Mike Stopforth

My loyalty to the many feeds pouring into my RSS reader on a daily space is fragile - if you’re like me you process about a hundred incoming feeds on a daily basis, leaving you with the reality of having to make decisions regarding which of those you’ll give decent attention to.

This is not always a conscious thing - sometimes the sheer quality and frequency of posts produced by certain blogs naturally shifts them head and shoulders above the rest of the bunch.

Out of all the feeds I track marketing, advertising and branding-themed blogs are my favourite. Obviously the likes of Seth Godin dominate the global blogosphere in terms of sheer value and popularity but we’ve got three pretty special blogs here in South Africa I’d like to highlight as absolute necessities if you care about business, entrepreneurship, marketing or advertising.

The first is Jon Cherry’s Cherryflava. One of South Africa’s most popular blogs by far, Cherryflava describes itself as a Web magazine dedicated to hot new trends emerging in business, marketing, advertising and fresh thinking that’s igniting a creative revolution - published daily from Cape Town. Jon works flippin’ hard on updating the blog on an (almost) daily basis with top notch, bleeding-edge insights into the world of new advertising (or ADDvertising as Jon calls it), innovation, trends and branding. Add to that the fact that Jon’s a darn nice dude, and you’ve got a winning formula. Cherryflava recently launched The Cherryflava Show, an attempt to “extend (their) footprint beyond the confines of (the) written blog… taking our first step towards medium expansion”. Here’s a glimpse of their first (pilot) episode:

The second awesome resource I’d like to point you to is the ‘company’ blog of Cape Town eMarketing firm Quirk, called GottaQuirk. Quirk have firmly established themselves as a leading authority in all things eMarketing in SA, and are using the collective digital explorations of their talented staff to populate the blog with always interesting media snacks from the social Web with an insightful comment or conclusion to boot. It’s a great strategy - getting your staff to contribute content to the site and growing a profile through it. So great in fact, that Cerebra is doing it’s best to copy it

Last but certainly not least is the blog of the crazy brilliant team behind World Wide Creative and Yuppie Chef (amongst other things) - Ideate. They describe Ideate as a blog that “focuses on small business in South Africa, and includes articles about administration, marketing and operations. Ideate also features interviews with other business folk, articles about technology and cool advertising past and present.” But that’s not all - Ideate are secretly (or not so secretly) building up little empire of phenomenal brains who all contribute to the site on a regular basis with magical tidbits of value - brains that include the likes of the aforementioned Jon Cherry and one of my less-publicised personal heroes, Rui Esteves, one of the two guys behind the greatest coffee franchise in the world! Damn, I’d be thrilled if Rui signed my right butt cheek, never mind wrote for my blog!

Congrats to all three on the fabulous work you’re doing - not just in terms of keeping South Africans at the cutting-edge of the most progressive thinking in the world, but more for making the world aware of the talent and potential we have here. Keep up the excellent work!

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