Well, Suraj Sudhakar, the guy who brought us TEDxKibera in 2009 is at it again and this time he wants to bring TED 2010 live to Kibera and the youth of Kibera [Read the full story] …

A few weeks ago Afrinnovator featured GTBank, the Nigerian bank that is pushing it’s use of New/Social Media as a way of building it’s brand and connecting with it’s clients (or in this case audience).

GTBank are clearly trend-setters for corporations in Africa. We found it interesting that a bank had spent so much effort and gone to so much detail to create a strong online brand presence on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

So what did we do? Well, we did the obvious thing! We sought an interview with GTBank on their use of social media (don’t you just love us!)… why would a bank want to use Social Media? Are their efforts bearing any fruits? What lessons have they learnt along the way?

Lola Odedina, the Head, Communications & External Affairs at GTBank, oversees the Brand Management, Media Relations & New Media development for GTBank & all subsidiaries. She answered these and other questions regarding this innovative use of ‘social tools’ to enhance her company’s brand.

Afrinnovator.com will live blog the event on both days. So stay tuned to the website and keep a close eye on the Twitter account for a minute by minute account of what’s happening on the ground at the event.

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I will of course keep writing here and the frequency should pick up a bit more.

Hey, I just came from this conference where every one was talking about social networking, and social media, and new media… What does this all stuff mean?

Well, according to Wikipedia:

Social media (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Media) is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

A social network service (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Networking ) focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services.

New media (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Media) is a term meant to encompass the emergence of digital, computerized, or networked information and communication technologies in the later part of the 20th century. Most technologies described as “new media” are digital, often having characteristics of being manipulatable, networkable, dense, compressible, interactive and impartial.

Wow, do you like cram wikipedia?

Well, yeah, sort of. I do it as a pastime when I’m bored. Open a random Wikipedia article and cram it!

Ok…. Weird!!!

Hey! So Facebook is Social Media?

Nope.

Err… Twitter Social Media?

Nope.

I have a business. What does all this new/social media/networking stuff have to do with me? I just care about my revenues; does it still mean something to me?

Your clients….?

But I don’t care about my clients. Wait! Those are the guys who give me my revenues right?

Exactly!

So with Facebook and Twitter and all these things I can make revenues!

Err… sorta…

Ok, I think am beginning to understand.

Good

To successfully take my business to the next level through this social mumbo jumbo I just need a Facebook account.

Nope

I need… a Twitter account.

Nope

Aha! I’ve got it I need a website!

Oh boy! You don’t already have one of those?

Well…. Err, we have a web page!

Arrrgrgrgghghgh!

Ok, so what do I need?

You need to be human.

Huh?

Yup. Human. Say it with me… ‘humaaaaaaan’

You’re weird…. What does that have to do with anything?

Well, if you’re human you are necessarily social. You can relate with other human beings. You can empathize with them (and sympathize as well). Most importantly you can carry out a conversation.

Huh? You lost me!

“Social” media/networking is more about the “social” than the “media and networking”. It’s about connecting with real people who use your product or service and listening to them and talking with them (not to them or at them).

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc etc are just mediums to reach out to this audience and interact with them. That’s why it’s called social MEDIA i.e. mediums of expressing the social nature of human beings. Otherwise it would have been called something else, like err… err… Ok, I’m blank!

… to be continued…

Since then, the activity on the instance has grown tremendously. The Ushahidi team has even set up a Situation Room at the Fletcher School to keep up with SMS reports and such. Right now not only are there status reports on the map, but with the new overlay feature of Mogadishu, the latest version of Ushahidi; you can visualize KML overlays of different kinds of data like where medical facilities are located. In addition there’s a stream of photos (which you can help tag) and an embed of the Google person finder ‘gadget’. Swift River, the crowd-sourced data filter, has also been put to use in tracking twitter activity around the crisis.

This is by and large the biggest deployment of Ushahidi not just in terms of traffic to the site, and number of incident reports but also it has been the most involving. It is taking the tireless efforts of a bunch of amazing people to keep this running.

