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Pinterest – a Modern Twist on an Age Old Concept

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The concepts of a scrapbook and pinboard may seem old-fashioned in today’s world, but the latest social networking craze has dragged them both into the digital age.

In a world where businesses can quickly gain national and international prominence, the barrier of language can stall not only expansion, but the targeting of new markets and their valuable consumers. Pinterest is the latest social networking site to explode online, but differs from the rest by taking a more universal mode of communication, focusing on pictures rather than words. The site launched at the beginning of 2010, but has gained users exponentially thanks to a greatly increased media exposure in recent months, propelling it into the top ten most visited social networking sites.

What is Pinterest and how does it work?

Pinterest allows users to share images and links which they find interesting or inspiring, once shared these images become ‘pins’ that can be placed onto fully-customisable virtual ‘boards’ under similar themes. Once pinned, they can then be re-pinned by other Pinterest users onto their own boards, as well as being compatible with other social networks, easily linked to your Facebook profile, Twitter account or embedded in your blog. Each pin can be commented on and followed by other users, with their ability to re-pin your content greatly increasing the likelihood of viral success.

Getting started on Pinterest, like all social networking sites is a simple affair, just go to www.pinterest.com and click on ‘request an invite’ (currently the only way is via email invitation from the site or a friend already registered) and create an account.

Applying it to your business

The simplest way of seeing if Pinterest can profit your business is to give it a go. Set up an account with a small number of boards, but they don’t have to be directly business focused. Pin images that have inspired or influenced your services or products, customers using them, your presence at regional events or related sites or goods, allowing visitors to see the human background to your business.

New boards for your products can be added, featuring images, descriptions, prices and additional information, with each linked back to your company websites and other relevant pages, helping to drive traffic to business blogs, YouTube and Google+ accounts, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles combined.

There are internal as well external applications with the site potentially serving as a bulletin board for employees, giving notice of upcoming events, news and promotions, helping to increase staff morale and team spirit, key factors for heightened productivity.

Pinterest is currently free to use, the only thing it will cost is your time. But as is true for most things, the more you put into it, the more you will get out of it.

Understanding Viral Marketing Content

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Viral marketing: the holy grail of the marketing world, where your community does your marketing for you.

WRITTEN BY VANESSA CLARK – Mobiflock Marketing Director – [email protected]

Is viral marketing really a category in its own right? Is it either accurate or feasible to say you offer viral marketing services, or have launched a viral marketing campaign? This implies that you can plan and predict a campaign “going viral”. Or is it more a case of the best a marketer can hope for is to set the scene, make sure all the right ingredients are in place, and then, if the timing is right, see the campaign go viral?

The latest piece of what I would consider truly viral content doing the rounds on the internet is ‘Buck Norris’ – the video clip of 17-year-old cyclist, Evan van der Spuy, being knocked off his bike in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa by a red hartebeest. At the time of writing, in less than a month almost 12 million people have watched the original clip posted on YouTube, not to mention hundreds of thousands of views of secondary clips, as well as spin-offs (you know you’ve made it on the internet when someone spoofs you), and international news coverage from UK daily Metro to online newspaper the Huffington Post.

Key to the clip was timing, both of the filming and the encounter, but key to the clip going viral was Max Cluer, owner of Team Jeep South Africa and organiser of the cycling event posting the clip up to YouTube immediately, while there was still buzz amongst the immediate audience about the incident. These Twitter and Facebook conversations were an ideal vehicle for making the clip spread virally around the world, earning Cluer’s Team Jeep brand unprecedented exposure, thanks to the logo on Van der Spuy’s cycling kit.

This is also crucial to laying the foundation for a piece of content to go viral: don’t be overly promotional. Team Jeep was seen in the context of super-awesome content that was worthy of sharing. It wasn’t a Team Jeep advert. Brian Mung’ei, Head of Business Development at Nairobi, Kenya-based web and marketing agency, Pamoja Media agrees:

“Don’t make the campaign an advertisement. A campaign doesn’t need to educate people about the product but rather on the benefits of the product. Think of a perfect online ad as a ‘behind the scenes’ version of a normal commercial TV advert. This means one needs to have a different mindset in that it’s not pushing a brand or product, rather about story-telling. The product does not even have to appear anywhere on the video for people to understand the ad and remember it,” he says.

