I came across a very insightful post over at Experience: The Blog where the author uses Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to tease out some of the reasons for online behaviour, in this case why people join online communities. It is a very good analysis of the motivations behind people’s behaviour and set me thinking about the online social media scene in South Africa and why companies who engage in online social media campaigns may be jumping the gun a bit.

South Africa is still in a very fragile state of uneasy equilibrium socio-politically, nearly fifteen years after the end of apartheid the overall majority of the black population is not very much better off than before the end of apartheid in 1994. Economically, the majority of the country’s wealth still are controlled by a small minority of predominantly white people, the reasons and dynamics for such a state of affairs which falls outside the scope of our present conversation. The result is that when it comes to information technology and the ecosystem around ICT tools, we still have a very unequal distribution of access to these modalities. In other words, the average black student or child still does not have access to computing resources and their parents still are not in a position to afford a computer; most of the time they are still struggling to just provide in the basic needs like proper housing and enough food on the table in the face of a struggling economy and rising fuel and food prices.

When one speaks of social media, you are thus speaking, in a South African context, of a small minority of predominantly white geeks and geekettes with an odd sprinkling of Coloured, Black and Indians thrown in who are leading the conversation and an incestuous in-clique parrotting and echoing each other’s blogs and blog posts. Recently a furore broke out when one freelance journalist made a list of the prominent figures in the South African blogosphere and almost all of them turned out to be white. One coloured blogger quickly reacted with a counter-list of non-white South African “Web 2.0″ personalities and his post was severely criticized by many on the “white list” as being divisive and hurting those he mentioned on the list. How exactly it would hurt them I could not imagine, I suppose all the white boys would fort up and keep the business and the action within the in-clique and ignore completely anything that any of these “troublesome” coloureds have to say…?

The point is, social media and social media marketing and social media strategy is an almost pointless pursuit for businesses in South Africa when the same small group of people who are also the same group who got the contracts to develop these sites, now have to go around and stir up their small, limited circle of friends to go and see what Company A or B has put up and comment there or add a digg, or del.icio.us bookmark or in South Africa’s case Muti or Laaik.it or Amatomu or Afrigator. Once anyone has put anything up and he goes: “hey guys go look at my post” a small number of his/her buddies will rush over and throw two cents worth of “nice post, keep at it” into the comments collection-box and be on their merry way to look at the next shiny little pebble on the internet highway.

When it comes to companies releasing press releases about new products/programs or initiatives they are launching, we are stuck in the old top-down hierarchical mentality of wanting to control the message and releasing stiff, formal templated media releases that does not contain anything with a potential of going viral or being worthy of being shared with your friends on Facebook. The Vodacom animated meerkat is a much despised brand property on Facebook where there is actually a group called “I fucking hate the animated meerkat from Vodacom” with 15,642 (South African) members.

Some of the bigger media companies have in-house “social media experts”, mostly web development geeks who saw potential in this new frontier opening up and all sorts of “consultants” offering “New Media and Social Media Strategy” services for exorbitant fees. Most of these consultants are based in closed in-clique centres like Johannesburg and Cape Town where most of the action is happening and the market is so small that there is usually stiff competition from the same group of individuals for the available social media gigs. This then inevitably leads to some behind-the-scenes intrigue and gossip mongering and trying to keep it “within the family”.

This means that in a South African context where an incompetent and corrupt government alliance are failing all it’s people, every community is closing in on itself and protecting it’s own and being very protective of the available small pieces of pie going around. The hierarchy of needs that Maslow talks about thus comes into play with people who have access to technology and the education enabling them to wield that technology adequately and competently, keeping it to themselves in order to remain ahead of the pack in the African bush. You then find a situation like you have at present in the online Web 2.0 South African zoo, those who have been benefitting from apartheid through privileged education and upbringing and access to good education and resources banding together only with those from similar privileged backgrounds.

Everyone else is not “worthy” and it is not their problem or their concern why “these people” aren’t educated or sophisticated enough, it’s been fifteen years of Affirmitive Action and BEE after all! We thus see a very vicious racism rearing it’s head where the Australian passports and emigration visas are being dusted off and old Afrikaner Boer generals are nostalgically praised in popular culture to signal a return to the “good old days” if only in spirit and not in the everyday reality.

My point in waffling on like this? People form communities around common and shared interests. Many of the small minority of active participants in the South African blogosphere or Web 2.0 scene share only one thing: being white and their parents having benefitted from the previous apartheid regime. They are thus the custodians of the old wealth and the old ways and are doing everything to protect their position of privilege from being usurped by pretentious nouveau-riche blacks who wants to overrun and nationalize everything in sight. Recent political developments like the ANC youth league president threatening with killing for the very unsuitable presidential candidate does not exactly help in easing their fears.

