Mike Stopforth

The last few months have been pretty hectic at work, hence the sporadic posting. Thanks to a bit of free press (CNBC, FM Campus and Financial Mail - not to mention Afrigator’s appearance in Business 2.0) more companies are noticing Cerebra and wanting to do cool work with us.

Apart from the numerous ’social media as an internal communication and collaboration tool’ projects that we’re doing (which form the bulk of our business), there are two very exciting customer-facing social media projects that we’ve had a hand in. I want to introduce you to them and get some feedback if possible. Yes, this is their ‘official’ launch.

The first is a blog we built for Samsung Mobile. It’s hosted by us and developed using the Drupal open source content management system. We outsourced the slick, minimalist theme and the Cerebra team has been responsible for the content, strategy and training of the Samsung team.

Credit must go, first and foremost, to Daniel Lamberti and Justin Hume at Samsung for being so open and receptive to the conversation - keen to connect with the South African blogosphere and learn as much as possible on the way. As bloggers we sometimes underestimate the amount of red tape and internal regulation corporate marketers face daily, especially when we get on our high horses (remember Dell?) expecting instant responses. Cerebra has built the Samsung blog, with Samsung, in an attempt to close the gap between the company and it’s customers - identifying the evangelists and addressing any frustrations head on.

The next project we’re working on is the Toyota Auris blog. Toyota is an extremely cool brand to work with and we jumped at the opportunity to use social media to compliment their campaign. We’ve been working with FCB to ensure that Toyota gets maximum benefit and reach out of the campaign, World Wide Creative who did the brilliant design for the blog and our own content guru’s who have been making sure that the site climbs the rankings and offers Toyota evangelists and potential customers the opportunity to experience the car through the blog.

So… both very exciting projects with very cool brands. What do you think? What would you do differently?