Mike Stopforth

* This article appeared on my MoneyWeb blog on 5 July 2006 [Link].

A select group of South African companies are really beginning to see the benefit of blogs on the bottom line – these are the success stories…

Caffeine can be found at 11 Regent Street in Seapoint, Cape Town. It’s the latest addition to a growing number of Caffeine coffee shop franchises in the Mother City. What differentiates this particular watering hole from its competitors is the attention Caffeine is getting thanks to a very clever marketing initiative by the owners and a whole whack of blogging buzz – citizen journalists writing about it on the web in personal journals and websites.

[*Remebering that this appeared at MoneyWeb originally, this para caters for the Web 2.0 uninitiated] Blogs are websites built and maintained by ordinary people who have no coding experience and want to publish content without investing in a webmaster or web agency. They have grown in popularity over the last few years (stats show that the number of blogs on the Net has doubled in size every 5 months for the last 42 months) and as it stands there are over 47 million active blogs pumping out new content on the internet every minute. Blogs have democratized the internet as a publishing platform for Joe Public.

Blogs are dialogues – they invite conversation and participation from readers. This empowering, transparent approach to journalism has revolutionised the make-up of the web. It’s quickly evolving from a collection of static web pages into a vibrant, pulsating conversation driven by the consumer. Caffeine understood the inherent potential of such a platform and took the plunge by creating a simple, free (emphasis on free) blog using www.wordpress.com. The resultant creation is located at www.caffeinespot.wordpress.com. But just having a blog is not enough – you need to generate conversation and buzz to attract consumers. So Caffeine drew alongside some prominent Cape Town bloggers – Dave Duarte, Jon Cherry, Max Kaizen, Rafiq Phillips being just some of them – to develop a strategy for creating buzz. They decided to incentivise bloggers to talk about Caffeine in their blogs by offering a free coffee and muffin to any who did so. It wasn’t long before Caffeine was enjoying some friendly ‘linkage’, and Wordpress.com reported on 16 June this year that Caffeine Spot was the 33rd fastest growing blog in the world!

Other South African companies are using blogs as internal communications and collaborative tools. Avocado Vision uses their blog as a company website – the employees build the content of the site, which is an ongoing, organic process. The beauty of this approach to a corporate website is that you as the reader get a real sense of the essence, the personality, of Avocado Vision from your first interaction with their site. It also becomes a thought repository for the company – a place to store ideas, resources and general info in a digital, indexed, retrievable format. Avocado Vision have enjoyed phenomenal feedback from clients and vendors on the vibrancy and energy evident when they visit the site – and they keep coming back. I often ask my corporate clients what incentive they provide web users to return if the content of their site never changes? That’s like buying a newspaper with the same headlines two weeks in a row…

I recently spoke at an SAB management development programme on the subject of the emerging web and social technologies. One of the groups of delegates liked the idea of viral marketing using blogs so much that they built blogging into their strategy for a fundraising initiative. Thanks to a great idea, a handful of online buzz and some excellent corporate support they where able to raise over R 70,000 in no less than 8 days for CIDA City Campus in Jo’burg.

Jonathan Cherry of the popular blog Cherryflava - “a web magazine dedicated to hot new trends emerging in business, marketing, advertising and fresh thinking that’s igniting a creative revolution” - recently announced the launch of Cherryflava Media Company which hopes to “pioneer the use of blogging as a media vehicle and an interactive brand communication tool” (press release) in much the same way as Nick Denton of Gawker Media has so successfully done.

Our own organisation, the TomorrowGroup of companies, which operates as a completely virtual, fractal network of individuals uses a blog to share interesting and insightful information, connect with each other and collaborate on projects. It can be found at www.tmtd.biz and has a wealth of valuable articles, conversations and stories for companies wanting to embrace the challenges of the new Connection Economy.

These are just a sample of the applications South African companies, big and small, have found for blogs and social software. As broadband internet access (albeit slow in coming and expensive in arriving) ever widens our horizons from a communications and marketing perspective, it makes sound business sense to learn about these new tools and what value they may hold for your organisation, both internally and externally.

Or, as Hugh of gapingvoid.com so eloquently puts it…

If you still don’t know what he’s talking about… click here.

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