture.

Here’s the promo:

Mobikasi Promo Video from Cow Africa on Vimeo.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a few more of these around the world, rad way to explore from the comfort of your sofa…

Virgin Music is asking bloggers to write reviews on the SA VFest, with the possibility of winning a tour of all the VFests around the world. Awesome.

Check out the details here. I’m seeing an increase in music posts all round.

Thought you did everything on your phone?

24 year old Capetonian Bevan Ducasse has created a payment method to make that even more of a daily reality.

wiWallet is a payment system straight from your cell phone to the till.

Currently the payment method can be used at selected retail outlets with Primi Piatti, Mr Delivery and Scooters joining next week. “Most major retailers are interested in Wiwallet and some have already started projects to integrate” said Ducasse, mentioning popular grocery stores, clothing retailers and petrol stations. …

“I think for South Africans it will mean a simple, secure, convenient and stylish way of paying, but eventually what we are aiming to do is to literally cater for every one of their payment needs: account payments, credit card payments, bill payments and loyalty payments. So it manages all their needs of one platform.” – Ducasse

via News24.

Our housing complex property management company, who are really shit at most things relating to our complex (as I’m sure most of them are), is doing something cool internally.

They’re giving each employee R100 extra pay this month, to do something good. At the end of the month they’re all getting together to let everyone know how they helped someone with that R100.

It’s a small sum of money each, but if you have a company with 100 employees, that’s R10 000 worth of good, given to people in need.

Awesome.

I read in biz-community that there is new business blogger out there. Brian Berkman is a local PR guru, and I imagine, due to the publicity of the recent global PR blog week, has decided to try his hand.

Now, while a glance at his blog shows content that has potential, he does seem to be missing a few fundamentals:
- Firstly, there is no feed, forcing you to visit the site, rather than reading it in a news aggregator, With the term “No feed, no read” getting bandied about so much, this is something that needs to be addressed.
- There are no trackbacks, worse for Brian than for me, but how will he know when he’s quoted? (I guess he can keep checking Technorati).
- Truncated posts, this is by far the biggest sin. Not only do I need to visit the site, but I need to follow links just to read one post! Crazy loco!
- A last weird thing is the display of complete URLs rather than just linked text, I imagine that this is simply part of a learning curve. My suspicion is that Brian has launched without spending much time engaging (reading and commenting) other bloggers

All that being said though, I think business blogging should be encouraged locally, I’m blue in the face trying to get my PR clients to buy into this, so a huge congratulations to Brian for having the guts to be the first…nice one Mr. B.

Onwards an upwards…!

For a limited time only, you too can get a really cool Chicky Meal from KFC. For only R19-90, you get a kiddies burger, a small packet of chips, a Liqui-Fruit…

…and the coolest Doc Ock toy ever!

Sweet.

For those of you who didn’t watch the Carte Blanche exposé on Telkom (like myself), there’s a site on the internet dedicated to giving Telkom hell. Hellcom (yes, I too wish I had thought of it first). And they let you make your own T-shirts!

The fact that someone has dedicated this much effort and time into pointing out the blundering giant’s chronic and usually public mismanagement says something for South African’s attitudes to them in general.

We need to bring a competitor in urgently. But apparently, we’re not allowed to yet.

Sounds like someone else we all know…

The South African tourism company, Gold and Wine Tours, is to launch a glossy magazine entitled Golf & Wine to German-speaking Europe.