Mediaboss Marketing

The name Ope Banwo certainly rings a bell both in the entertainment and Internet community in Nigeria. This is apart from his primary constituency, which is the legal profession, where he holds a PhD.

Many Nigerians, especially those in the movie and music industries will readily remember his exploits as the founding Managing Director of Dove Media, where he made a strong statement with his activities that Nigerian movies can make mega money if things are done rightly during the production process and distribution.

With an aggressive approach, Dr. Ope Banwo was able to revolutionalise the production and distribution process of the Nigerian movie industry.

After his exploits in the movie industry, Dr. Banwo, who is also a Chattered Accountant, took on the Music Industry with Stingomania Records, combining music label, recording and artistes management in an aggressive way hitherto strange in this clime.

Aside managing and developing budding music stars, the US registered legal practitioner also managed established music and movie stars under the Stingomania management outfit.

It is however a wonder that, after a recoil, he resurfaced in the relatively new internet marketing arena in the Nigerian space.

Though a lawyer and chartered accountant, he has been championing the cause of internet marketing in a nation where many only go online for social media interactions.

The recent upsurge in the number of Nigerians taking to online marketing and raking in impressive income, in all modesty, is partly due to the aggressiveness with which Dr. Banwo approached his latest love, online marketing. This is the approach he has always used for everything he has been involved in! Though many Nigerians, especially those who have attended his Internet marketing classes in parts of the country, are aware of his impressive exploits in online marketing, Dr. Banwo recently achieved a major feat when he came up with a revolutionary software that has lately redefined Mobile App creation, MOBIMATIC.

Aside the creation of this software, done in conjunction with another Nigerian, he had a product launch on JV Zoo with MOBIMATIC, making a whopping N158,670,000 (One hundred and Fifty Eight Million, Six Hundred and Seventy Thousand Maura) during a five day launch. That has continued to dominate discussions when its comes to first time product launch on JV Zoo.

Intent on giving Nigerians, especially, youths, an opportunity to exploit the several opportunities and the mega money available in online marketing and mobile app sector online, Dr Banwo, in this interview, talks about the MOBIMATIC software, why he is hosting an executive presentation of the software and mobile apps built with it in Nigeria and how Nigerian youths can take advantage of it to better their lives and start living their dreams. He also delved into how the internet provides an answer into the youth unemployment crisis in the country. Excerpts

What is Mobimatic?

Mobimatic is a revolutionary mobile app development and business platform.

With Mobimatic you have a robust mobile app Software that makes it Super easy to build Apps for Business while providing tons of cool Features to make building awesome apps as easy as Drag and Drop.

Mobimatic also provides great Mobile App business setup to enable you earn from the Mobile App Business.

At the moment, hundreds of businesses and Mobile App Agencies across 50 countries use Mobimatic to greatly reduce the time and cost it takes to build high performance Apps.

From drag-and-drop development to app store submission, publishing a mobile app for businesses has become very easy with all the tools you need within reach.

What makes Mobimatic unique

The different features added to the Mobimatic software makes building a mobile app a unique experience.

From the social features that allows you to add a realtime Chat, or allow user posts sharing and comments in just a Click to setting up Loyalty Cards and Discount and Coupons and Scratch cards for Business.

Aside these, Mobimatic also allows you to have beautifully displayed images, videos, feeds and Podcast easily, while you can also build a native ecommerce in mobimatic or display Products from third party ecommerce solutions Setting up sever functions like Radio, Job Portal Click to Call, Contest and much more becomes integrated. With Mobimatic, you can now say goodbye to building different app per Platform.

With a Single click you can build apps across platforms that look and feel and above all, perform amazingly.

The Mobimatic Product Launch Miracle

From all indications, the five day launch of the Mobimatic Software on JV Zoo was a miracle. A miracle many established launchers have never had in their careers.

As a first time product launcher on JV Zoo, I was not expecting to have a six figure launch especially a huge six figure launch, raking in over $430,000 that translated to N158,670,000 over a five day period. We however achieved this.

The Mobimatic Miracle is a function of both doing the right things as well as having the right product. The Mobimatic software is indeed a revolutionary one that allows a total novice to build a mobile app in minutes. You do not need any technical background to build a mobile app you can sell up to $3000 to third parties for their businesses.

