The Heavy Chef Project

Category Archives: Recipes for Success

Heavy Chef Session: FoxP2 brings the house down

Last night, Justin Gomes, Creative Director and co-founder of Cape Town advertising agency FoxP2 presented a talk entitled “Why Wookies Don’t Wear Pants: A Study Of Creativity And Its Power To Transform Business“.

Justin took the audience through the case study of George Lucas and Star Wars, and how hard it was to convince the movie execs to approve a concept that was well and truly off the charts creatively.

The main points I took from the presentation were:

It pays to be brave
Creativity is not the only way to make money, but it is the best way
Creativity and commerce are not mutually exclusive
Fred Roed is a great actor (…you had to be there.)

Justin summarised the talk with the following conclusions:

Creativity Is the art of finding new solutions, not copying tried and tested formulas.
The formulas Of Best Practice and Research cannot be easily applied to truly original work.
Creativity can be be applied to find alternative media solutions when traditional channels are not available.
Brave work needs a brave client and an internal champion.
Creativity can ensure clients enjoy a disproportionate return on their investment.
Visionary creatives embrace commerce, but at the same time fight for their creative independence and principles.

Check out FoxP2’s work here.

When we go live with the new Heavy Chef website, we will upload the video of last night’s presentation, but in the meantime, you can revisit some of the classic pieces Justin spoke about in the session. Justin showed some examples of work he admired, many of which underlined the courage that clients need to have to approve some creative concepts…

Check out the “Whassup” advert here:

Check out the Honda Diesel advert here:

Check out the Cadbury’s advert here:

Check out the “Dogfish” advert here:

Dog-Fish - Volkswagen SpaceFox - The funniest videos are a click away

Check out the Oasis video here:
Oasis - Dig Out Your Soul In The Streets

Thanks again to our sponsors 24.com, Perdeberg, Corona, Glaceau Mineral Water and Springleap.

A big round of applause was given to Justin at the end - everyone was truly stoked to have witnessed a rousing and inspiring talk. Thanks to Justin and Charl for entertaining us!

By Fred | July 2, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success

Mayo Clinic - A Practical Case Study on Using Social Media

An excellent case study for using social media as a marketing and communications tool for non-sexy brands - like Mayo Clinic, a leading medical/surgical clinic based in the US.

This interview by Guy Kawasaki with Lee Aase, social media manager at Mayo Clinic, shows how they make in-depth health and medical news content available directly to patients and interested consumers in order to encourage feedback, dialog, and sharing of information.

An excerpt from interview:

“With over 90 percent of Mayo Clinic patients reporting that they say “good things” to their friends after a visit, using social media tools to amplify their impressions seemed reasonable.”

“That said, we didn’t just immediately jump into blogging, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. It was a natural, gradual progression that incorporated what I [Lee Aase] like to call, “The MacGyver Mindset”…creating new solutions out of resources we already had on hand.”

Specifically, what I like about Mayo Clinic’s approach to social media is their mandate for being nimble, thinking on their feet and having an in-depth knowledge about Mayo Clinic’s strengths and values.

That they have key staff members like Lee Aase to represent these traits is a blessing.

By Louis Janse van Rensburg | June 24, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success

Web? What? Where? How?

As the communications intern at World Wide Creative there is more than a lot I still need to learn about the web and online media. Even though I regard myself as someone who can use the web efficiently, I find it vital to know the platform I am working with – not just how to work it but what it is. I’ve heard of terms such as Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 but never understood what they were.

To start off, it is important to know the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web. The internet is actually a public system/network of computers accessible to everyone, everywhere (hardware). Most importantly it provides access to the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web functions within the Internet as a service provided by the Internet.

Ben Ramsey thinks of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 as “‘eras’ of the Web”. Web 1.0 would represent the first decade of the Web (1990-1999), which he calls the ‘read-only Web’. The term, Web 1.0, is mostly used to contrast the earlier days of the Web before blogs, social networking sites and Web-based applications became routine. Web 2.0 would then be the second decade (2000-2009), which he calls the ‘read-write Web’. This implies that not only does the Web connect to its users by giving them information but vice versa, allowing users to connect to companies and each other.