Bozza’s Head of Brand Strategy, Catherine Lückhoff takes it a step further saying: “You don’t create virals – content either becomes viral or it doesn’t. All you (agency, client, marketing person etc.) can do is to know your market and create content that is sticky. Our experience is that contextually relevant local content is key. Content has to add value; be that through entertainment, education, a combination of, or giving users access to information.”

Bozza is a case in point. Dubbed a mobihood – a mobile neighbourhood – Bozza allows communities across Africa to share their stories and interact via a mobile phone. It launched a proof of concept on MXit in 2010, with hyper-local made-for-mobile video content. Within three days it had 40,000 subscribers and within three months, 170,000.

It can be pretty scary for brands to realise how little control they have over their brand anymore. But for content to truly become viral, they need to give up this control – or face an unpleasant viral backlash, as Brandhouse found out when it lost its sense of humour back in 2009 over user-generated spoofs of its Lou Gossett Jr. ad campaign.

Pamoja Media’s Mung’ei advises brands: “The web gives the audience greater control of how to interact with the campaign such that they can save, replay and most importantly share the advert within their networks. Ensure the video is free to access, download, embed and share online. This is basically the underlying essence of viral campaigns. If someone has to log on to your website to be able to view the advert and then ‘like’ your Facebook page to share it, someone needs to get fired.”

Renewable Energy Firm Targets West African Projects

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Africa Renewables aims for more investment to launch additional biomass projects . Africa Renewables, also known as AfriRen, has launched a fresh round of fundraising for biomass projects across west Africa.

The international renewable energy trading company, which is headquartered in London, is seeking up to €30 million from qualified investors to help fund a series of sustainable initiatives across the region. The first project, in Ghana, will require €5 million in investment.

The target investment will fund biomass extraction and exportation projects in markets across the western African countries over the next four years. As a result, AfriRen expects to grow annual production from 150,000 metric tonnes (MT) to 500,000 MT in that period.

Jean-Francois Guillon, AfriRen Chief Executive Officer and a veteran energy trader at Vitol and Africa specialist, said: “We are seeking strategic investors in London and internationally who have a track record and deep understanding of investment in Africa. AfriRen projects are multi-national, are made across the supply chain to maximise returns. Most importantly, and unlike other biomass producers, our supplies are guaranteed.”

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AfriRen’s first energy trading project, a biomass extraction chain in Ghana, harvests redundant rubber trees and processes them into woodchips, which are then sold to European power houses and businesses in order to displace the burning of coal. The project is facilitated by an eight-year partnership with the Ghana Rubber Estates Ltd (GREL).

Sonia Medina, AfriRen Chief Operating Officer and a former carbon project specialist, said:“We aim to become the largest biomass producer in Africa and to treble the amount exported from the continent to Europe over the next four years.

“This will mean growing our first biomass project from eight shipments a year worth €7.2 million to shipments worth €58 million.”

AfriRen’s partnership with GREL breaks new ground in connecting African produced biomass to European energy firms. Currently, almost all biomass currently imported into the EU comes from the Americas.

Daily Deal Sites: Holy Grail or Poisoned Chalice?

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Since Groupon, the big daddy of daily deal sites, launched in 2008, group buying has been heralded as either a revolutionary new way for small businesses to gain exposure or as a sales and marketing disaster.

WRITTEN BY VANESSA CLARK, Mobiflock co-founder

[email protected]

There is no doubt that small businesses around the world are very successfully using daily deal sites to market their offerings. However, there are enough horror stories out there – most notably the UK bakery that had to bake 102,000 cupcakes at a £12,500 ($20,000) loss after offering a Groupon deal – for businesses to tread carefully when figuring out whether this type of promotion is for them.

Daily deal sites negotiate huge discounts for consumers based on the principles of collective buying: deals are only activated when a minimum number of people agree to buy. In return for massively discounting their products and services, usually between 50-75 percent as well as giving the daily deal site a cut (around 50 percent of the price paid by the customer), businesses are marketed to the hundreds of thousands of local consumers who have opted in to receive the deals.

On the one hand, the concept is fairly risk-free: businesses only pay if the deal tips and they get business out of it. On the other, there have been a number of reports of businesses brought to their knees by overwhelming demand or thanks to making an irrecoverable loss on the deal.

In Africa, South Africa is probably the most developed daily deal market on the continent, although a number of sites have already closed down, including Naspers’ Dealify and Avusa’s Zappon. Groupon, currently boasting a market cap of $12 million, added South Africa to the list of the 46 countries it has expanded to at the end of 2011 when it bought local Twangoo in January 2011.