Of course such a great opportunity cannot be overlooked by any forward looking person. That, I think, is one of the reasons the launch was so successful and has made the software to continue to be in high demand. Why the Executive Presentation in Lagos, Nigeria?

Now this is the important aspect. I must confess that I am not the first or only Nigerian involved in internet marketing or product development and launch online. There are others who have been doing well with online marketing or product development. The difference, however is my resolve to empower Nigerians, especially youths based in Nigeria to take advantage of what the internet offers. I have been in the forefront of preaching the gospel of internet business in the country for about four years now and I must confess that a lot of young Nigerians are beginning to wake up to the reality that they can rescue themselves from poverty and joblessness by embracing these opportunities.

For me, the Mobimatic software provides Nigerians businesses and youths a great opportunity to move to the next level.

As a business, either small scale or a large enterprise, you do not need a big budget to get an amazingly working mobile app to reach both existing and prospective customer. While any youth in Nigeria, with an eye of doing things for himself and improving his life can take advantage of this software by simply identifying a need and filling the gap with a mobile app he can build with Mobimatic.

That explains why I have decided to present the software on Sunday the 23rd of July at the Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos to the Nigerian audience. Starting from 4pm, we shall be presenting this wave making software and six apps that have been made with it. There will also be testimonials from other users across the globe who are taking in thousands of dollars using Mobimatic to build mobile apps.

The lunch, where the presentation with be made is free but CEOs, Directors, Product Managers and all that other executives willing to attend will have to text their names and their organisations to these numbers: 08076244694 or 08068148300. This will confirm their attendance and also enable us reserve their seats. The confirmation text has to be done latest by Saturday July 22.

First internet summit

We have several initiatives that we have started because I love to innovate. We did the first internet summit last year, the African Internet Business Summit, which took place in November and soon, I will be launching the first internet school in Africa American Internet Business School in Lagos. It is the equivalent of Lagos Business School but for internet businesses where people can go online and learn different aspects of internet business like how to do social media marketing, reputation management on the internet; customer management, how to sell products and services on the internet. People can get certification in these different areas. Many of the companies employing people to manage their social media or sell online do not have trained people so we are setting up that school to provide capacity-building for individuals as well as companies on internet business-related subjects. We are partnering with foreign professionals who are experts in this field to provide the curriculum, the training etc and then we put it online and people can register as students and take courses and get certified.

Awards

To encourage internet businesses in Nigeria, Afrinet instituted two awards. We feel that one of the ways to develop internet business in Africa is to start to recognise people who are doing great in internet business. So we are organising the first dot.com awards in Africa, the Nigeria dot.com awards. The idea is to honour people in different areas of internet business like the best bank online, best newspaper online etc. We will bring together internet business professionals from within and outside Nigeria to do research online to get us the best in different categories like entertainment blog, news blog, best newspaper, best internet service provider, best insurance company online etc., about 25 categories. We will then narrow down to the best four or five in each category and the public will vote.

Two Awards

There are two awards in each category one is called Viewers Choice. Here, the candidate with the most votes from the public wins regardless of whether he is number one in terms of visit or not. In other words, the person that the public voted as number one based on their experience. Then there is the Practitioners Choice award i.e by the African Academy of Internet Business People. They will critically look at all the finalists and pick the best based on criteria we will give them. They will also come up with their own winner, so each category will have two winners. Of course, it is possible for one person to win both awards but one will be based strictly on voting from the public while the other will be based on technical evaluation by the technical crew.

Free Training

We also organise periodic trainings for youths. I did a freelancing course at Ajah, Lagos for unemployed youths because I believe that government should focus more on training the youths. If you can provide training that will cost little or even free training like I did, and the average person can learn how to do freelancing online, they can get to the point where they can be making $500 to $600 monthly in less than six months. So they dont need to apply for jobs.

There is this man I trained at our summit last year, now, he is making more than $4,000 $5,000 on the average every month, just doing proofreading online for people all over the world. So rather than complaining and waiting for government to create jobs, people can go online now and get jobs from all over the world. Today, you can stay here and get clients from Bangladesh, Australia etc., so you can employ yourself with minimal training at minimal cost to the government. Government should focus more on training people to be self-employed online. I feel that is one of the biggest solutions to unemployment among the youths because anybody can go to a cybercaf and learn how to do legitimate business. Anybody can get a laptop and employ himself; they dont need to go complaining about President Muhamadu Buhari and unemployment in the country just because they have submitted applications everywhere for non-existent jobs. If they can take three or six months to learn legitimate businesses online, they can be liberated and that has motivated me as I see people who have been unemployed for four, five years starting to earn their first $100 online.