Web 2.0 has for some become a mere marketing buzzword with no real understanding of what it means. Now, there is still disagreement about what Web 2.0 means but to show The best of Web 2.0 technology, I gat hered some information on a few of the most important sites and features. This should give you a pretty good idea of what is meant by Web 2.0.

Micro blogging is an important feature of Web 2.0. It is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates, photos or audio clips and publish them. To upload and share photo’s online Flickr enables you to tag photos and search for specific content of photos. Vimeo could easily be described as the video counterpart of flickr.com. I guess you can mention YouTube in the same breath. When it comes to social bookmarking Del.icio.us allows its users to keep track of their favourite items on the web including music, websites, movies and lots more. Twitter is a text-based example of a social networking and micro-blogging service that lets its users send and read each others’ updates, known as tweets.

Another important feature of Web 2.0 would be RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This feature is used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in a structured format. It filters through the web to collect the latest information on specific websites of the user’s choice. It benefits readers who want to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

Through social networks such as Facebook it is clear that web culture has revolutionized. The whole system of social interaction has evolved. Experts have already started predicting Web 3.0 and what it would be like. There are some who believe that the Web 3.0 browser will act like a personal assistant that learns what you are interested in through a memory of sites you frequently visit. Ben Ramsey calls it the next decade of the Web (2010-2019). He predicts that there will be a widespread backlash as Web 3.0 begins to affect the mainstream culture. Ramsey suspects that only by 2015 we’ll really know how Web 3.0 will play out and the affect it will have on the world we live in today.

By Yolandi Janse van Rensburg | June 23, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success

Why Facebook is an important platform for Brand Building

Facebook has now moved from being not only a social network for personal use but is now considered (more prominently) a platform for business use as well. More and more marketers use Facebook as a key medium for their brands online. During the overall redesign of Facebook, Business Pages acquired some new changes as well. These new Business Pages now imitate the same Wall and tabs design as that of normal profiles. Business Pages maintain the same functionality - the ability to share photos, videos, text, applications and custom content. With focus placed on the Wall tab, Pages will feel much more dynamic than before. This will promote more participation and interaction between brands and their readers, inevitably helping to establish a better relationship. Content posted on the new Wall will also appear in Fans’ News Feeds. This means that posting updates to your Page is much more effective and has the potential to drive significant traffic to your Page. The Status Update will provide a powerful way for Pages to share short interesting bits. Brands that use Twitter can merge their accounts so that selected Tweets will automatically post to Facebook as Status Updates.

Nick O’Neill in his article How to Develop A Facebook Page that Attracts Million of Fans provides 10 tips for creating engaging Facebook Pages. I will only touch on a few of them but all of them are in the end vital for promoting a brand and bettering the overall brand experience.

An important tip Nick mentions is to integrate applications to increase engagement. According to Nick “the last thing you want is for users to land on your Facebook Page and leave immediately”. There are currently over 55,000 applications on the Facebook platform and a quite large portion of them can be directly incorporated into your fan page. Games, quizzes, and other types of interactive content can help keep users on your Facebook Page for longer durations of time. It is important to grab the attention of your users and keep it.

To establish a concrete relationship with fans and clients it is important to communicate with them continuously. Social media has always been about joining the conversation and now brands can be a significant part of the conversation on Facebook. These conversations can take place within a Facebook Page as well as in a user’s news feed. That means every time someone comments on a status, a photo, or a discussion thread, you need to comment on it. However, your social media strategy should still continue to include other outlets (blogs, Twitter, etc). It is important to remember that your fans/clients are also human – they are just like you.

Another point Nick emphasizes is to publish interesting and relevant content. Just like in other areas of social media (blogs, Twitter, etc), it’s central to provide exciting content to your readers. As part of this pointer, the next tip focuses on reposting. Just like Twitter, reposting information is basically the same as a retweet. By reposting a person’s information, they will be more likely to pay attention to your brand.

