Blogging for Poverty
15 October 2008 is Blog Action Day, an annual event in the blogosphere that’s aimed at getting bloggers around the world to discuss one topic of global concern. This year’s topic is poverty.
“We invite bloggers to examine poverty from their own blog topics and perspectives, to look at it from the macro and micro, as a global condition and a local issue, and to bring their own ideas, views and opinions on the subject.” – The Blog Action Day Blog
Seeing as how 45-55% of South Africans live in poverty, here’s our chance to do some digital good and raise awareness and discussion around poverty through blog posts, podcasts and videos.
To participate in this event, you can do one or all of these 3 things:
– Register to participate on the Blog Action Day site. You’ll be given a bit of HTML code to add to your blog post so that it can be tracked on October 15.
– If you earn income from your blog through ads or product sales, you can also donate a day of your earnings to a poverty-related charity in your area or one supported by B.A.D.
– Promote the event by spreading the word or adding a promotional banner or video to your site.
Mass support
Since its inception in 2007, Blog Action Day has received huge support in the blogosphere and from organisations like the United Nations, Opera, Change.org and BlogTV Inc. This year, there are currently 4770 sites participating in the event, with more than 9.5 million RSS readers.
To follow the latest developments, you can check out the Blog Action Day Twitter feed, or Flickr, Facebook and MySpace groups.
Conversation
It would, ofcourse, be silly to believe that Blog Action Day is going to decrease or put an end to poverty. What it will do though, is get us thinking and talking about an issue of global importance that doesn’t get enough attention in the blogosphere. I think this event is also crucial in changing the narrow mindset that social change and awareness is only possible by “real” activists or organisations in “real life”.
We all – activists, bloggers, geeks, social media addicts – should play a part.
And just for a day, it will be interesting to see if we bloggers can resist our narcissism for a bit of altruism. If we can talk about real issues instead of the iPhone 3G or the parties we went to on the weekend. Just for a day. And then, maybe another, and another.
Big Brother 2.0
Whenever I receive a Google Alert in my inbox for a search conducted on me, I get a little concerned. Who wants to know more about me? Why? And did they find anything incriminating?
This may seem rather silly or vain, but I bet I’m not the only social media user who’s wondered about their online privacy – if such a thing exists.
We’re the so-called Google Generation that lives a large portion of our social lives online. Thanks to web 2.0 technology, we’re part of an infinite social web through which we construct our digital identities and connect with friends and family via blogging, facebooking, plurking or instant messaging.
This type of communication is immediate, cheap and convenient. It enables us to be users and producers, and share information on an unprecedented scale. It satisfies the exhibitionists and voyeurs in us all. Our past and present is digitally archived for the world to find, ogle, admire or exploit. But along with this blurring of the traditional private/public boundary comes a barrage of threats to our privacy.
Watch out
IT Security Strategist Herbert Thompson has demonstrated just how easy it is to break into a person’s online banking account using the information they provide about themselves on the Net, via their blog or online CV. Even little nuggets of your personal information make you vulnerable to exploitation. His advice is to “think first, post later”, as most of the data we put online cannot be deleted.
Privacy
Danah Boyd of Harvard University aptly points out that the current generation of social media users – i.e us – embrace a new conception of privacy. Instead of regarding it as a secret to be concealed, we consider it more an issue of accessibility to information.
Hence the mass protests and petitions against Facebook’s Beacon and Social Ads systems which were introduced last year. With the Beacon application, Facebook struck data-sharing deals with various e-commerce sites. If, for example, a user bought a product online, that information would appear on the user’s Facebook profile.
Facebook’s social ads system went a step further – or too far. If a user posted a positive comment about a movie or book, Facebook would include his/her name and photo in an advertisement for that product, and display it to his/her friends.
Following protests and petitions from users, Zuckerburg and co. have reformed their privacy settings but not enough to leave the privacy-phobes satisfied.
Wake up!
