Mike Stopforth

This time inspired by Erik Hersman, but not necessarily a meme, my weapons of choice:

1. 15″ MacBook Pro
2. 16 Gb iPhone
3. Gorilla-head stress ball (too cool)
4. Steaming hot cup of coffee
5. Car key (I spend most of my life on the road)
6. Canon EOS 450D D-SLR (not pictured)
7. Garmin Nuvi GPS (not pictured)

What are yours?

Erik has tagged me as part of the “Why I Blog About Africa” meme.

It’s proved a tough one to answer. I blog about Africa primarily because I was born here, I guess. I sometimes feel guilty calling myself African because in many ways South Africa is to Africa as America is to the rest of the world - a bit clueless. On top of that, I’m a white, relatively wealthy South African to boot. In South Africa many whites are of direct European descent. You have your Greek, Portuguese, Italian and Lebanese ’sects’ which, for the largest part, keep very much alive the traditions and nuances of their forefathers. Black South Africans obviously have rich tribal identities. Afrikaans white South Africans have a tangible sense of tradition and culture.

But then there’s us half-Euro half-Afro South Africans who don’t seem to fit in anywhere. Sometimes I feel like a bit of a mish mash of all of these things, and I wonder when travelling if foreigners experience me as such - a smorgasbord of cultural bits and pieces bundled into various South Africanisms.

I’m completely off the track of this meme, aren’t I?

Point is, I blog about Africa because it’s the only real identity I have. Though I don’t always feel authentically African, I am factually African. There’s no doubt I was born on this continent and I sure as hell don’t fit in anywhere else (as I discovered when travelling in the US :P)

All my identity confusion aside, I am terribly excited about this continent. It is out of chaos, diversity and adversity that opportunity arises. And boy, is there ever opportunity in Africa and South Africa. Immense pain, unfathomable heartache, and then in the middle of all of that immense opportunity. I’m not just referring to capitalistic ventures. I mean opportunities to connect, to grow, to solve, to discover and to learn. That’s got to be a good thing.

• How to Use Twitter to Grow Your Business — Copyblogger
  Is Twitter more than just a waste of time? Before you discard it, read this and decide.
  (tags: web2.0 socialnetworking socialmedia marketing branding business tips tools seo social_media Twitter)

• Influential Marketing Blog: A Compilation of 2009 Social Media Predictions Worth Reading
  Rohit points to a very nice doc highlighting 2009 social media predictions / trends from the minds of the industry's leading thinkers
  (tags: predictions trends social media RohitBhargava)

• Cherryflava: South African Old School ads: Making even more sense 20 years on
  Jon Cherry takes us back to the 80's and some scary-ass ads, which, sadly enough, have some learnings for modern advertisers.
  (tags: marketing branding advertising Cherryflava cigarette)
• Cherryflava: Best South African ad of 2008
  Jon Cherry takes a look at the cream of SA's TV ad crop for 2008, and picks his favourites
  (tags: marketing branding advertising Cherryflava television)

This morning, at 07h08, Kate Ashleigh Stopforth joined our family.

The moment I walked into the ward at sparrow’s fart this morning the memories began to flood back. Ethan was born in the same hospital, same surgery, almost four years ago. It’s amazing how quickly you forget the sites, smells and sounds - and the depth of the emotions that go along with them.

All I care about is that Kate and her mom are well, which they are, and as an added bonus she’s a beautiful little creature to boot.

A huge thank you must go out to all our family and friends who have been so supportive and generous, and then above all to my wife who endured a tough pregnancy, came through like a trooper and will no doubt be as good and even better a mommy to Kate as she already is to Ethan.

I’m a blessed guy. Pics are at http://flickr.com/photos/mikestopforth/sets/72157611001813254/.

I was privileged enough to receive an invite from Reuben Goldberg to join him on an episode of his popular talk show The Internet Economy which airs every Friday night from 7-8 on ClassicFM.

We spoke about the broad subject of social media in South Africa, the article I wrote the other day (the Next Step for Social Media) and finally Afrigator.com and the 27dinners.

Click here to download the MP3 (13 Mb) - I’d really appreciate your feedback on the content.

Four years doesn’t feel like a long time. But my goodness, a lot can happen in four years.

3 years and 10 months ago my son Ethan was born. It was a big day. I know that’s a cliched thing to say - but there’s just something earth-shatteringly amazing about experiencing the birth of one’s child, no matter what your religious orientation or philosophical leaning, that takes some topping.

Today Wendy and I found out our second child, the sex of which we’ve chosen not to know, will be born a week from now, on 10 December. Exciting, scary stuff

Point is, driving home from the gynae I was trying to remember what I had written on my blog/s, Facebook profile and Twitter account when Ethan was born. And then I realised, coupled immediately with a sense of stupidity and disbelief, that I had never heard of a blog, wouldn’t have known how to register an account on a social network and that Twitter didn’t exist when Ethan joined the world, 4 short years ago.

In fact I started to recall distant memories of asking my boss for three day’s paternity leave, and bringing back photos of my newborn baby boy and his beautiful mom to the office to brag to my colleagues. I remember setting the best of them in a frame on my desk - the desk where I had a worn-out piston as a business card holder

How I got here goodness knows, but I’m grateful, proud and humbled all at once. I know I’ve said it before but it’s been an awesome ride!