I am not saying that people will become millionaires overnight, that is a myth, you have to work hard to get there but I believe that the average person can become self-employed and can make N50,000 to N80,000 a month within three months of learning this business. That is why I am committed to internet business capacity-building in Nigeria. I feel the Press can point attention to this area, organise free seminars.

It is not all about making money for me because I believe that as you grow, our business will also grow and that is why I do a monthly free training.

Continued here:
Ope Banwo returns with a Bang! Launches Wonder Mobile App Building Software in Lagos - Daily Post Nigeria

I once worked with a B2C client that offered a college prep product for high schoolers. They wanted help expanding their content engine and getting the word out; in their mind, their problems were related to capacity, not quality of content.

See, they had their audience figured out (or so they thought). Their blog articles featured liberal use of memes and casual conversation. Videos featured students talking about preparing for college or tackling hard exams. The only reason this stuff wasnt hitting was because it wasnt out there enough, right?

But as we dove into the problems that faced their specific target audience, we found that many of the assumptions that had been made were wrong. Sure, high schoolers like memes just as much as the next person, but they dont want to see them coming from a brand that feels like theyre trying to force a connectionit came off as manipulative. Sure, it was nice to see videos with high schoolers explaining college readiness topics, but their audience wasnt looking for guidance from their peersthey wanted to see and hear an expert talk. But even before I had seen any of this content disconnect, I knew right from the start this was going to be a brand with some trouble because of a key red flag.

They didnt have an established style guide.

An established, documented brand style sheet is essential for any content team that wants to hone their voice for their audience. At the most general level, these documents can be a few pages long and dive into the minutiae of how you want to be presented and perceived in the market. Put to work overtime, these guides can turn into invaluable hundred-page documents that answer even the most specific questions about word choice, presentation, and tone.

If your brand doesnt have any documented brand style, then youre essentially hoping that your entire content team is silently on the same page about hundreds of different editorial points without any form of concrete reference. This likely isnt a bet your brand should be investing in.

At this point, you either have no style guide and need guidance for getting one started, or you have an established guide youre looking to hone. In either case, it can be daunting to figure out what you want to tackle next. Brand voice contains thousands of variables that range from the specific (does your brand use contractions or avoid them?) to the vague (what attitude does your brand try to convey?), which makes choosing a starting point hard.

A good place to start is with the foundation of your voice. These elements tend to be a bit more intangible, and they affect everything that comes out of your content team. I like to refer to them as Tone, Complexity, and Purpose:

These three elements cant define your entire brand voice, and they will need constant tweaking and detailed supplements over time. But messing up any one of these attributes can absolutely cripple your content engine, while an odd word choice here or there might not hamper you so much.

Image attribution: Sylwia Bartyzel

But how do you know where your brand should fall along these brand attribute scales? Sure, you can start with educated guesses, but ultimately the proof is in engagement. Social media provides an excellent space to listen to your audience and figure out how they want to be interacted with. The trick is making sure you have solid measures to tie back to your foundational brand attributes.

Complexity is a good place to start because it actually has some of the more concrete measures for your brand to bite into. To get a feel for you brands ideal complexity, copy messages and posts from your social platforms (Facebook ideally, since it imposes the fewest limitations on posters) into a readability score generator. I personally like to use the Flesch-Kincaid scale.

These readability scales will examine elements like word and sentence length to assign text a rough score that corresponds to a grade level. Using these tests specifically on social interactions is going to be inherently rough since they are designed for longer blocks of text, so expect a margin of error of a few points in either direction. For reference, most people can read at an 8th grade reading level. Unless your audience is unusually well educated, youll want your content to at least match this level of readability.

Tone can be a bit more difficult to quantify, but it isnt impossible to do so. Here, its often best for your content marketers to actually read posts themselves, rather than to leave analysis to a computer. (While there are some fascinating conversations happening in linguistics about how to measure formality, we just dont have reliable tools at our disposal to do this yet.)

Start by getting a list of posts of your shared content from the past six months to a year, and list them from highest to lowest engagement (you can absolutely include shared or retweet posts of your content in this list). Then, go through these posts and have members of your team assign a score of one to seven (informal to formal) for every post text, comment, or message. You should quickly be able to see some trends from your more popular content, and then its up to your team to decide how to synthesize this score into language for your brand.