Privacy is not a privilege online. We should quit playing Victim and start taking responsibility for our digital identities in this networked world. These are my three simple rules of thumb:
1. Value your personal information. Most social networks require only your name, email address and birth date on registration. Everything else you provide is voluntary (and can come back to bite you in the rear end).
2. By using a social networking site like Facebook, you agree to its Terms and Conditions. Read it!
3. Do not share information that you don’t want others to know about you. It’s that clear cut.
For the odd narcissists who demand their online privacy while still posting sordid details and images of their sex lives, I suggest you revert to web 0.0 and keep a journal. Unless the current legislation on privacy is amended, our online identities will continue to be fair game for companies, governments, employers, journalists and stalkers alike.
We’ve got to live with it. Responsibly.
Making money with $ocial media
A local company is a case in point of the potential power of social media for businesses. Stormhoek, a Western Cape winery, has been making waves on the web since 2005, when it turned to the blogosphere to promote its brand. Stormhoek’s first campaign was simply to hand out 100 free bottles of wine to bloggers in the UK, France and Ireland, who were not obligated to promote the product.
Nevertheless, the campaign paid off and yielded exposure for Stormhoek. More importantly, it helped bring in the bucks: in less than two years, the company’s UK branch was enjoying a five-fold increase in sales – a feat that it attributes to blogging.
Web 2.0 to the rescue
In February this year, Stormhoek found itself faced with a crisis when its UK partner, Orbital declared bankruptcy. But instead of asking FNB for a loan, the company asked its customers. (Yes, you read right.)
For a loan of R2000, a Stormhoek supporter would be allocated a vine in the company’s vineyards with his/her name and location on it. The supporter would also receive a photograph of the vine and a bottle of wine sourced from that vineyard’s crop.
Stormhoek would pay back the loan with interest, by allotting 5% of its production costs to a loan-repayment fund.
The Own-a-Vine-Save-a-Job campaign quickly went viral once it was posted on the company’s blog. To date, Stormhoek has received R572 000 from the campaign and is on track with loan repayments.
I’m impressed by Graham Knox’s creative thinking, but even more amazed that it worked. Perhaps I shouldn’t be though, because their social media strategy is simple, effective and based on trust. Stormhoek’s success story is due to the honest and transparent relationship it maintains with its supporters through the Stormhoek blog, Facebook group, Twitter feed and Zoopy video channel.
The lesson from this for other South African businesses is this: social media can help you meet your goals if it’s used consistently and creatively.
Frome one newbie to the other, here are some interesting resources that further explain how social media can benefit businesses:
Next Generation Social Marketing
Fundamental Truths about Social Media Marketing
The customer could be King again
I recently lost my Edgars Cash Card and trudged to the local store to get a new one. The cashier, however, could not track my old card on the system and said it was impossible to transfer my accumulated purchase points to my new card. (Apparently, the card registration form I filled in years ago was not properly captured on their system).
But hell hath no fury like a shopaholic who doesn’t get her money’s worth.
I drove home, logged on to HelloPeter.com, and made this not-so-polite complaint.
Within 12 minutes, Vanessa from their Customer Services Centre responded to it, assuring me that the local store manager would contact me to resolve the problem. She did, the very next day. We met, talked briefly, she apologised for her staff’s blunder, and I received a R150 voucher for the “inconvenience” caused to me.
Don’t you just love how empowering social media can be? Now we don’t have to grumble quietly about inefficient customer service. Tell it to millions of people around the world instead, and see how quickly companies sit up and take notice.
Impressive Influence
Research conducted in April 2008 by a US social media think tank reveals how influential social media is on customers’ decisions and perceptions. Here are some of the stats, taken from local marketing strategist Walter Pike’s article:
- 59.1% of respondents use social media to “vent” about a customer care experience
- 72.2% of respondents research companies’ customer care online prior to purchasing products and services at least sometimes
- 84% of respondents consider the quality of customer care at least sometimes in their decision to do business with a company
- 74% choose companies/brands based on others’ customer care experiences shared online
- 81% believe that blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums can give consumers a greater voice regarding customer care, but less than 33% believe that businesses take customers’ opinions seriously.