Facebook Pages present an exciting opportunity for brands to directly engage with their existing and future customers and harvest new ones. It is and has been a known fact that the more time you invest in your brand’s Facebook page, the better response you’ll get.

Over the past few years Facebook has witnessed a dramatic rise in new user adoption. Just to put things intoperspective, here are the Top 5 Facebook pages and their statistics:

By Yolandi Janse van Rensburg | June 14, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success

Facebook Facts on a Platter

If you’re a facts-junky like me, you’ll just love this site - www.allfacebook.com

Loads and loads of resources on (yep, you guessed it) all things Facebook, including stats on most popular FB Fan Pages*, Apps & FB Connect usage (size + growth).

Look, I’m the first guy to tell you that stats are only stats, and shouldn’t be viewed in isolation, but AllFacebook gives a healthy balance between cold, hard facts and opinion. Thus, providing readers withinformed opinions and observations - something that is often lacking amongst our fellow bloggers (like these guys).

As a marketer though, going through AllFacebook’s resources, viewing the best-of-the-best (number-wise) on Facebook, it makes my job easier to identify & implement best practices for growing brand communities on South Africa’s biggest online playground.

*Seems Facebook users love to sleep - I (love) SLEEP’s fan page has 4,460,499 fanzzzzzzzzzz….

By Louis Janse van Rensburg | June 10, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success

Business Plans - do they matter?

I wrote a post on our sister blog, Ideate, over lunch with a 7 point list to ‘create your perfect business plan‘.

This is particularly relevant, I think, to online start ups, since most are started without much fore-thought or planning. This can sometimes be an advantage, especially if you read Richard Branson, but in most cases, is not such a good idea.

If you’re:

looking for investment
want your new media / digital start up to be a success
want to differentiate

…then a business plan is maybe not such a bad idea.

Business Plan link here.

By Fred | June 8, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success

Create Unusually Simple & Surprisingly Powerful Products

At World Wide Creative we promise 2 things when creating digital strategies for our clients - Profitability and Creativity.

I’m wondering if we should add ‘Elegance’ to that pledge?

Guy Kawasaki recently interviewed Matt May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, about tips to pursue elegance.

According to Matt, his definition of Elegance:

“Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful. One without the other leaves you short of elegant. And sometimes the “unusual simplicity” isn’t about what’s there, it’s about what isn’t. At first glance, elegant things seem to be missing something.”

“Unusually simple” and “Surprisingly powerful”. Beautifully brilliant.

A fascinating read - specifically if you are interested in creating elegant digital products and strategies. (*Read the entire interview with Matt on the OPEN Forum blog –> HERE)

By Louis Janse van Rensburg | June 4, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success

Where are we going to? The Internet Past and Present

We all know the expression “you cannot know where you are going if you don’t know where you are coming from”. To foresee the future of the internet it is important (and interesting) to look at its history. Here are some highlights of the major occurrences over history that has shaped the Internet of today.

1965: First Network Experiment: Directed by Larry Roberts at MIT Lincoln Lab, two computers talked to each other using packet-switching technology.

1966: The first ARPANET project begins. Small university networks are beginning to be developed.

1968: The first computer mouse is introduced.

1969: The first ARPANET message sent: “lo.” Trying to spell log-in, but the system crashed.

1972: First basic e-mail programs for ARPANET: SNDMSG and READMAIL. “@” sign chosen, meaning “at”

1973: ARPANET goes global

1976: Queen Elizabeth sends out her first email message. Apple Computer founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

1981: IBM announces first Personal Computer. Microsoft creates DOS.

1983: ‘.com’, ‘.edu’, ‘.gov’, ‘.org’, ‘.net’ and ‘.int’ created

1984: William Gibson coins the term ‘cyberspace’. Apple Computer introduces the Macintosh on January 24th.

