Mediaboss Marketing

Africa's thirst for social networking seems insatiable and homegrown products to meet this thirst, like MXit and 2go, have really got traction.

It's a mixture of flirting, free messaging and meeting real people that draws people in. With the current numbers, advertisers will begin to use mobile as a media and support their development. Russell Southwood spoke to Marc Herson, 2go about how it will seek to expand.

2go is a mobile social network where people can use IM to chat with their friends for free and meet new friends in its chat-rooms. In total, it has over 20 million registered users, of which 3-3.5 million use it on a regular basis. Over the last 30 days there have been 8 million active users. Its biggest market is Nigeria (61% of total) which has 12.5 m users, followed by South Africa(31%) with 6.5 million users, followed by Kenya (4%) and Other (4%).

It's continuing to grow at between 40,000-60,000 registered users a day.

All this has been achieved with virtually no marketing and lots of word of mouth. When users sign up, they can send notifications to their friends to join.

The users are young: 74% are 15-24 year olds in South Africa and 60% in Nigeria. The gender balance is almost equal in South Africa with 49% women but slightly more male in Nigeria with 64% men:"In South Africa, it's the women cleaning our office and the person trying to sell me a prepaid mobile at the corner-store. In Nigeria, users are more educated and sophisticated."

It is a profitable start-up launched by South African Anthony Davis.

Currently it's self-funded but it may look for VC funding in the future. As Herson (part of whose background is in VC funding at Softbank) told us:"I've only recently joined 2go and I'm their first executive hire. I'm also an equity stakeholder in the business."

It's focused on giving users a light application that will work on low-end phones:"We are totally focused on creating the most nimble and light technology. A great deal of users in Nigeria have feature phones so it's easy to use Java-based application. You simply download it, answer a few questions like your age and you're ready to go."

It supports around 1,000 different feature phones (J2ME), Blackberry (with BIS integration) and Android. Better still, its messaging integrates with Gtalk, Facebook and MXit Chat so users don't have to choose between these applications.

Read more:
Africa: Thirst for Social Networking Spurs Mobile Growth

Now I can't be too long over this, because I have to go and shoot Bambi in a minute. But I am so unnerved by the past fortnight that I must risk affronting friends, family and colleagues by identifying a slick of dishonesty upon the great tide of gladness sweeping through these islands.

It would be churlish to deny that the Olympics, overall, have been a gratifying triumph. I can even accept that the prodigious expense of the stage has been vindicated by priceless inspiration from the performers. How delightful to see so many children so enthused. Perhaps some will even pursue a holiday fad rather longer than did those Australian youngsters judging from their returns this summer who were presumed "legatees" of Sydney 2000.

No event on this scale can register top marks across all indices. So it would be silly to waste too much vexation on, say, the monstrous priapic deformities somehow chosen as logo and mascots. Or the ghastly branding infecting daily vernacular, to the point where perfectly sensible people routinely immolate their dignity by talking about "Team GB" or "Games Makers".

Society showed ample vigilance, moreover, about the most obviously sinister challenges from the Games. Plenty were angered, for instance, that venues should be "proud only to take Visa". Or that the private sector be given a bet-to-nothing, as when a security firm trousered a huge contract, screwed up, and could rely on the army to make good the risked shortfall. In turn, I'm sure, they feel disquiet that the Olympics made it acceptable for British police to wander through crowds toting sub-machine guns.

No one, however, seems to have a problem with the docility and hysteria uniting millions of ordinary people in a Great Big Lie. For their obedient infatuation with the Games, at the behest of the mass media, has become a chilling exercise in the fragility of democracy.

Here is the bald truth suppressed at the heart of our present euphoria. In most cases you could stage exactly the same events as "world championships", last year or next, and hardly anyone would cross the road to watch. Very few, in fact, would bother to shift a thumb on the television remote. Jessica Ennis herself completed her Olympics warm-up before 300 paying customers.

Now clearly the Games mean more than a world championship to many of the participants themselves, albeit not in mainstream sports such as football or tennis. And that warrants respect. But only up to a point. Because it's blatantly dishonest to dismiss all these people as nobodies one day, and acclaim them as "icons" the next; to exalt, overnight, minority pastimes you have long considered dull or ludicrous; to deny that many of them, contested by so few people, must almost certainly set the Olympic bar pretty low.

Which is presumably why so much Lottery revenue was given to sports with a financially intimidating infrastructure. Sure enough, one of our rowing gold medallists had never sat in a boat until picked out by a Lottery-funded scheme barely four years ago. I certainly wouldn't disparage her endeavours or achievements since.

She is, demonstrably, extremely talented and, like almost all the athletes I encountered at Eton Dorney, an impressive role model for young compatriots. Certainly, if the world is deceived that all Britons are as accomplished and engaging as Anna Watkins and Katherine Grainger, then the flattery contrived by these Games will have been worth every penny.

So I would hardly equate the syndrome with the Nuremberg rallies. What's the harm, after all, in people getting a little overexcited about something as wholesome as sport, of any kind? Over the last 14 days, we have duly come to respect the dedication required by champions of any discipline; and found their emotions agreeably infectious. But their crass apotheosis, by a free press that would have disgraced Pravda under Brezhnev, frightens the life out of me.

View original post here:
The Last Word: Beware the Great Big Olympics Lie

Surviving high school can seem like a nearly impossible task to anyone, but if you're the new kid, you might as well scale Everest instead. Will Mackenzie certainly has his work cut out for him in MTV's new scripted comedy series, "The Inbetweeners," and if the trailer is any indication, his transition into an entirely different realm of student life could leave him scarred. Still, there's always hope--even in the darkest places--and since we (barely) made it through the experience ourselves (and are SO adult now), we've decided to give Will a hand.