I’m not an online marketing guru, but I do know that web users have a greater degree of influence as producers and co-creators of information. It’s common knowledge that this has changed media-audience relationships, but it has also altered the company-customer dynamic.
Customers now have a more powerful platform from which to voice their complaints and hold businesses accountable for shoddy service. Consequently, companies’ PR staffs have their jobs cut out for them with regard to brand and image management, since all it takes is a Google search to find dirt on these ‘corportate culprits’.
However, social media does not only benefit customers. It is also proving to be incredibly useful to local and global businesses, who are increasingly adopting it for advertising and marketing purposes. More on this in my next post.
Blogging made oh-so-simple
Blogging these days is not rocket science: you sign up to a blogging platform, log in, write, and publish. But a new blogging platform launched in June this year makes the likes of Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr look complicated and time consuming.
It’s called Posterous , it works through your email and it’s dead easy. No registration is necessary: all you have to do to start a blog is send an e-mail to [post at posterous dot com] and within a few minutes you’ll receive a validation e-mail with the URL of your new blog. Here’s mine.
Multimedia
To start blogging, simply e-mail your post to [post @ posterous dot com]. You can send attachments –pictures, audio or documents – which will be published on your blog. It accepts pdf, mp3, jpg, gif, doc and png files. Unfortunately, Posterous hasn’t made allowance for video attachments yet but if you include a YouTube url, it will immediately imbed the video into your post. Each user gets 1GB of free space, and there are plans to develop premium features soon.
Furthermore, Posterous lets you publish your podcasts via e-mail onto your blog. It plays using the site’s flash player or iTunes.
Just remember that you do have the option of registering your Posterous blog and posting directly from the Posterous site. This way, you can edit your posts with the site’s rich text editor.
Looks
Posterous is aesthetically pleasing. It has a uniform theme, but the clean, neat interface looks better than the usual Blogger and WordPress themes. Posterous automatically rescales your images and if you attach multiple pictures, it automatically creates a photo gallery, giving your blog an organised and de-cluttered look.
Another plus is that it allows viewers to download a single photo or an entire gallery (in .zip file) in their original sizes. If your content is copyrighted, you can alter your settings to turn off the download option.
Social Media
Posterous has also dipped a toe into social media by allowing users to autopost updates to Twitter and pictures to Flickr from their site. E-mail your .jpg files and posterous will automatically add them to your Flickr stream.
It also has a social networking capability: users can search for and follow other posterous bloggers, or track posts on particular topics. The automatically created RSS Feed is also a definite plus.
Cross posting
A revolutionary feature of Posterous is that it allows you to post to existing blogs. Currently, the service supports WordPress, Blogger, Xanga, Live Journal, Tumblr, TypePad and Movable Type. Now there’s no need to log onto multiple blogs to post – simply set up your autopost, send one e-mail to Posterous, and your post will be published on your multiple blogs.
Mobile blogging
The biggest advantage of this minimalist blogging platform is that it makes mobile blogging much easier it currently is. Posterous allows you to blog on the go by simply sending an sms to them. This service is currently available in the US only, but if they manage to extend it globally, it’s sure to be a hit.
Killer App?
There are numerous blogging platforms that have a larger, established presence on the web but the simplicity of Posterous is what sets it apart from the rest. It’s just a few months old but it has awesome functionality and potential. Ofcourse, that its developers roll out new features all the time is a definite plus.
My verdict? Posterous has the makings of the next killer app. When the e-lluminati start raving about it, just remember that you read it here first 🙂
Search Wars: Man vs. Machine
The more I learn about social media and Web 2.0, the more I think that cyber futurists are getting it wrong. If we indulge their claim that we’re advancing towards a world in which machines and robots are going to reign, then technology – or at least the web – is going backward. It’s become less mechanical and more social – and if the popularity of social media is any indication, most of us web users love being on the flipside.