1985: The first registered domain is Symbolics.com.

1988: First large-scale Internet worm affects thousands of Internet hosts.

1990: APRANET ends.

1991: Tim Berners-Lee develops the World Wide Web.

1992: “Surfing the Internet” is coined by jean Armour Polly.

1993: Web grows by 341,000 percent in one year.

1994: ARPANET celebrates 25th anniversary. Java’s first public demonstration.

1995: Sun Microsystems releases Java. Windows 95 released

1996: Domain name tv.com sold to CNET for $15,000

1997: business.com sold for $150,000

2000: 20, 000, 000 websites on the Internet.

2003: The SQL Slammer worm causes one of the largest and fastest spreading attacks ever, taking 10 minutes to spread worldwide.

The Research project “How much information 2003: finds that e-mail generates 4000,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide.

2005: YouTube.com launches

2006: An estimated 92 million websites online.

2007: Apple surpasses 1 billion iTunes downloads. Search engine giant Google surpasses Microsoft as “the most valuable global brand: and also is the most visited website.

Sweden is currently the country with the highest percentage of net users, with 75%. The Internet continues to experience incredible growth. More people use the Internet to get connected to others, find information, do business, and share information than ever before in history. An interesting survey showed what the experts thought of the future of the internet. The Pew Internet/Elon University survey was conducted online by experts and active members of several key technology groups. Among them were The Internet Society, The World Wide Web Consortium, The Multistakeholder Group on Internet Governance, ICANN, Internet2 and the Association of Internet Researchers. These experts were asked to give their predictions about technology in the year 2020. What they predicted was that the cell phone will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people; voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the internet will be more widespread and accepted; and the gap between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be closed even more for everyone who is connected. Approximately 1,114 billion people use the internet today and this number is growing. The Internet is expanding and developing at such a fast rate, who knows where we are heading towards.

A side order of fun facts:

- The first computer mouse was introduced in 1968.

- Backrub was the original name for Google. The name Google is a twist on the word

Googol, a number represented as 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Thanks to these websites for their great history timelines of the Internet:

http://websearch.about.com/od/whatistheinternet/a/historyinternet.htm

http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/timeline.asp

By Yolandi Janse van Rensburg | June 3, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success

Journalism Students Reluctant to Blog

As a blogger myself I know the importance of creating an online identity. I started snooping around to see what has been written on blogging and how much people really know about it. It is strange to me that people still define a blog as an online journal or diary, because this definition for me is a bit out dated.

Blogging has moved past only being a journal filled with a blogger’s personal thoughts and experiences. Another definition I found was by Cedar Pruitt who said it is an “ongoing documentation that can be viewed by anyone in the world with access to the internet”. This definition is probably more accurate but it still doesn’t dig into the essence of a blog.

After sending out a survey on blogging to TUKS journalism and communication students, I was shocked at how little they knew. All of those who replied said they do not have a blog but interestingly one student replied saying “Yes, if Facebook counts as a blog”. It was a great shock to me to realize that there are people that are clueless when it comes to the online world. Personally, when I studied journalism we didn’t even glance in the direction of online media and that’s tragic.

When asked whether blogging could become a form of journalism most students replied “no” and said that it does not require journalistic skill. What is ironic about this statement is how incorrect it really is in terms of how many great journalists there are in the world who do not have a journalistic degree or ‘skill’.

According to Cedar Pruitt blogging has already started to have a powerful effect on mainstream media. An important characteristic of a blog that makes it different from other forms of information media is the ability of its readers to give immediate feedback by publishing a comment on a story.

The blogging phenomenon is here and it’s real, but what people want to know is ‘why blog?’ and the answer is clearly not reaching everyone.

By Yolandi Janse van Rensburg | May 29, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success, There's a Fly in My Soup

The Future of the Social Web - Take it Seriously

**Article republished from World Wide Creative’s Johannesburg Manager, Louis J v Rensburg’s Ka-Pow! blog.

Yesterday I wet your appetite with this excerpt from Forrester Research’s latest analyst report on The Future of the Social Web…

“…not just social networks, but every brand site will become social — whether you include these features, or visitors bring them along.”