Some of the most amazing inventions and innovations have been the result, not of in depth research and analytical market studies to find out what the customers need and whether the product fits the market, but simply of this almost mysterious thing we call a ‘hunch’ I believe that probably one of the biggest undoings of major corporations is to ignore the ‘H-factor’, the ‘hunch factor’. The problem with running a business, and this is typical (i think) of even the brightest startups once they become major corporations is exactly that – running the business! What I mean is all of a sudden you are caught up in balancing balance sheets and worrying about so many other things, trying to quantify everything, trying to justify everything – and I’m not saying this is a BAD THING. But it becomes an impediment when it becomes the primary focus, overshadowing the very thing that began the enterprise (remember those startup days, when you just went with what just, plain and simple ‘made sense‘ to do? Just read this article by Joe Wilcox, about how this very thing could have been a crippling factor for one of the largest corporations globally in the last decade, Microsoft. (Someone said if you’re a startup, hire MBAs last, fire MBAs first – No pun intended to all MBAs) On the contrary, the H-factor has propelled to amazing success, such seemingly trivial ideas as ‘letting people know what you are doing in 140 letters or less’ (also known as Twitter). Watch Twitter, co-founder Evan Williams explaining this:

The moral of this whole story is simple – Don’t ignore the H-factor; not everything is measurable. (In fact trying ‘formal’ approaches to some ideas destroys the idea itself – imagine if the first thing the Twitter founders did was to commission a market research on ‘whether people would want to tell others what they are doing in 140 characters or less’!)

This is why I like simple ideas, ideas that make sense without having to scratch your head for 5 minutes about it. In fact, if you can pitch your idea in a sentence (like this guys pitched his startup idea to Guy Kawasaki on an elevator) and get the whole idea out there in principle and have someone understand it and how it would possibly work (in principle); you’ve got a winner. I’ve had the opportunity to judge at several business plan competitions or to judge at some student project presentations and almost always, I could tell whether it was a brilliant idea or not within the first one minute of the presentation.

The idea at the time was pretty simple – A Google Maps mashup of sorts. Allow startups and innovators in Africa to put themselves ‘on the map’… literally. The motivation was simply that most maps you see of Africa well… let’s just say they almost never portray something very positive about Africa (unless it’s a map of something to do with mobile technology).

I hacked the original Afrinnovator in an evening and put it up the next day. However, I had this burning desire to do more with it, really tell the African story as far as technology, innovation and startups in Africa is concerned. Simply put, a place that gives good representation of what’s going on in Africa because this continent is not as dark as people think it is.

So it was a great pleasure when my pal Kevin Rombe who is one of the people behind GotIssuez.com approached me with the some ideas, the opportunity presented itself and we literally put Afrinnovator.com to sleep for a few months.

The New Afrinnvovator

Today I am pleased to announce that we have woken her up. She is back and better. And this is just the beginning, over the next few weeks we will roll out some more interesting stuff on Afrinnovator.com. Believe me – it’s more than just a blog!

You can follow Afrinnovator on Twitter at @afrinnovator and Kevin and myself at @kevrombe and @wmworia

It is with great pleasure that African Pixel today announces it’s first two apps for the iPhone that are now in the iTunes AppStore!

This is truly a great thing. The last few months have been quite a task as we have been working hard not only to develop the applications but also to make the process of making them from Africa work. This has not been a small task but a worthwhile one as we have gone through several iterations trying to get things right for this first application.

Ok, enough with the mushy stuff – what’s the app? what does it do? where do I get it?

Well, essentially there are two applications in the app store which are actually the same application… huh? Well we have one application that we call iScribe, and a ‘Lite’ version of the same (called ‘iScribeLite’ – duh).

The Lite version is fully functional just like the ‘full’ application. So you can do the same thing with iScribeLite as you can do with iScribe. There are only two differences between the two:

1. iScribeLite is FREE
2. iScribeLite has embedded ads which iScribe does not have

So whichever app you get, you enjoy the full features available.

What is it?

Well, Simply put, iScibe is a story telling/editing/publising app.

Read the rest on the official AP blog… Because story telling is not just African, it’s Human!

This has been the year of the long awaited, supernatural, amazingly awesome, we’re talking toast-your-bread-in-a-second event of cosmic proportions… i’m talking about the landing of fiber cables connecting east africa to the world (i’m still waiting for the earth to shift it’s orbit slightly now that this has happened) – of course, i’m over exaggerating here (and probably not very fair, my apologies).

SEACOM and other fiber cables really have started us off on a really cool path here. Their role cannot be minimized (though it has been blown out of proportion more than enough times already). And it is still too early to predict with absolute certainty how the tech scene in Kenya will evolve now. However, there are some good indications so far from what I’ve been observing.

There’s quite a bit of talk in tech circles about technology parks and other ‘infrastructural’ things that need to be in place for tech startups to launch into a Silicon Valley-level kind of tech cluster. The ministry of ICT is in the process of constructing some technology parks somewhere. This led me (a while back) to start researching on what made such technology clusters as The Valley succeed. In the process I came across some very interesting essays by Paul Graham (the guy behind that awesome thing called y-combinator) on precisely this.

One of them titled Can you buy SiliconValley? Maybe. Asks the exact question:

A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask “How could we make something like that happen here?” The organic way to do it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live. That’s how Silicon Valley happened. But could you shortcut the process by funding startups?

