MIKESTOPFORTH

There is much being said about how brands should engage with customers in social media. Words like “authenticity”, “transparency”, “immediacy”, “personability” and others are bandied about as we as consultants, together with our clients, figure out the rules of content and community online. This is a good thing. Brands tend to forget that platforms like [...]

In the hope that they will one day evolve into something of substance, I have recently been scribbling down notes on some of the ideas I have around marketing, advertising and communication in general. Bear in mind I share these thoughts purely in my capacity as a consumer – I am no marketing, branding or [...]

I was privileged enough to receive an invite from Reuben Goldberg to join him on an episode of his popular talk show The Internet Economy which airs every Friday night from 7-8 on ClassicFM. We spoke about the broad subject of social media in South Africa, the article I wrote the other day (the Next [...]

The honeymoon is over. Much of the hype and noise surrounding social media and its meteoric rise (especially in the USA) has abated. Perhaps owing to the global economic crisis, arguably due to the apparent lack of sustainable business models and possibly as a result of some semblance of reasonable thinking, we’re no longer reading [...]

Big news from the Afrigator team today is the launch of AdGator – Africa’s first blogging ad network. We always envisioned Afrigator being a platform that bloggers could not only use to ‘market’ their content but also a source of revenue for them, and finally we have a model that allows us to do just [...]

This is a video of a recent talk I did at the exclusive Tintswalo equestrian estate (note the horse’s bum in the background) with the MasterMind Group of Professional Speakers, of which I’m a member. I decided at the last minute to ditch my PPT slides in aid of the old fashioned approach. Your critical [...]

…but not on the billboard, it seems. I’ve been planning this post for some time, stopping arbitrarily (and rather riskily) on the side of the highway to snap photos of lifeless billboards, but it seems the incomparable Rui Esteves beat me to it at Ideate. Now I’m a bit notorious for bashing billboards in my [...]

One of my professional speaking colleagues, Erik Vermeulen, forwarded a very cool email newsletter to me the other day. Normally that would tick me off but the newsletter, produced by Scott Ginsberg (check out his site and blog, they’re awesome), had an article titled 46 Marketing Mistakes Your Company Is (Probably) Making that caught my eye. I read it an thought I’d share it with you – some of it ought to be familiar already but there are a bunch of cool thoughts I thoroughly enjoyed…

I’ve just picked up on a fantastic post from one of my favourite bloggers, Lee LeFever from the Common Craft Show which is a must-read for all of us immersed in the Web 2.0 evolution.

I’ve often criticised advertising agencies of losing site of the bigger picture as a result of striving for bigger, flashier ads, edgier copy and design and of course, elusive awards. But Lee’s post has pointed my accusatory finger right back at me – do I have blinkers 2.0? Am I so worried about my traffic, Twitter replies and blog rankings that I’ve forgotten that the vast majority of my clients and their customers don’t know about, or don’t care about anything 2.0-ish.