Jan07
28
It’s All Important
Lesson Numero Uno of building an online profile / social media profile:
Everything you publish is important.
Uno de Waal, Social Media consultant and all-round-dude-of-note has taught me a lesson in this regard. You can never afford to sit back and just write stuff. You have to think about who is reading what you write and what that could mean, if not now into the future.
Uno was remarking on an article I wrote for the Citizen newspaper (I have a weekly op-ed column with them that gets published online) in which I was attempting to educate some non-techie readers about the appearance and exciting growth of Muti, Africa’s own social bookmarking site.
His concern came down to the title of the article, “SA has big footprint on social web”, which, by the way was not my title but edited in by the editorial team at the Citizen. My first choice was “Good Muti”. He disagreed with my comment at the end of the article: “It’s great to see Africans having a significant footprint on the global social network scene”, stating otherwise with some impressive research to boot.
First up, the context is important. I was not trying to compare Muti to Digg, the comparison is ridiculous at this early stage. I was rather commenting on Business2.0’s rather encouraging recognition of Muti.
Look, nobody’s going to please everybody all of the time. I’m not saying that. And the better you write, and more opinionated you are, the better the chance someone will disagree. But carefully consider the quality of the material you publish online. Uno has taught me to stick with a title I prefer over a traditional editorial team, because it could matter to the market’s perception of what I write. This is another reason I like to use my real name whenever I publish online or comment in other’s blogs. It forces me to think.
Arb thoughts for a Sunday.
Arb Thought’s R us, do you know any other medium that allows you to air your arb thoughts & then go back & analyse your thoughts to find the gluee that sticks your thoughts together & allows you to develop new products and services out fo those arb thoughts?
The add to muti.co.za feedflare was a result of mining arb thoughts & combining those thoughts with lessons learnt (XML) while thinking.
See you at the next 27.
Hey Mike,
I think that at the end of the day my issue is not necessarily with your article per se, but with some of the trends I’ve been seeing in the small, but sometimes big, circles we move. I’ve gotten edgy lately and needed a vent to let off some steam! Hehe.
I’m a great supporter of doing stuff on your own, by that I mean not outsourcing, but rather taking the initiative and going alone. So with that mindset I am supposed to be quite an ardent supporter of sites such as Muti.co.za, but at the same time I am a huge non-supporter of uncreative thought, and cloning something smacks of that.
And my gripe isn’t necessarily with Muti or Myvideo or Blik or watever, it is with the commentators. You aren’t helping by giving uncritical support! Groupthink and yes-men type support aren’t going to help, you really need to look at the product and say,”Well, actually it’s been done before, so maybe you should do something a bit different.”
It’s probably a bit of a weird analogy, but take Bush and his advisors. His core group of advisors only tell him what he wants to hear, and in the process they go into Iraq and stuff things up. That theory has shown to be able to apply to quite a few other cases as well, and I don’t want to see it happen in South Africa where we have such great opportunities.
So, in short, I fully support local start-ups, we must just be really sure that what we are doing isn’t a generic clone but that it is a truly South African product, in the same league with Mrs Balls, a braai and the Soweto String Quartet (let’s forget about Steve Hofmeyr). At least if that is your intention. I reckon we should stuff the local poor bandwidth penetration and go for a bigger, global market. Why the hell not?
Uno, you said:
“You aren’t helping by giving uncritical support! Groupthink and yes-men type support aren’t going to help, you really need to look at the product and say,”Well, actually it’s been done before, so maybe you should do something a bit different.”
What a lot of kak! I’m not going to criticise every initiative that comes out of Africa that slightly resembles an overseas iteration (like my company for example), simply to be a non-groupthinker.
I think Muti is brilliant, and I love what Neville is doing with it, regardless of how similar it is to Reddit, Digg or anything else. I say bravo, at least he’s doing something.
Should we criticise Justin Hartman for Grabble? Should we criticise IncuBeta for Clicks2Customers? These are all successful, yet not entirely brand spanking new ideas. Well done to them.
Believe me, if I think it’s crap, as I did with picknplay.co.za, I’ll say so. But I’m happy to be a Yes-Man and Groupthinker if the group is right.
It’s not doing something different, as in creating an entirely new platform, it’s creating something that has more value than what you are cloning.
I have a friend who was at a company who were churning out Digg, Reddit, Youtube, Myspace, etc clones out.
Eventually he went back to his old job at Mweb as he got sick of just creating clones all the time and them not offering anything exciting.
If Digg et al were to offer localised versions of their service it would effectively make Muti redundant, except if we were to still use it out of some patriotic sense of duty. I can’t see it being that difficult for them to do actually.
I also say “Bravo”, but I’m not sure if it has a stable enough business model, or sustenance model.
> If Digg et al were to offer localised versions of their service it would effectively make Muti redundant.
Hi Uno
Remember that Reddit came about after Digg, but still managed to capture a significant portion of the market. I am not suggesting that muti is as good a platform as reddit but I want to illustrate that by your logic Digg could have rendered reddit insignificant. But reddit survived and indeed flourished because a community evolved around it. Do you not think that it is possible for such a community to evolve, albeit at a much smaller scale, in Southern African?
Mike: Thanks for your support, it is very much appreciated.
Mike, the 1st few links don’t make sense to me
they point to a murder article from you’re previous post.
Phew, some words being swapped.
There is no wrong in creating something that already exists if the market it operates in is not already saturated. I do think that markets get saturated a lot more on the internet than they do on ‘earth’
This is probably due to the fact that implementation thereof is a lot more time-friendly online. I think Muti has a relatively small share of the Already tiny South African market, which, on a global scale, is miniscule. This is probably why Uno has a gripe toward local internet startups in a saturated market.
That aside, there is no reason why this type of project should not be pursued. As we all know, one can always top something with value-added features and just a general improvement. The Japanese do this very well. However, if you cannot actually improve on the already formidable service, then there is no point in pursuing the project. (I am talking about muti and digg).
It is also very difficult to run a country-specific application online, as you immediately cut off 99% of the potential market. (that is if the specific country is South Africa)
That aside, I think that internet startups from South Africa does build brand awareness (or country involvement awareness) and this is attracting, albeit slowly, some international traffic to South African internet. So, no matter how unique the startup, it is still acting as some form of advertising for south africa’s online business. One day, a unique product/service/application will come out of South Africa, and there will be a market to embrace it due to the former online projects.
Uno, Pussyfooting is not necessarily always the right thing to do, but one must distinguish between pussyfooting & motivating.
My 2c. Muti is an excellent idea - even if a carbon copy of Reddit (not sure how the algorithm differs). I see it contributing to SA Web by highlighting LOCAL talent. That will only happen if it builds its local community like Neville says.
You’re certainly not going to find much truly SA social media stuff on the wanky procession of crap that is Digg and Reddit…