This excerpt was taken from the diligent work of super analyst-cum-celeb blogger, Jeremiah Owyang, who a few years back stated the obvious (in a very credible way) through his post on why corporate websites are irrelevant.

Jeremiah, working at the Forrester Research Group, continued to add to the credence of Forrester’s Groundswell work through this report which, quite frankly, is above the heads of most local marketers.

That being said, the report has some real relevance to South Africa’s web landscape. I’ll highlight some of the main points of the report:

Every experience online will become social
Currently, the web has evolved by prioritizing relationship building (Era of Social Relationships)
Already we are seeing a more functional utilization of these relationships via applications and widgets (Era of Social Functionality)
Gone are the days of isolated websites - all becoming part of a greater, integrated social web; web technologies will focus on making web users online identities central and portable i.e. visitors to your site will bring their identities with them (Era of Social Colonization)
Inevitably, this will lead to communities of web users who will define future products and service (Era of Social Commerce)

Taking this into account, Jeremiah in his post does list a couple of pointers for brands to consider - of which, the one heads-up for companies that stood out for me was this:

“…prepare to fragment your corporate website and let it distribute to the social web. Let the most important information go and spread to communities where they exist; fish where the fish are.”

As Jeremiah puts it… “Shatter your corporate website”. Brilliant.

Clearly though, this shift to a fully envisioned social web isn’t happening over-night. Forrester themselves predict social commerce only to really take shape in 2 years time, maturing in 2013.

Still, fact is how consumers are communicating with brands have changed.

In a recent conversation I had with the Client Service Director of one of South Africa’s leading automotive brands, he stated:

“I have a problem. My phone doesn’t ring anymore.”

His phone… “doesn’t ring”?

Why?

Did his customers disappear?

…not likely.

Jeremiah and team, love your work.

*An entire overview of The Future of the Social Web report can be found on Jeremiah’s blog –> HERE. It’s a riveting read.

By Louis Janse van Rensburg | May 28, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success

Net Prophet 2009: All the Talks, Slides & Pretty Faces

Ok, so I heard that the Net Prophet 2009 conference at the beginning of this month rocked. Brilliant!

So, what about our not-so-lucky folk (like me) who weren’t able to attend?

No worries, the guys from Net Prophet came to the rescue!

Apart from all the Twitter updates (here), all the talks and accompanied slides have been made available via Net Prophet’s blog…

Arthur Goldstuck, World Wide Worx MD on ‘Why the Digital is going good in bad times’
Peter Flynn, White Wall Webb co-founder and MD on ‘Software as a Service’
Herman Heunis, MXit founder and CEO on ‘Mxit, The Past Present and Future’
Henk Kleynhans, Skyrove founder on ‘Lifting the Venture Capital Skirt’
Dave Duarte, Huddlemind Labs partner on ‘Integrating web & mobile into your marketing mix’
Mike Stopforth, Cerebra MD on ‘Harnessing the social web’
Hannes van Rensburg**, Fundamo founding member on ‘Opportunities for entrepreneurs looking to the mobile web’
Andrew Smith, Live Alchemy founder on ‘eCommerce is not about Technology’
Charl Norman, Blueworld Communities Operations Manager and co-founder on ‘Market, Manage and Monetise your blog’

And of course, what would the Net Prophet 2009 conference be without the presence of World Wide Creative’s star networker, brand genius and CEO Fred Roed…

(Courtesy Net Prophet 2009’s Flickr stream)

**Hannes, love the surname!

By Louis Janse van Rensburg | May 26, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success, Resources and Freebies

Backing up your online life

You back up your email, pictures, music and even your cellphone SIM Card. Why should your online resources be any different? After all, you do invest loads of time into these sites.

Here are three ways to back up those important social media activities:

LinkedIn - the core of your professional life.