African Business Review got in touch with Daniel Guasco, Head of Groupon (www.groupon.co.za) in South Africa, to get his views on when it makes most sense for a business to use its services.

In response to concerns over daily deals being too successful he said: “We work hard to collaborate with businesses to structure a deal that makes sense and achieves their business objective of generating new customers and creating incredible levels of local exposure. Vendors should communicate their concerns with us. From time to time we will impose a limit if the vendor’s establishment has limited capacity.”

When it comes to what sort of businesses are better suited to running daily deals, Guasco said: “There could be an argument that less labour intensive deals such as virtual service or purely product would be better suited for a daily deal site like ours. However the premise globally is to experience the best of their city for less; this will always be a focus as it allows vendors to have a one on one interaction with the customer. Regardless of the service/deal Groupon is still the most cost effective way for these vendors to gain new customers in a matter of hours – the time well spent with customers equals repeat customers and retained loyal customers.”

ADVICE FOR BUSINESSES

So how do businesses decide whether daily deal sites are for them or not?

Firstly, they need to do the maths. Not only on whether the initial deal works out for them, but also on the potential to up-sell the customers once they are through the door, as well as converting these new customers to repeat customers.

Secondly they need to work out how many new customers they can manage at any one time both logistically and bearing in mind that their regular customers need to be looked after as well.

Speaking of regular customers, businesses need to decide what impact dramatic discounts will have on the perception of their brand. How will loyal, full-price-paying regulars feel about the discount, especially if they, for instance, can’t get a table at their favourite restaurant because it’s fully booked? As a business are you also looking after your regulars with offers to say thank you for their loyalty?

Thirdly, know what you want to get out of the deal and have a plan that extends beyond the initial offer. Just wanting to get bums on seats for a performance that would go ahead anyway is one thing. But as Guasco points out, the aim for businesses should be to get repeat business and loyal customers out of the deal. At the very least, businesses need to be capturing customer details and starting an ongoing engagement with them. Inevitably there are going to be serial daily deal buyers who never return, but the proportion that does needs to be nurtured.

Looking beyond South Africa’s borders, there is a growing daily deal market specifically in Kenya, with Rupu (www.rupu.co.ke) and Zetu (www.zetu.co.ke) looking like they could be positioning themselves as attractive to Groupon, and Mocality Deals (deals.mocality.co.ke) spun out of the local listings site. A daily deal site play across Africa will necessarily have to be a mobile one to reach the critical mass needed for the model to work.

So how do you decide whether daily deal sites are right for your business or not? Do the maths. Understand that at the outset you need to think about how the daily deal fits into your overall strategy and take responsibility for ensuring you get the most out of the deal as a business.

Jacob Zuma Signs up to join the Twitter Army

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As the SA President joins Twitter, will it open communication to a younger generation of voters?

The power of social media sites has long been talked about. The ease and speed at which a message can be spread means it is a platform unrivalled by print and even broadcast media. Micro-blogging site Twitter in particular has become a forum to share breaking news.

During the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya Twitter became a hotbed for alerts on the latest incidents and goings on during the protests. It was a place for communities to unite and communicate at the touch of a button.

But can it help connect politicians and the voting public? South African President Jacob Zuma is hoping so. Zuma became the latest leader of a country to set up a Twitter account last month and in doing so has left himself exposed to the wrath, and sometimes praise, of his people.

Voters 

Zuma’s Twitter debut on 10 May provided a timely reminder about his African National Congress (ANC) party as people were deciding whose box to mark on municipal election day on 18 May.

Within hours of Zuma’s account going live, people had tweeted him about a range of issues, from simple messages of support to loaded questions about problems in their community.

While Zuma, or more accurately an official from his office no doubt typing the messages, may not be a Twitter addict – he’s only sent eight tweets in his first eight days – does even a small presence on a social networking site enable a worthwhile channel of communication?

Reaching a wider audience

Presidential spokesperson, Zizi Kodwa, commented that Zuma “decided to join the world of Twitter to better communicate his activities and reach a wider audience both young and old, domestic and abroad.”

While this communication may be one way (the President is yet to respond directly to any of the tweets directed at him), it does promote political awareness to a generation of South Africans taking full advantage of the internet boom.

And Jacob G. Zuma, or @SAPresident is not alone – so far 38 world leaders to join the Twitter revolution, including US President Barack Obama, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Canada Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Zuma also follows in the footsteps of former South African President Nelson Mandela, who joined Twitter last month. So what are you waiting for? Get following…