World Wide Creative is launching a  branch in Johannesburg in September to look after our growing roster of web marketing clients and new business leads. As a result we’ve brought in the talents of one Louis Janse van Rensburg, who

• has a Masters Degree in Entrepreneurship (seriously)
• has considerable experience in the online marketing sector
• has a wardrobe of superfly pinstripe suits
• is multilingual (Afrikaans, English and Marketing)
• appreciates great coffee
• lives in Pretoria
• can langarm (seriously)
• plays flyhalf
• loves most sports, including cricket, golf and curling
• will head up the World Wide Creative Jozi office

You can gauge from the list above pretty much how the interview process evolved.

Louis will be looking after our Johannesburg clients, as well as looking after new business leads in the City of Gold. Anyone wanting to speak to Louis about new business, web marketing opportunities, building communities online or Kurt Darren, please phone our studio number at 0861 932226.

In recent years, it has felt like Corporate South Africa has been asleep to the online world, but we’ve noticed a sudden awakening to our dark and mysterious world of Web Marketing. World Wide Creative have now started working with some of South Africa’s biggest corporate names, consulting on areas such as Social Media, Online Advertising and Search Engine Marketing. As if experiencing a simultaneous myoclonic twitch, it appears as if Marketing Managers, Business Owners and Entrepreneurs have all woken up and are climbing on to the internet  bandwagon - often not really knowing what they’re doing, or how to go about it.

And so, it is with great excitement that we announce the speaker for the  August Heavy Chef Session.

Rob Stokes is the CEO of Quirk eMarketing, and will be presenting a Session entitled: ‘Introduction to eMarketing’.

Rob is one of the foremost thinkers on the topic, and has recently co-authored the book ‘eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Online Marketing‘ Rob’s company has been in the industry for 10 years, a lifetime, and we greatly respect their expertise as leaders in highly specialised field. This presentation is essential for anyone wanting to enter into the online marketing world, or build their understanding of the basics of Web Marketing.

Want to attend?

If you’d like to join us, please email Rowan (rowan at worldwidecreative.co.za) or phone the studio at 0861 932226.

Venue: 3rd floor, 24.com building, Foreshore, Cape Town  (directions here)
Date: 27 August 2008
Time: 5pm – 7pm (slightly earlier because some of us are going to the 27dinner!)
Cost to attend: 2 hours of your time, and a big, apple-crunching grin as you walk out the door.

There are 50 seats available, on a first-come first-serve basis.

For those of you up bright and early in the morning you may have seen World Wide Creative’s very own TV celeb, Fred Roed, donning his customary Hawaiian shirt on CNBC Africa. Following on from his Carte Blanche cameo he was asked to talk about web marketing strategy for African business.

Fred was asked to suggest a possible online strategy for a fictitious business. Breaking the strategy down into four key steps, he outlined a possible route of attack for a Kenyan Taxi service. The key steps were:

1) Understand your brand and be consistent and pervasive with it.

2) Set up your online presence

3) Engage with your customer, both online and offline

4) Keep it active!

Now, with part 2 scheduled for the end of this month, we’ve asked two of South Africa’s best exponents of e-commerce to speak at the upcoming Heavy Chef Session on 30th July.

Fiona Phillips, CEO Cybercellar.com
First up, we have Fiona Phillips, CEO and founder of Cybercellar.com, one of South Africa’s first and biggest online shopping platforms. Fiona started the company waaayyy back in 1998, and has a wealth of knowledge about surviving and thriving through bumpy times in the tech sector.

Cybercellar.com is the fifth biggest etailer in the country, with further growth expected as Fiona starts to expand into North America at the end of this year.

Andrew Smith, Co-founder of Yuppiechef.co.za
Our second speaker is Andrew Smith, co-founder of the coolest kitchen store in the country, Yuppiechef.co.za.

Yuppiechef has won acclaim across dozens of magazines and newspapers across the country, and is the recipient of multiple awards, including E-commerce Site of the Year (Home & Garden Category) in 2007, and Sunday Times Food Awards ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’. Andrew is the techie in the Yuppiechef team. He’s in charge of the systems and architecture, as well as figuring out how all the various pieces of the puzzle need to fit together.

Marketing and Technology
Fiona will kick off the proceedings with an introduction on how she set up Cybercellar.com, focusing on the business / marketing side of e-commerce.

Andrew will then look at the technical and logistical side of things, digging into the behind the scenes stuff no one thinks about when scheming up their netrepreneurial world-domination plan.

Want to attend? You’ll have to cough up, big time!

Cost:
* Petrol to get there: roughly R400 to drive 10kms there and back.
* Phone calls asking for directions around Green Point: about R10 (on Vodacom)
* Bandwidth downloading videos of the event afterwards: about R100 (on one of Telkom broadband packages)
* Cost to attend: Priceless (er, free.)

Date: 30th July
Time: 5:30pm to 7pm
Venue: 3rd floor, 24.com building in Green Point
Drinks: Wine and snacks sponsored by Perdeberg Winery

If you’re keen to come, please email Rowan at worldwidecreative.co.za or give Rowan a call at the World Wide Creative studio 0861 932226.

As you know, you should always be checking your stats on a regular basis and one thing I do is check the keywords people are finding our site for. This allows us to focus some more SEO effort on keywords we are starting to see some action from, if we think it could bring in some good traffic.

We had a great search find us this week: “World no 1 web design company”. So its offical we are the best:-)

Perdeberg will be providing the refreshment to the evening’s festivities. Perdeberg has been extremely active in supporting South Africa’s internet community, and is following on the success of its ‘Clink to Win’ campaign by engaging with individuals in the marketing and tech sector.

This is in line with Perdeberg’s grounded and intelligent brand personality.

We are happy to be associated with Perdeberg, and look forward to getting stuck into its award winning Reserve on the evening!

[Details, dIrections and times here]

They’ve interviewed Verity about her journey over the past 36 months - charting her progress from wayyy back when Verity and World Wide Creative first started brainstorming the idea of selling her album before it was made.

Don’t miss it…Even if it’s only to see yours truly in full Hawaiian glory, mouthing off about social media.

Check the video here if you can’t view it above:

Keep your eyes peeled for the next one on the 25th of this month. It promises to be another killer session. We’re changing the schedule slightly and pushing the next ‘Netrepreneur’ Session to July. This month, the focus is going to shift a little from our usual topic of profitable websites to ‘Building a Brand in South Africa’.

Sorry for the cryptic nature of this post, but we’re still confirming venue, etc.

Carte Blanche, South Africa’s premier investigative news programme, visited our studio this morning to interview me on the success of the Verity campaign.

Verity and World Wide Creative have been working for three years with the goal of raising enough money to produce her album. The idea was to sell an album that didn’t exist, and, as it turned out, we reached the goal a few months ago. Verity has just completed the production.

We designed her website, e-commerce facility, her CMS, a newsletter system, her blog, logo, flyers and a host of other social media widgets and gadgets to raise publicity for her cause.

Carte Blanche picked up the story through the press, and are now combining her journey with a piece on how the internet is changing the music industry.

The interview was pretty nerve-wracking. Funny how you always figure out what you want to say when it’s too late. The French call this ‘L’esprit D’escalier’ or ‘the spirit of the staircase’.

If you’re in Africa, the piece should air in the next couple of weeks. Our international readers can pick it up on the Carte Blanche website. Check it out and let me know how I done!

[Check out more pics on the WWC Flickr Photostream here]