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

This is one of my all-time favourite songs from Stain’d, it reminds me of my own daughter…! Enjoy this, Aaron Lewis is an amazing vocalist.

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.