I’m not just talking about blogs and social networks, but the recent explosion of social search. New search technologies that provide interactivity, personalisation and dynamism offer a remarkable alternative to mainstream search engines. It’s time we look beyond Google because it doesn’t have all the answers.
Search 0.0 – 3.0
Search 2.0 developer Ebrahim Ezzy’s explanation of the three generations of search technology helps to understand how search has evolved:
Traditional Search Engines work to retrieve information using Boolean queries, link analysis and text relevance. These first generation search engines, like Alta Vista, rank sites according to page content.
Second generation search (eg. Google) uses link analysis for ranking search results.
Third generation search engines combine the functions of the “old” search engines with new models that take into account “user preferences, collaboration, collective intelligence, a rich user experience, and many other specialised capabilities that make information more productive”.
I’ve compiled a list (by no means comprehensive) of third generation/social search engines that will make you think twice about declaring Google King of the Search Wars.
Scour is a social search engine aggregator that allows users to vote and rank search results using their own criteria. It delivers search results from the top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) after taking into account user feedback. Users earn points for each search, vote and comment they make, which can be redeemed for Visa gift cards.
Rollyo is a community-driven search engine that allows users to create their own personalised search engines based on sites they add to their SearchRoll. Given the information overload that we have to endure on the web, these search engines conveniently allow users to filter and control the amount and quality of their searches. Swicki works in a similar way to Rollyo, but returns comprehensive text or multimedia searches on a specific topic/theme chosen by the user.
While Google is great for searching pages, it’s less handy when searching for people. That’s where Sightix comes in. This unique service provides users with personalised searches based on their social networks, friends and connections. While traditional search engines will return the same results to different users, Sightix takes into account the identity of each user and returns unique, personalised and relevant results based on that user’s social graph. Whozat, SpocK and Zoominfo are other people search engines that are worth a visit, especially if you want concise information on an individual.
A major shortcoming of Google is that it doesn’t index multimedia content and Flash files, but now there are search engines dedicated exclusively to this. Mediawombat is a search engine for multimedia and Flash files only. Snipp.tv is another valuable multimedia search engine that can be used for finding video and audio files.
My favourite of the lot is Clusty, which organises search results into folders, making it easier and faster to navigate. So while a Google search of Nelson Mandela will return millions of page results that you’ll have to wade through to find specific information on his 90th birthday celebration, Clusty returns this impressive, organized collection of folders ranging from Biography, 90th Birthday Celebration, Nobel Peace Prize, etc.
Another search engine that will speed up your research is Cluuz, because it goes beyond providing mere links as search results. It peers into the Web, extracts information, images and tags relating to your search word and presents them to the user so that relevant information can be found faster.
Niche search engines are also on the increase: 5tvs is an Internet TV search aggregator, Metaverselink can be used to search within virtual worlds, Gogooligans is an educational search engine for kids, and Codase and Krugle are every programmer’s dream as they index only source code (Java, CSS etc) and technical information.
Traditional vs. Social Search
Social search may be more innovative and intuitive than traditional search, but it cannot replace traditional search engines. When used together with mainstream search engines, they can yield powerful search results that can be more productive and valuable for the user.
One of the problems with community-driven search engines like Scour is that they depend on the participation of users to stay afloat , and are also susceptible to spammers.
While many new Search 2.0 tools are aspiring to be the next Google, it’s not about competition but collaboration. As Ezzy points out, even the mainstream search giants have realised the potential of social search and implemented some of its features. Yahoo! has introduced My Web 2.0 and Google offers bookmarking and tagging of search history for users.
The future of search- and the web at large – is definitely leaning more towards man, not machine.
Hiatus
I’ll resume blogging in July, after my exams, the National Arts Fest and a much-needed vacation.
What digital revolution?