So social media strategy and social media marketing online in South Africa is only existent for a small minority of privileged white geeks and their equally small potential white and privileged audience who might be enticed into visiting a site and leaving a comment or sharing it on a social bookmarking site. The rest of the population do not have computers, many access these sites from work or school or university and then only to check the odd e-mail and zombie bite their friends on Facebook. Most of the teenagers are clogging up the GPRS networks with Mxit from their mobile phones and those (mostly white kids) that have access to 3G use it to play XBOX or World of WarCraft online.

DISCLAIMER: This is my personal blog, the opinions expressed here belongs to me alone. You are free to differ from me in the comments, but please keep it civil and on point, I tolerate no monkey business

After a long break from blogging because of project and client commitments (I was Twittering and Facebooking and Friendfeeding and posting to del.icio.us all the time; does that count…?), I have now decided to get a name domain and do a bit of the personal branding type stuff that everyone is talking about

The first step of course was to register my own name as a top level domain (TLD). This starts your journey on the way to projecting a serious, professional image to prospective clients and business partners or just friends on the internet who now can see you’re not just goofing around on the internet the whole time, but that it can actually be used for more serious business and professional networking purposes

So this is the start of my attempt to bring all my different blogs and profiles together under one roof and namespace. The obvious benefit is that it will go a long way towards focusing my attention on only the one major repository of stuff that is scattered all over the web at the moment.

All the different blogs hosted elsewhere and all the different profiles on the different social networks are becoming a bit unwieldy and the trend is nowadays towards aggregated lifestreaming and building your personal brand online.

Doing that will be much easier if there is one place to rule them all, one place to consolidate them, one place to aggregate them all and in lifestreamlining bind them. (Apologies to JRR Tolkien). Hey, did I just make up a new word: lifestreamlining…? Hmmm… So, what exactly is it that I do online that it now deserves a dedicated namespace and aggregation effort…? Web development, mainly on the WordPress content management system platform and everything related to that: registering domain names, hosting those accounts on CentOS Linux servers, setting up and configuring the WordPress CMS, maintaining it and augmenting it with the multitude of plugins and themes available. Of course it’s never that simple, and I shall dedicate a future post to a detailed outline of what all goes into setting up and maintaining blogs for clients. Especially with the advent of Social Media and the myriad services out there, it has become a regular cottage industry. Consultant services to marketing and PR professionals who want to enter the Social Media phenomenon but who do not necessarily have access to a geeky nephew or brother who can set it up and maintain it for them.

Also with the creation of new roles of Social Media Strategists, more and more businesses and big corporations are committing budget to individual who can set up, configure and maintain social media profiles and services for them in the new media landscape where they have to necessarily go where the conversation is happening and the cool kids hang out, otherwise they will just become irrelevant and fall out of everyone’s attention sphere and lose clients and thus business and profit. So, without rambling on too much, that is what I do all the time, getting paid to goof off on the internet all day and put up Facebook and del.icio.us and Friendfeed accounts and profiles for paying clients. Geez, I’ve done it for myself and I’m having a fabulous time, if someone else also want in on the action, they can bloody well pay me for my time and trouble, can’t they…?

Some bright sparks (software engineers) who worked at Google before, came up with a brilliant new lifestream aggregating service called Friendfeed. I am testing the brand spanking new WordPress Friendfeed widget in the sidebar of my blog. What it does is integrate into one service all the disparate profiles and accounts and pull them together, and now with the WordPress widget you can plug it in to your blog sidebar. People who are interested in seeing what you’re up to need only go to one place to see where you’ve done what. For example if you’ve watched videos over at YouTube and marked it as a favourite, if you’ve posted a new blog post at another domain, uploaded Flickr photos, shared Google Reader items from your RSS collection of feeds, listened to favourite last.fm tracks, scheduled an event at upcoming.org or updated your Twitter status with a Tweet or ten, whether you dugg stories on digg or saved del.icio.us bookmarks, it will all show up in one place: your Friendfeed profile.

The main Friendfeed site and web interface also has the ability to let you like things and comment on your stream of events and those of friends whom you have subscribed to. This has led to Friendfeed becoming the destination of choice for many of the more prominent Twitter personalities when Twitter experiences one of it’s notorious hiccups, which is frequent and unexpected and many times it’s a case of guess which functional aspect is gonna be crippled this week while they (hopefully) are hard at work in the background getting things up and running smoothly.