Backup your contacts by clicking on the Export connections function at the bottom of your contact list. Sadly there is no way to export your resume other than downloading the PDF. At least you save a copy of those worthy recommendations.

Twitter - because you’re on it for most of the day.

Backup your tweets by using TweetBackup. Currently it only backs up your updates but soon you will be able to backup your Twitter peeps too. This nifty service allows you to download both html and text. In addition it features a handy “restore” option.

Facebook - because let’s face it, it’s your little black book.

Search for FriendCSV in Facebook - you can export your friends and have them in a CSV file ;-)

It makes sense to do a backup of your online work. Hours are spent building and nurturing connections online. If you don’t own the content you might as well have a copy of it at your disposal.

“People spend all their energy and attention pumping content into closed networks where they don’t own the content.” Swimgeek Food for thought.

By Beverley Merriman | May 18, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success

Welcome Yolandi

Today we’re welcoming our newest Chef (Chefess?) to the fold, none other than Yolandi Janse van Rensburg.

Yolandi is our eager-beaver, ready to learn, student who graduated with a BA Journalism degree and is busy with her honours in Visual Studies. This 21 year old is a car fanatic with a touch of pink. As a blogger herself Yolandi writes about the car industry, design and performance. Being a beginner in the field of digital marketing and online media Yolandi means to gain knowledge and investigate the realm of digital marketing. With a Prada bag in one hand and a Top Gear Magazine in the other, Yolandi plans to conquer gender-biased societies and male-driven industries. Glitter and gloss aside, Yolandi is a soccer-fan, F1-fan, cricket-fan and very competitive in pool. This new learner uses her enthusiasm for the web to tackle this task with the same aggression as she does everyday stereotypes.

Yolandi is new to the digital marketing world, so her brief for the Heavy Chef blog is to learn as much as she can, Heavy Chef style, and share it with us on this forum.

We await with baited breath, Yolandi - good to have you with us!

By Fred | May 13, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success

Forrester Research Says Social Media Sucks

Yesterday, I tweeted the following: “When @jbernoff says you better stop thinking of the Social Web as ‘media’ - you better listen!”

This tweet referred to Josh Bernoff (one of Forrester Research’s bigwig-cum-analysts)’s post: “Why Social Media Sucks” on Ad Age Digital Next’s blog.

Josh gives us an overview of his, qualified, views of the various terminologies bandied around by digital marketers so often - most noteworthy the inaccurate and over-hyped use of the phrase: ‘Social Media’ (something that we’ve also pointed out at our Heavy Chef Joburg event on ’Smoke, Mirrors & Social Media’ here and here)

Josh, specifically referring to the baggage that comes along with the word “media”, says:

“Media is something that media companies control, and media is overwhelmingly one-way. The online social world is about as two-way, multi-way, any-way as it can be. Nobody controls it, not even Facebook, which found it can’t even change its own terms of service… and while, as in media, you can advertise in social network sites, that is the least interesting use for them.”

Prefering to define the whole world of people connecting and drawing strength from each other online as the Social Web, Josh in his post also provide’s some clarity on his take on words such as ’social applications’ and ’social networks’.

Love your work Josh!

By Louis Janse van Rensburg | May 12, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success

Don’t miss the point with technology

I was sent an article by World Wide Creative’s Johannesburg Manager, Louis Janse van Rensburg, about Chris Hughes (Barack Obama’s online campaign manager and one of the original architects of Facebook), and it proved to be riveting reading. The article is from the Fast Company site and is entitled “How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign”.

My favourite excerpt: He [Chris Hughes] thinks that Web 2.0 underemphasizes the real world and that businesses trying to tap the technology often miss the main point. His philosophy, he says, is unchanged from his first involvement with Facebook: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a company or a campaign; you build around commonality. If it’s real people and real communities, then it’s valuable. Otherwise it’s just playing around online.”

Valuable stuff. The article is well worth the read (click here).

By Fred | May 5, 2009
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Posted in Recipes for Success