Last year, while a few New Media lecturers (read digital evangelists) in the Rhodes Journalism department were sporting cool t-shirts that said “Print is dead”, my Writing & Editing lecturers (read print loyalists) were citing figures about increased newspaper circulation and proclaiming that online news will never replace the print medium.
Since changing from writing to a new media specialisation this year, I’ve been on the hunt for one of these t-shirts. Not to wear right now though, but just to keep in my closet and pull on when the time is right.
Let’s face it: South Africa is nowhere near a digital media revolution at present. Not when only about 11% of all South Africans have Internet access. Not when the majority of the people in this country are struggling to afford the basic necessities, let alone an ADSL line or 3G modem. Not even when 83 out of 100 South Africans have mobile phones, but not necessarily the airtime or the technology to surf the Net. And not when more people are reading newspapers.
Still going strong
The Audit Bureau of Circulation’s figures show that South African newspaper circulation has increased by a small margin between 2006 – 2007. The circulation of daily newspapers has grown by 2.7%, weekly papers by 5.4% and weekend newspapers by 4%. The latest All Media and Products Survey results are also impressive: there are 14 572 million newspaper readers in the country, and 46.8% of South Africans over the age of 16 read a newspaper.
It seems print is not dead;it’s alive and well.
However, one must consider the bigger picture of Living Standard Measures (LSMs) and demographics when thinking about South Africa’s print newspapers and their digital editions. SA’s leading daily, The Daily Sun has almost five million readers, whose monthly household income is around R4 541. Compare this with the 467 000 Mail & Guardian readers, whose monthly income is about R14 598 – or Business Day readers, who have R18 953 a month in household income. I’m not saying that a print newspaper’s readers are also its only digital newspaper’s readers, but the point is that those who have disposable income to spend on an Internet connection are mostly middle-class, educated, employed citizens who prefer a particular type or quality of media. This explains why the Mail & Guardian and Business Day have online websites, and The Daily Sun doesn’t… yet.
Internet boom
According to the AMPS and Online Publishers Association (OPA) reports, Internet usage is on the increase too, but what’s most interesting is that South Africans are using it to consume media, not just Facebook.
News24.com is South Africa’s most popular website on the OPA’s Top 10 list, with more than 1.1 million unique browsers since March this year. That’s a growth of a whopping 44% since March 2007!
The other online news website to make the list is Independent Online (IOL), with 585 000 unique browsers, up 15% since March last year.
Local news websites dominate the list of the fastest growing websites in South Africa. The Engineering News, Mining Weekly, Carte Blanche, Sowetan, and SundayWorld websites have registered a user increase of 100% or more during March 07 – March 08.
These impressive figures are great news for SA’s digital media, because it means more people are consuming and interacting with their content.
Social media and access
The increased popularity of local online media is due to the fact that they’ve realised the importance of Web 2.0 and social media for traditional journalism. It’s simple: in order to attract more web users, news sites have to offer them more than inverted-pyramid style stories… and even more than multimedia news.
So they’ve brought on the blogs ( M&G’s Thought Leader and Tech Leader, News24’s blogging portal), bookmarking (Laaikit, Digg, Del.icio.us), a bit of citizen journalism (readers can submit pics and stories), q-&a services (Answerit) and of course, the inclusion of a comments box for readers to have their say.
Both M&G and News24 have jumped on the social networking bandwagon and created Facebook applications so users can read the latest headlines on their profiles. They’ve gone mobile too, by delivering breaking news alerts, weather reports, and even the lotto numbers to users via sms.
Die Burger has gone a step further by instituting a web-first policy, which sees them break their news stories online instead of in their print edition.
All these strategies are working well, but, at the risk of sounding like a tape on rewind, they’re only available to the five million of us who have the option of accessing them.
That’s a digital divide, not a digital revolution. And definitely not a digital democracy.
When South Africa’s internet access statistics begin to rise as high as its fuel and food prices, then I’ll throw on my “Print is dead” t-shirt and not feel like a pretentious idiot for wearing it.
Stumble It!
Social Media 