arthur Goldstuck

On Wednesday night, a warm African night, a crowd of geeks, marketings, journos. techies, designers and business people gathered in the plush opulence of Twiice International in Rosebank.

The Session was a follow up to ‘Smoke, Mirrors and Social Media, Part 1‘ back in October, The first Session identified that social media is merely a set of tools that can be used to accelerate a message. Part 2 featured three of South Africa’s pre-eminent digital marketing exponents, Mike Stopforth, Arthur Goldstuck and Andy Hadfield.

This time round we got going at 7pm with Mike kicking off the proceedings.

Some highlights of Mike’s talk:

• An overview of what Cerebra is trying to achieve
• Loads of lessons learned along the way
• If you build it, they will come…with thunder
• Content needs to be maintained
• Social media is a 5 day game
• Roles are being defined that didn’t exist before

Arthur then followed with a firestorm of factoids, exciting the hell out of us.

• There is a revolution coming.
• Hype is not isolated to social media. In the early days of the net in SA there was even more hype, with examples of sites costing R60m to develop!! Many people were burned.
• Pipes are being laid into Africa that will increase accessibility of internet exponentially
• The ‘experience curve’ dictates that internet users in SA take 5 years before they really start to understand / use an element of the net to its full potential.
• Midway through June 2009, 3 gig caps will be a thing of the past.
• 2013 is when we’ll see widespread adoption of internet in SA.

Andy then gave us an insight into the corporate world and social media, with some tips on how to pitch to a corporate.

• Coming from a consultant’s perspective into a corporate world meant that he had to learn fast what was really important. In FNB’s case, cash in the ATM’s was way more important than a social media campaign.
• FNB are launching an exciting new Facebook campaign for Premier Banking users.
• Their IdeaBounty initiative using Quirk’s crowdsourcing site was a success.
• Agencies pitching to corporates must remember to account for an exit strategy, allowing the client to take over the running of the tech if necessary.

These are some of the broad strokes, but more will be revealed once we’ve diced and spliced the video to be uploaded to this site.

Thanks again to Twiice for the stunning venue, and to Corona and Perdeberg for keeping us cool.

Read more posts by Fred Roed

Fred is the CEO of digital marketing agency World Wide Creative. Fred co-founded The Heavy Chef Project, as well as Ideate, a forum for African entrepreneurs. Fred focuses on online brand building, marketing strategy and loud Hawaiian shirts. Fred is famous for his sartorial excellence, long diatribes about music and fanatical attention to detail when making pizza. Follow Fred on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Fred_Roed

Related posts:

1. Heavy Chef Session November: “Smoke, Mirrors and Social Media (Part 2)”
2. First Heavy Chef Session in Jozi: ‘Smoke, Mirrors and Social Media Part 1′
3. Two Heavy Chef Sessions in Johannesburg: “Smoke, Mirrors, Mobile and Social Media”
4. Heavy Chef Session March: David Duarte’s presentation on ‘Social Media in South Africa’
5. Upcoming Heavy Chef Session schedule