Understanding what is most useful to your audience is actually quite easy: People tend to share things they find useful and that they think their friends may also find useful.

The primary metrics youre going to want look at here are how far your content goes when shared. There can be a load of confounding variables here, from irregular ad spend to posting time and everything in between. To wade through some of this information, you can also cross-reference your list from most shared to least with some sentiment data. Highly shared, highly positive content is likely hitting the right place for your audience in terms of utility. Try to focus on formats or story approaches that fit this top-performing material.

Image attribution: Wilfred Iven

Updating how your brand speaks is an ongoing process. Your social media marketing offers powerful ways to evaluate where you currently stand, but the most useful practice you can instill in your team is to have a constantly growing, constantly evolving style guide. Use this tool to prune out what doesnt seem to be hitting and encourage creators to focus on language or topics that remain consistently relevant.

After that, all thats left to do is let your brand be the welcoming, engaging, useful presence youve always meant it to be.

For more stories like this, subscribe to the Content Standard newsletter.

Featured image attribution: Clem Onojeghuo

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Numbers for Words: How to Update Your Brand Voice Using Social Media Marketing Data - The Content Standard by Skyword

Handing over the reins of your social accounts can seem like a daunting task, especially if youve been successfully managing social media up until this point. While you might be hesitant to relinquish controlor, even, to share controlof your online presence, utilizing an inbound marketing agency to bolster your social media strategy can be extraordinarily beneficial for a number of reasons. Keep reading to discover four reasons your agency and social media go hand in hand.

One of the top channels for inbound marketing is social media. Social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are great ways for new contacts to discover your products and services. Your inbound marketing consultants can, and should, be using these channels to amplify your inbound campaigns to drive traffic and generate leads across your website.

Any inbound agency worth its salt will coordinate social media campaigns alongside content creation, product launches, or other important milestones to amplify reach and impact. Not allowing your agency at least some degree of autonomy when it comes to social media can stunt your campaigns and prevent them from reaching their true potential.

While social media is a powerful tool for amplifying inbound campaigns, it can also serve as a valuable resource for creating content and inspiring campaigns. Your inbound agency should always have one ear to the ground when it comes to social media, keeping track of trending content and recurring themes.

For example, if prospective buyers are always reaching out over Twitter to ask about a specific feature of your product, then it might be time to create a one-sheeter describing its capabilities. If a specific topic or news story is trending in your industry, then it might make sense to capitalize on these trends. Your agency can use social listening tools to research topics for future content, ensuring that your inbound campaigns will be relevant and well received across all channels.

Another way your inbound marketing agency can utilize social media is by aligning it with your buyer personas and each stage they face throughout the buyers journey. While this goes hand in hand with content creation, ensuring content is relevant is a different story. After all, anyone can write an article on your blogbut an inbound agency should be writing articles that speak to different personas, at different stages of the buyers journey. This content can then be amplified with social media, and specific messaging can help ensure that your personas see it as relevant and compelling.

Webcast, July 19th: The Blueprint to Build Trust in a Digital World

Additionally, having your inbound agency handle persona creation, content ideation, and social promotion can ensure greater consistency across all channels. Having it manage your editorial calendar can also ensure a regular and active posting schedule, ensuring that your channels are consistently attracting new followers and engaging old ones simultaneously.

One of the most valuable, albeit somewhat obvious, benefits of using an inbound marketing agency is that you can leverage its expertise and knowledge to your advantage. Inbound consultants are experts in the field, and considering that inbound and social media marketing go together like bread and butter, it would be a waste not to fully utilize them in your larger marketing strategy.

As social channels continue to evolve and expand, having an inbound marketing consultant at your disposal can be a valuable asset to ensure your business doesnt get left behind the times. Whether youre looking to expand into new social channels such as Snapchat, or simply to ramp up your existing Twitter strategy, using an inbound agency can ensure you have all your bases covered.

Hiring an inbound marketing agency to manage one of your most prolific and sensitive marketing channels requires a considerable amount of trust, but leveraging its expertise is an invaluable tradeoff. Considering the complementary nature of inbound and social media, using them to augment each other simply makes sense; allowing your inbound consultant to drive your social strategy can provide your organization with increased benefits that wouldnt be seen otherwise. If you want to see the best possible ROI for your inbound efforts, then partnering with an integrated agency is the only way to ensure each facet of your campaign is truly successful.

