Mike Stopforth

Mike Stopforth is an entrepreneur, writer and speaker who helps companies extract real value from Web 2.0* trends and technologies to create smarter, more profitable businesses.

He heads up Cerebra, South Africa’s leading social media company (the sister company of Brandsh Media), which enjoys relationships with local and global brands - Toyota, Standard Bank, Rand Merchant Bank, Samsung Mobile, ABSA, Converse, ASCO (Calvin Klein) and more. These companies have used Cerebra to connect more meaningfully with their consumers outside the corporate firewall, and harness the full potential of employees behind it.

Mike writes a weekly column for the Citizen newspaper and is a technology commentator for popular business and marketing websites. He lectures at the Vega School of Branding and features as a guest lecturer on executive programs at the Graduate School of Business in Cape Town, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science in Johannesburg. He is a popular feature on the local and international business-to-business speaking circuit.

Mike co-founded Web startup Afrigator, Africa’s social media aggregator, and the 27dinner social networking movement.

*Web 2.0 is a “trend in World Wide Web technology, and Web design, a second generation of Web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies, which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing among users.” [from Wikipedia]