Information Week carries a story about the British Education authorities deciding against upgrading their network of schools to Windows Vista and Office 2007. They cite cost and ‘unclear benefits’ as reasons and are looking at free Open Source alternatives such as OpenOffice.org, which is near equivalent and in many ways surpasses many proprietary offerings on the market.

“Upgrading existing ICT systems to Microsoft Vista or Office 2007 is not recommended,” said the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, also known as Becta, in a report issued this week.

Becta officials said a study the group commissioned found that upgrading school systems from Windows XP to Vista and Office 2007 would increase costs and create software compatibility problems while providing little benefit.

“Our advice is to be sure there is a strong business case for upgrading to these products as the costs are significant and the benefits remain unclear,” said Stephen Lucy, Becta’s executive director of strategic technologies, in a statement.

Becta also singled out for criticism Microsoft’s failure to support the Open Document Format — which is recognized by the International Organization for Standardization — in Office 2007. Instead, the software uses a new Microsoft format called Office Open XML.

WordPress Bookmarklet Hack is a nifty little WordPress ‘hack’ that involves you going to the Write tab in your WordPress admin panel and dragging the little ‘Press It’ link in the bottom-left corner to your browser bookmarks or quick links toolbar. You must do this from your own blog admin screen – the name of your blog appears in the bookmark toolbar with the Press It label.

Now, whenever you get to any page or article on the web that you want to blog about, this little Javascript code snippet opens up your WordPress Edit window with the link and title of the article already filled in for you in WordPress. All you need to do is add your own little bit of wisdom or insight about whatever it is you blogged about, add any links to pics or whatever, and Voila! You have just created a blog post without the hassle of having to go and log in and navigate down the blog dir structure to get to the Post page.

“Universe puts us in places where we can learn. They are never easy places, but they are right. Wherever we are, it’s the right place .. and the right time. Pain that sometimes comes is part of the process of constantly being born.”

– Delenn to Sheridan in Babylon 5: “A Distant Star”

Update: Just a week ago I did a View Source of my blog webpage and discovered some editURI entries that redirected to a domain i did not know and when I tried to look it up with domaintools.com, my browser bombed out… So far from wanting to appear to be wearing a tinfoil-hat, I embarked on a quest to ‘harden’ my blog and searched around for Wordpress security related sites. The most relevant and in-depth as well as valuable articles, advice, links and plugins are found over at blogsecurity.net

The result of all this lockdown madness was that I went a bit overboard and couldn’t even log in to my blog because of editing .htaccess on the server. DO NOT mess with that unless you know what you’re doing, you can seriously disrupt the flow of your blogging posts with this kind of tweaking and fiddling. As if that was not enough, afterwards posts I edited did not save and the result was a post title of Blog Security!!! for nearly a week with no content being able to be saved. It took over a week of hard graft down in the trenches and we’re happy to report everything is up and running again.

There comes a time in every blogger’s life, actually just right after installation and setup, when issues of security need to be considered. Not just securing your Wordpress installation against spam attacks, but also checking code for editURI entries in page source for example. Then there comes the issue of keeping those with malicious intent at bay and here one sometimes get to deal with some tough cookies, indeed.

A very valuable resource in every Wordpress blogger’s arsenal is blogsecurity.net. They have excellent articles and posts and guest contributions by people at the forefront of blogging security on the Wordpress platform specifically. There is even an interview with Matt Mullenweg, the godfather of all things Wordpress-ey.
The blogger’s quest for security should start with installing the wp-scanner and loginlockdown as well as WPIDS (WordPress Intruder Detection System) plugins.
It’s as easy as right-clicking on the download link at blogsecurity.net and clicking on Save target as… or any variation on that and unzipping the plugin and uploading that folder into the wp-content/plugins directory.
From the WordPress dashboard go to plugins and activate them and click on options to further configure them if you so desire and it is A for away.
You are now secure against most of the most harmful things that can befall a WordPress blog; just bear in mind that we are in a fluid dynamic system with platform upgrades, plugin upgrades and the ingenuity of the bad guys out there constantly evovolving.

So it also just make good horse kind of sense to check your blog every day and view the source and check the plugins and your wordpress installation for updates etc etc

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, but we are proud to announce our very own YouTube channel, specifically for Hogsback Media Networks related content.

In trying to build up features and content for this site, one of the obvious media modalities to consider is videos of things and subjects relevant to New Media 2.0, which is Hogsback Media Networks’ primary business focus. After considering all the options and doing the cost-benefit analysis thing, it was decided to rather go the YouTube route, than hosting videos on our own server infrastructure, which would cripple our servers and chow through the bandwidth, if and when a certain item or items or posts becomes popular.

So, the solution: Registering for a YouTube account, they are owned by Google, so they have the world’s biggest and best and fastest distributed data center architecture serving up streaming videos. And it is all free! Gravy!!!!