And he answers:

Possibly. Let’s consider what it would take.

In a separate article (which gives a more elaborated answer this by describing what it would take to grow the cluster organically) he gives several things that make The Valley what it is. And he has some good points. One which I strongly agree with is that, creating ‘a silicon valley’ does not lie in buildings.

Buildings (technology parks) are important (don’t get me wrong).

But the people who would fill those buildings are more important. And those people interestingly may not need the buildings given that today you can run a startup from your house all online, and yes, even from half way around the world in a continent few still think much about. I think the most important component is finding those startup founders, then figuring out how to get them to found startups, and then help them grow those startups.

When I gave this talk/presentation, ‘The Making of a Revolution‘; I would say that if we had about 10 founders – 2 each to start and scale a company as big as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook – we would have sorted out the Kenyan economy and more! Then i’d add the caveat that (of course) this could be a seriously difficult thing to scale (given that some of these companies have been around for decades and other circumstances) but what if you got 20 founders, starting 10 companies which became half as big as these, or 30 founders, 15 companies scaling a quarter of the scale of these; or 100 founder, 50 companies… Scaling this latter model is much easier right?

Ok, back to Silicon Valley and my quest forinsight. Today as I was learning on the internet about startups (and learn a lot did I!) I came across this awesome video on Youtube and corresponding presentation on slideshare that just gave me way new insight!

Need I say, Steve Blank has just joined my hall of fame. I hope some day I can start 8 companies…

Now, this is HUGE!!! We’re talking galactic proportions huge here!

I’m honored to have been considered for this and I thank the good people planning it. I will either speak at the event, or be on a panel or both. The speakers at this event are simply amazing, it will be a great place to learn about mobile in Africa from different perspectives. From the official website:

Following the unrivalled success of Mobile Web Africa, which was a true ”sell-out” conference held in South Africa in October, Mobile Web East Africa is the next in a series of progressive and innovative events to focus on one of the most important technological advances of the 21st century.

Again utilising the exceptionally interactive roundtable format, Mobile Web East Africa promises to be one of the leading events of 2010 in Africa.  It is through these roundtable interactions, panel discussions and presentations that the future development of the mobile internet, mobile applications and mobile ecosystem in the region will be discussed and mapped.

The only down side of the roundtable format is that it limits the number of attendees that can come - for Mobile Web East Africa the room is limited to just 120 people so to guarantee your place please register early!

You may have heard about Mobile Web Africa which took place earlier this year in Johannesburg, South Africa. I did not get to attend that but heard first hand accounts from people I know who attended and it was an awesome event.

I’m really looking forward to this. Learn more about MwebEA at http://www.mobileeastafrica.com/

See you there!

Inaugural TEDxYouthInspire to be held in Accra, Ghana in April 2010

Accra, Ghana, December 1, 2009 – On Saturday, April 10, 2010, from 8:00AM – 6PM GMT, the inaugural TEDxYouthInspire conference will be held at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT in Accra, Ghana. The one-day, free event will be the first TEDx event dedicated exclusively to young African visionaries ages 14-25.

Tasked with inspiring young people to make sustainable transformation, the conference will utilize the theme “A Good Head & A Good Heart”, from former South African President Nelson Mandela’s 1995 autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, to exhibit how radical thought and integrity of spirit combine to create unlimited possibilities for a brighter future.

“It is important that young people are aware of their power as local and global community leaders,” says Raquel Wilson, event curator, “TEDxYouthInspire will encourage participants to collaborate and embrace their shared passions for change.”

Space for TEDxYouthInspire is limited. Young people interested in attending should apply online at www.tedxyouthinspire.org/attend. Eligible applications must be received by Sunday, January 31, 2010 to be considered for admission.

Individual and corporate sponsorship packages are available. Additional information about TEDxYouthInspire can be found by visitingwww.tedxyouthinspire.org. You can also follow along on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tedxyouthinspir or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tedxyouthinspire.

First off, before going into the  ’7 steps’ and ’10 points to consider’, my philosophy on social media is simple – actually it is exactly that – keep it simple! In other words, do what makes sense; sense for your brand, sense for your audience, sense for your consumer, sense for your company, sense for… just plain sense, in fact – common sense. As a matter of fact, I think if you got this right the rest – what social platforms to use, design of the blog, should we tweet… become fairly simple decisions to make.

In fact, social networks and platforms are really just a means to an end for your product or brand. They are not the end game. It’s kinda funny actually. What’s the end game. Well, the end game is what you want to achieve out of leveraging social media for your product/brand/company. Interestingly, this could be the very same goals you had with more traditional marketing strategies – brand loyalty, sales, brand awareness – shocking? I don’t think so. The strength of Social Media lies in the enhanced capability of the medium. It’s like, old school marketing media are dial up connections, social media is like a fiber connection!