As movies and TV love a good starting-from-scratch story, we racked our brains for tales of how former onscreen new kids navigated big moves, the great switch from public to private education or even exiling at the demands of a witch's council (the usual). Check out what Will could learn from five green prototypes, and make sure to offer your own tips if you've ever had to adjust to new places and faces.

Sabrina Spellman: On "Sabrina, The Teenage Witch," the quintessential girl next door discovered a magical family secret upon moving in with her two aunts (who happened to be witches). A new school and new powers spelled disaster for the spunky teen (oops, the school bully's now a pineapple!), but if Will can learn one thing from the smart mouth, it's that sticking to your guns--even when the world around you is changing--will lead you down the right path.

Tai Fraiser: Tai was an insecure pipsqueak when she first landed at Bronson Alcott High School, but the outcast of "Clueless" developed into the Queen Bee, ultimately betraying the person that first gave her popularity. What can Will learn from Tai (besides not to wear plaid-on-plaid)? Never bite the hand that feeds you.

Will Smith: Philadelphia's infamous class clown got a culture shock on "Fresh Prince" when he left his blue-collar Philadelphia neighborhood to live with his relatives in Bel Air. Amid caviar lunches and jacuzzi parties, though, Will always held on to his personal style, and served as a solid example that staying true your roots will help when you might feel lost.

Rory Gilmore: Rory remained in her hometown until college, but was nudged into private school by her mother on "Gilmore Girls" for a better shot at the Ivy League. Rory was smart by nature, but never had to play social politics until her first day at Chilton, and quickly learned the people who are ostensibly your enemies can turn out to be good pals.

Cady Heron: Having grown up in an African tribe, American public school was about as strange as it got for new kid Cady Stanton. She started off on the right foot in "Mean Girls" by joining the math team, but ultimately compromised her work ethic to get a guy's attention. It'd be hard to advise a high school dude to steer clear of girls, but...uhh...everything in moderation, Will.

Dig Remote Control? Follow us on Twitter, like, now.

Related Content The Inbetweeners, Neither Cool Nor Totally Hopeless: Meet 'The Inbetweeners'

Original post:
5 Famous 'New Kids In School' Who 'Inbetweener' Will Can Learn From

"There are a lot of tools that listen for conversations in various online communities and some of them give you a sentiment analysis as well," noted author Paul Gillin. "But what Awareness is doing is allowing the user to filter the conversations based on criteria set by the user."

Awareness has enhanced its social marketing automation suite, Social Marketing Hub, with a new feature called "social scoring." The feature allows marketers and brands to identify, store and rank prospects across all the major social networks based on scoring criteria they define.

(click image to enlarge)

It is a deliberate change from the fluffy metrics typically associated with social marketing -- such as "Likes," fan pages and comments -- which are impossible to tie to bottom-line results, the company said. Instead, users score social engagements based on their own business rules.

Hub had been on the market for two years before the company introduced the new scoring feature, explained Mike Lewis, VP of sales and marketing at Awareness.

"The original iteration was designed to a Software as a Service tool that allowed brands to connect all social destinations in one place," he noted. "Pretty quickly, though, we found that while they liked managing the content, they also wanted to see ROI."

Writing Your Own Scorecard

Hub was enhanced to pull social profile data and score or rate a prospect based solely on engagement. Now, with this new feature -- which has been generally available for about two weeks -- users can take advantage of a slew of criteria to rank a contact.

"The user can go through all of the profiles he or she has collected in a database and apply rules and weights to individual profiles based on certain criteria," Lewis said.

"For example, a marketing company might be interested in sales reps that have tweeted about marketing applications in the past two weeks and have more than 1,000 followers on Twitter," he suggested. "The end result is a list of people tiered according to your criteria."

Continue reading here:
Awareness Helps Social Marketers Know the Score

Let's not mince words about what the state Senate's Democratic leader did Wednesday. It was self-serving censorship, the sort of thing that one expects from tinpot dictators, not from those who fancy themselves to be progressive civil libertarians.

Someone acting for Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg suddenly cut off cable television access to a legislative hearing to air facts and arguments about pending ballot measures.

The Senate Governance and Finance Committee called the hearing as required by law into three tax increases (Propositions 30, 38 and 39) and altering the state's budgetary procedures (Proposition 31).

As it opened, the committee's chairwoman, Democrat Lois Wolk, said she hoped that the testimony would help voters make reasoned decisions about the highly controversial measures.

But only the few people in the hearing room and those technologically savvy enough to tune into an Internet audio feed heard Wolk's words.

Just before the hearing was to be telecast on the California Channel, a public affairs channel carried on most cable systems, somebody from the Senate told Cal Channel to cut it off.

It's obviously bad business that Capitol politicians can control what the public sees of their activities. But this is an especially egregious example of manipulating that power for political purposes.

It wouldn't take a Mars rocket scientist to figure out why Democrats didn't want the hearing to be broadcast.

One witness was to be Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, who opposes Proposition 30, the sales and income tax measure that Steinberg is fervently supporting. And he would most likely dwell on the Senate staff raises that Steinberg had granted as an example of why taxes should not be raised.

Coupal, in fact, made exactly that point, but that's what the hearing was about airing the arguments and counterarguments along with factual information from the Legislature's budget analyst.

Read the rest here:
Dan Walters: Censorship rears its ugly head in California Senate