Here’s to the next 4… Hold thumbs for us on the 10th and, well, expect pics on Facebook, Flickr, here, there, everywhere…

Or at least that’s what my neighbour, Jacques, will be hoping. Early this morning Wendy woke me up asking me to unplug the computers, modem and phone lines because of a serious electrical storm that had set in (we get some pretty mean lightning where we are so this is a fairly regular occurence).

Stumbling back down the passage seconds later, my mission complete, I nearly crapped myself as a white flash and a deafening explosion resounded through our house. I’m not normally scared of thunderstorms but this was scary. It sounded like a grenade had gone off in our lounge.

Anyways I assumed that it had just been a close call and went back to sleep.

2 hours later I woke up again, stumbled down the passage and found Wendy and Ethan staring at the house opposite the road through our kitchen window. This is what they’d seen…

Close up of the lightning strike

Debris that landed on our driveway - ACROSS THE ROAD!

Quite a strike that - apparently it hit his modem and computer - both of which landed up on the floor. Unpleasant!

But you gotta love Jozi thunder storms

The honeymoon is over. Much of the hype and noise surrounding social media and its meteoric rise (especially in the USA) has abated. Perhaps owing to the global economic crisis, arguably due to the apparent lack of sustainable business models and possibly as a result of some semblance of reasonable thinking, we’re no longer reading about $1.6 billion investments in YouTube and $15 billion Facebook valuations.

At the same time social media or Web 2.0 or new media or whatever the heck you choose to call it certainly hasn’t disappeared either. On the one (marketing) hand we’re seeing significantly higher budget percentages being pushed at below-the-line, experiential and digital (for the purposes of this conversation including online and mobile) channels - a sure sign that business takes the effect that the social media evolution has had on their customers pretty seriously. Agencies are feeling this - a fact that keeps my company and me very busy.

On the other (internal) hand, many organisations have realised the enormous power in leveraging social platforms, tools and technologies behind the corporate firewall (a school of thought dubbed Enterprise 2.0) and traditional ERP vendors like Microsoft, SAP, IBM and Oracle are actively incorporating social features and functionality into their offerings.

But for you - the marketers, advertisers and brand custodians - social media can only be one of three things. Firstly, you may feel threatened by it, having listened to the doomsday prophets and their “Web 2.0 = the death of traditional advertising” sermons. They’re talking crap, by the way, but we’ll get to that later. Maybe you consider yourself a technophobe or digitally incompetent. Take heart in the fact that social media has got nothing to do with technology. Or rather very little. Understanding the technology of social media is no more critical to benefiting from it than understanding how to build a cellphone was important to using it to improve your business.

Secondly, you’ve seen the opportunity in social media but have no idea what to do next. This article is, in fact, written especially for you. That’s because the third group I refer to (and they do exist) have embraced the emergence of social media and are watching it add value to their clients and ultimately impact the bottom line.

So assuming you have gotten over the hype of social media and now seek to extract some substance in order to add the aforementioned value to your clients, how do you go about doing that? I’d like to offer a few tips and pointers from my experience running a social and mobile media company for (who would’ve thunk it) two years now - a company that has endured some hectic challenges carving out a niche in a completely new space. If you’re looking for the ROI on social media, or the real meaning behind Web 2.0, or just simple ways to take your agency to the next level, try these:

1. Focus on the WHY, not the HOW

If you get all wrapped up in the ‘how’ of social media you’ll get hopelessly obsessed with technology - RSS this, Ajax that, CMS at the back and CSS in the front - and spend all your time upskilling yourself on stuff you can outsource anyways. Rather spend energy understanding WHY social media is important - and it’s important for all the reasons you can read about at sites like www.cluetrain.com. Read it - you won’t regret it. Or download some eBooks by experts like Brian Solis or Seth Godin (Google them).

Quite simply - Web 2.0 is important because it gives ordinary people the opportunity to publish content online, shifting power to them, turning them into Prosumers (simultaneous producers and consumers of information) and the collective narrative they produce as a result has simply got to mean something for brands. Web 2.0 is also significant because it maps, often visually, the links between these prosumers in the form of social networks. The ability to see social networks is invaluable.

2. Integrate to Innovate

There is life beyond the 30 Second Spot (to quote Joe Jaffe, who wrote a book by the same name), and if you’re smart you’ve realised that. Still, I want to reiterate that the answer to the digital evolution is not scrapping everything you know to embrace everything you don’t. It’s about finding creative and innovative ways to integrate the new with the old, I mean, traditional. Our markets are smarter, more informed and more connected than ever before and if we don’t maximise our chance of grabbing their attention we’re wasting our time and our client’s money.
I believe social media provides a great opportunity to both sustain and measure the impact of above the line campaigns, while building community around brands at the same time. Conversely, investing in a blog or Facebook presence or whatever it may be without sending people there (one of the best ways of doing so obviously being via ATL channels) can be a frightful waste of time and money too. Succeeding in today’s marketing world means having an inclusive, integrated, 360-degree approach to campaigns.

3. Remember it’s a 5-day game

My colleague Angus Robinson has many favourite sayings, but arguably his favourite favourite is this “remember that it’s a 5-day game”. I think many of us approach new technologies and platforms thinking we’re in for a whirlwind experience with no structure or predictability.

In our experience of integrating social and mobile media with traditional campaigns, commitment, consistency and sustained effort is the order of the day. Find people within your business that understand the tools and platforms and who care about identifying content from within the business that will capture online audiences.

Start using these three tips as points of departure as you venture into social, new, 2.0 - whatever - and you may just find some value too.