This implies several things: First, the actual social networks/platforms (Facebook, Twitter etc) are really a latter consideration when coming up with your strategy. You don’t want to go into thinking about social media by thinking, “Hmm, everyone’s tweeting so we should tweet!”

Secondly, it means the primary things to think about are much closer home, what is your product, what do you want your brand to say, what experience do you want your clients to have when they engage with you? Then after answering these questions you can go ahead and select the best means/media to achieve these ends. Like I said, it’s common sense. (In fact I think there are a lot of things we make soooo complex, and make it look like you need a Phd to do, but it’s really just common sense)

One last thing I would like to mention before moving on to some interesting material that’s online on this subject is to do with design. Yes, design. Design is important. See, once you decide you’re going to use Twitter, it’s not simply just a matter of creating a twitter account and getting some bloke in the office to start tweeting! The thing about design (in this context) is not really (necessarily) the actual design i.e. what you will get a designer to do (although that matters too) (sounds confusing?) – the thing here is consistency! Consistency across everything – your Facebook page, your Twitter page, you website, your blog… See I think what you are giving your audience is an experience, they are literally engaging with you – only that they are doing so online, in a bit of an ‘impersonal’ way, which is also really an interesting thought because good use of social media gives your target audience as close to a ‘personal’ experience as possible; hence why it’s called ‘social’ and not ‘mechanical’!

This is also just plain common sense. Your message is about your brand, right? It is about the same brand, right? It is the same no matter what, right? No matter what social networking site/platform you use, right? Hmmm… then logically, you want the audience of that same brand, even if on different online ‘locations’ to get the same message across the board, right? Well, wasn’t that simple? Consistency in design will help you achieve this to some extent. Other things like consistency of tone (remember social is about talking with your audience, not at your audience) will also greatly help.

So how do you design to achieve consistency? Again, simple things – your twitter background, your avatars, the colors you use, your blog theme – simply put any design element that you have control over. Of course, you have more control over your own property – website, blog – versus say your Facebook page and Twitter page which you have varying degrees of control over (I find Twitter affords you a lot of flexibility). I’ll give a very simple example – My company, African Pixel: website, blog. Facebook page, Twitter page. I think we achieved some good level of consistency in design there.

Now, let’s look at some good pointers from some social media authorities:

I love this presentation by Jason Beer (and the corresponding blog post):

I am particularly struck by the idea that: Old school marketing is like Archery (Use targeting, and interruption to convince), New Marketing is like Ping Pong (Use human engagement and dialog to drive preference and loyalty)!

Here’s a summary of his 7 Steps to Creating a Social Media Strategy:

1. What’s your Pitch?
2. What’s your Point?
3. What’s your relationship with your Audience?
4. How does your Audience use Social Media? (See below…)
5. What’s your One Thing?
6. How will you be Human?
7. How will you Measure Success?

On point number 4 – How does your audience use social media – here’s a great article, ‘Understanding Users of Social Networks‘

CrowdSpring has a great piece on actual things you can do as part of your strategy by leveraging blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The cool thing about this piece is that they have conveniently suggested some short term and long term strategies so you clearly see what you can do immediately and what you can do over time. Another cool thing about this article is the fact that they have included tons of useful links and pointers to practical help on how to do things like setting up a Facebook page.

Finally, I think it’s also important to note that Social Media can be a two edged sword. You also want to be careful with how you employ it. The thing with social media that makes is as such is that unlike the old school where you could basically sit behind an iron curtain and dictate to your audience while sitting in safety; social media is well, exactly that – social! And social implies vulnerability, by going social you automatically make yourself vulnerable (again, common sense, just like choosing to be friends with someone you become vulnerable). You give your audience (and arguably even more than the exact demography you wanted to talk to since literally the whole population on say Twitter, or the whole online world can view your stuff) a level of control that’s unprecedented. You allow the masses to have control, you give them a voice. And the masses can be your biggest ally or your worst enemy (just read some history). When the masses rise, it becomes tough to control them. No, one will soon forget the upsurge at SXSW last year, and much less so, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerburg and Sarah Lacy. So caution is warranted. But in general, if you weigh your options and find you gain more from giving this power to the masses than you lose, then go ahead and bring down the iron curtain.

The cool thing about Social Media is that it is really inexpensive! You don’t even need to organize a 5 day retreat to the Bahamas for your Board of Directors to come up with a Social Media strategy!

[Feel free to contact me to help you come up with your social media strategy - I think I have officially earned the title 'Social Media Consultant']