Roundup of Nomadic Marketing 3, Day 1

The first day of Nomadic Marketing has been interesting and challenging in unexpected ways. On the one hand I’ve not encountered anything particularly new — in fact, one of the biggest surprises was discovering that the idea of markets as conversations is not universally accepted as blindingly obvious. Listening to various stories of corporate obliviousness has made me freshly grateful that I have very, very little to do with corporates.

On the other hand, it’s been a fantastic opportunity to play around with tools I don’t normally have time for, and to rediscover the value of some things I’d abandoned. In no particular order:

1. Following very enthusiastic evangelism by Mike Stopforth, I’m playing with del.icio.us again — I managed to tag some of the more interesting URLs mentioned during the day here and will keep adding to the list over the next two days. I also (finally!) got the “social” part of social bookmarking; I still think deli.ico.us could make it a lot easer, the interface is cumbersome at present but at least the payoff is now clear to me. Does anybody still use Furl?
2. Similarly, there is more interesting stuff happening in SA’s online media space than I had given it credit for; it’s clearly worth investing more time in exploring Afrigator and Amatomu; I’d (unfairly) never spared them more than a passing glance before.
3. Jayne Morgan is doing fantastic work at Podcart, which I can see might work really well for a couple of my clients.
4. Adii did a great job of selling me on Wordpress, which I have been feeling lukewarm about on grounds of user-unfriendliness. Fresh incentive to poke about here a bit more. I lost all my notes from his presentation to a Google Docs glitch (the danger of putting everything online) so will hope for more detail on the wiki.

Stuff I would like to see, discuss or think about over the next two days:

1. I’d dearly love to know more about the Standard Bank Pro20 campaign - details of how it was built and implemented, what platforms are being used, what the feedback and results are and so on. Ditto for Standard Bank’s MXiT campaign; a live demo or screenshots at the very least would be great. If this is all too much detail for others (I’m aware my appetite for detail is not shared by everyone) I may have to interview Mike Stopforth about it…
2. In fact, I’d dearly love to know more about MXiT all around; the future of social media in SA and Africa is going to be about mobile more than anything else, and it’s an area I know next to nothing about (looked at it once, didn’t really get it — clearly I have less in common with the users of MXiT than with their parents:-). Mike’s comment that today’s teenagers have skipped the web really struck home.
3. There’s a big and not very well formulated question in my mind about how to make all this work for companies that are a) not consumer facing and b) not wealthy enough to employ full-time community managers etc. It obviously works very well for freelancers and small companies whose work is precisely about social media — their engagement in conversation is essential to what they do every day; but what about companies who are selling, I don’t know, fingerprint scanners or ERP software or archiving systems? I’m sure there is a way to make it work, but I also suspect it will take a different kind of thinking and engagement. People just don’t get passionate about fingerprint scanners in quite the same way they do about cricket, on the whole; and the people who do get passionate about them might not be the same as the people in a position to spend money on them (although it would be very short-sighted to ignore the people who influence the people who influence…). As I say, not a well-formulated question so if anybody can help me unpack it please do!
4. On the detail front again, I’d like to know a great deal more about who is online in South Africa, what platforms they’re using, where they’re going and what they’re doing there. I’m not completely convinced by Alexa as an information source given that they base their information on users of the Alexa toolbar so there’s very likely some sample bias in there. On the other hand, maybe all this detail is simply a quick route to analysis paralysis and there’s more to be learned from just diving in and doing it.

And Dave and Adii, if you guys manage to read all this by 8am tomorrow morning I will be seriously impressed.