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4 Ways Your Inbound Marketing Agency Can Help with Social Media - Business 2 Community

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's top cyber authority ordered the country's top tech firms to carry out "immediate cleaning and rectification" of their platforms to remove content deemed offensive to the Communist Party and the country's national image, it said on Wednesday.

The watchdog held a meeting with representatives from firms including Tencent Holdings Ltd, Baidu Inc and Sohu.com Inc, on Tuesday where it gave them a list of specific errors, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said in a statement on social media.

The violations include distorting Chinese history, spreading fake news, misinterpreting policy directives and failing to block content that subverts public stability.

"[The sites] must adhere to the correct political line and moral norms," the statement said.

Chinese authorities have recently cracked down on platforms that allow users to share media from outlets that are not sanctioned under state-issued licenses, amid a wider censorship campaign spearheaded by President Xi Jinping.

On June 1 the CAC ushered in new regulations requiring all offline and online media outlets to be managed by Party-approved editorial staff. Workers in the approved outlets must receive training from local propaganda bureaus.[nL4N1I42ID]

In the wake of the new regulations several sites have been targeted with fines and closures under the watchdog's orders.

In specific examples, the CAC criticised one platform that failed to censor articles that "seriously deviated from socialist values" by saying China benefited from U.S. assistance during conflicts with Japan during World War II.

Other examples included a story detailing alleged affairs by party officials, an opinion piece that decried China's death penalty and an article that urged readers to invest in speculative real estate projects.

The CAC said the firms were required to immediately close offending accounts and strengthen "imperfect" auditing systems to avoid future punishment.

Reporting by Cate Cadell; editing by Susan Thomas

Original post:
China's cyber watchdog orders top tech platforms to increase self-censorship - Reuters

Imagine trying to do online research on breast cancer, or William S. Burroughs famous novel Naked Lunch, only to find that your search results keep coming up blank. This is the confounding situation that faced Microsoft Bing users in the Middle East and North Africa for years, made especially confusing by the fact that if you tried the same searches on Google, it did offer results for these terms.

Problems caused by the voluntary blocking of certain terms by intermediaries are well-known; just last week, we wrote about how payment processors like Venmo are blocking payments from users who describe the payments using certain termslike Isis, a common first name and name of a heavy metal band, in addition to its usage as an acronym for the Islamic State. Such keyword-based filtering algorithms will inevitably results in overblocking and false positives because of their disregard for the context in which the words are used.

Search engines also engage in this type of censorshipin 2010, I co-authored a paper [PDF] documenting how Microsoft Bing (brand new at the time) engaged in filtering of sex-related terms in the Middle East and North Africa, China, India, and several other locations by not allowing users to turn off safe search. Despite the paper and various advocacy efforts over the years, Microsoft refused to budge on thisuntil recently.

At RightsCon this year, I led a panel discussion about the censorship of sexuality online, covering a variety of topics from Facebooks prudish ideas about the female body to the UKs restrictions on non-conventional sex acts in pornography to Icelands various attempts to ban online pornography. During the panel, I also raised the issue of Microsofts long-term ban on sexual search terms in the Middle East, noting specifically that the companys blanket ban on the entire region seemed more a result of bad market research than government interference, based on the fact that a majority of countries in the MENA region do not block pornography, let alone other sexual content.

Surprisingly, not long after the conference, I did a routine check of Bing and was pleased to discover that Middle East had disappeared from the search engines location settings, replaced with Saudi Arabia. The search terms are still restricted in Saudi Arabia (likely at the request of the government), but users in other countries across the diverse region are no longer subject to Microsofts safe search. Coincidence? It's hard to say; just as we didn't know Microsoft's motivations for blacklisting sexual terms to begin with, it was no more transparent about its change of heart.

Standing up against this kind of overbroad private censorship is importantcompanies shouldnt be making decisions based on assumptions about a given market, and without transparency and accountability. Decisions to restrict content for a particular reason should be made only when legally required, and with the highest degree of transparency possible. We commend Microsoft for rectifying their error, and would like to see them continue to make their search filtering policies and practices more open and transparent.

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Microsoft Bing Reverses Sex-Related Censorship in the Middle East - EFF