If you have a gmail account already or using any of Google’s other services (docs and spreadsheets, calendar, maps, reader, scholar, books, etc.) you can just log in with that and start creating your YouTube custom profile, channel, favourites, tags, etc.

Do a search for videos you’re interested in, say Web 2.0 or wordpress or blogging, and you are presented with an overwhelming selection to choose from. Set up a playlist and channels: playlists are really categories and you can set up how many you need for each subheading of videos you’re interested in, e.g web 2.0, startups, technology, venture capital, photoshop, linux, blogging, wordpress, etc. Click through to go to the video itself and you are presented with a menu to Share, Add to Favourites or add to Channel or Playlist.

In such a way I built up a selection of Web 2.0 and tech startup related videos in one place, created a channel for all of it and then used the Google code generated for this purpose to host on one’s own website or blog. The interface was a bit unsuited for the main blog to integrate with, so i created a subdomain on hogsback.net, appropriately named youtube.hogsback.net. Head over there now and see what I have loaded into the channel so far; videos range from Mike Arrington of TechCrunch interviewing many of the most well-known Silicon Valley startup founders on their understanding of the term Web 2.0 to a board room session where angel investors speak of what they need to see regarding your financial projections when trying to raise startup capital.

All that and more and new videos will be added after I have chosen more that is relevant to Hogsback Media Networks and it’s clients. This is of course also part of the portfolio of value added services we can incorporate into a client’s marketing strategy. Whether you choose videos on YouTube uploaded by others and sharing and commenting on them, or whether you have your own created videos illustrating your message or brand or poduct, this is a very valuable enhancement to any brand or product and it’s marketing and PR strategies in todays New Media world.

So please head over to youtube.hogsback.net and feast your eyes

NB. Fast broadband/ADSL  connection preferable. Click on Menu and each video with a short description underneath appear in the right sidebar, use the right arrow to scroll through the selection and read the captions, then click on which ever video you want to see, and that’s it.

The whole issue of getting all the different social networking/bookmarking sites’ profiles into one page has now become a sort of personal mission for me, both because it makes it easier to manage and also because of the potential it has of becoming a personal publishing platform.

Like your own personal media network, where you decide what content from which sources you want to share and how and when and where and why such sharing should be taking place at all.

I have been trying to do this for a while now with Facebook, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, digg and basically just testing out all the different capabilities and functions and special features of each service. I will post more detailed uses of each site after a bit more testing and using and research.

Then of course comes the part where all of this has to be linked and connected up together and I find that Facebook works best for that purpose. There are of course whole tech startups devoted to exactly this, but I find the idea of yet another social networking service to aggregate all the other social networking services on one page a bit silly. I have received my Beta Registration acknowledgment for Twine though, and if all the reviews and write-ups about it so far are true, it should be exactly the kind of thing that is needed to make sense of all the disparate and scattered SNP’s (social networking profiles) into one profile to bind them, one profile to rule them all and in an intelligent manner binding them into One profile to rule them all. (apologies to JRR Tolkien)

For all of this of course you need a good web browser and here, without any hesitation or dispute, i will recommend Firefox, and the stumbleupon, del.icio.us and facebook add-ons (toolbars). Unfortunately Firefox has become a bit bloated of late and freezes regularly and uses too much processing power, so I switched to Seamonkey, which is more lightweight and very fast.

It is easy to, from within Google Reader, click on a link of a news article you like or find interesting, photoblog it with stumbleUpon, bookmark it with del.icio.us, and all of it is updated and cross-updated on your Facebook, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and digg blogs all at the same time or however you have configured or set it up. Our company of course specializes in exactly this as a service to our clients.

Gmail is every web worker’s number one ally, then there is Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Reader, Calendar and Maps etc to collaborate on projects with those that share your interests or guest posters/contributors etc. And if you log into secure encrypted SSL Google mail (https://mail.google.com), your Docs and Calendar and Maps are also automatically through encrypted SSL tunnel. And it is all free!!!

With Google Reader you keep track of the most important feeds from around the ‘blogosphere’, specifically those in your own field or sphere of interests and tastes.

What you highlight or bookmark or share depends entirely on your ability to pick newsworthy or interesting items that other people would be interested in seeing or if you have a certain story or project or slant, this can form the basis for the theme of ‘your own personal publishing empire’. With regular, quality content you build up regular and loyal visitors and with more and more regular visitors comes the ability to charge premium rates for ads (custom designed animated ad banners of advertising partners).

For more info on any of these strategies for your company or brand, feel free to mail mario [at] hogsback [dot] net