I’ve spent months (years?) waiting for the whole social media thing either to blow over or make itself indispensable before I invest time in it. Right now, I have decided that if not indispensable, it is at least beginning to be useful: hence this experiment. I’m designing a social media strategy for Client X at Duo Marketing; if it works for him, we can do it for others too. I’m particularly interested in finding out whether this will work in a B2B space in South Africa: so far my first impression of the local social media scene, judging by the blogs, is that it’s very small and incestuous. However, talking about it and doing it are not at all the same thing — the best use of social media I’ve seen has been among crafters, who have created a dense and vibrant network of blogs, Etsy shops, Ravelry profiles, Flickr accounts and international goodie swaps that’s creating a great deal of value. So, we will see.
The start of an experiment
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I hadn’t heard of Etsy or Ravalry and I’m sceptical of those in our environment. I can say that Bidorbuy and Gumtree are huge. I wonder why craigslist http://capetown.craigslist.com didn’t work?
Hey Alan
Etsy and Ravelry are very focussed sites (handcrafts and knitting/crochet respectively), which I think is why you’ve never heard of them — they’re also incredibly successful. My hunch is that the local scene is just too small and too low-bandwidth to support anything similar — the South Africans who are popular on etsy are linked into global networks. I never heard of the local craigslist, on the other hand — maybe gumtree already has the market sewn up?
Hey guys, we’re going for it at http://www.market-fleas.com. It’s only 3 months old and we’re not quite there yet, but I think we’re moving in the right direction. We’ve had almost 50 000 page views since launch, so I don’t think the local scene is too small but rather large. Have a look and give us some feedback please.
Regards
Rick