Tattoos and Chocolates

My son is 7 years old. He loves chocolates. He also have an unhealthy liking for tattoos. Those stick-on fake ones. Sometimes he looks like he’s been slapped with a wet Sunday Times. You don’t know if you should talk to him or read him!

Although he loves chocolates, he will not be able to contain his disappointment if you buy him the biggest slab of Cadbury’s chocolate that you could lay your hands on. Oh no. If you want him happy, you need to buy him one of those Black Cat chocolates or a New Look. Why? They’ve got those crappy stick-on tattoos in the wrapper, baby! And he LOVES those!

After reading Dave’s brilliant post on Stormhoek humanizing wine, it reminded me how important it is to “put tattoos in your chocolate’s wrapper”! Doing that seemingly insignificant little thing that happens to influence minds when they are buying chocolates! Stormhoek do that with their involvement in social events. When last did you have an informal braai at Nederburg with some free-drink-as-much-as-you-can-handle wine? When last did they sponsor free wine for an event you are organizing? Probably never!

ISP’s have been doing it for AGES! Offering email addresses with a dial-up/adsl package. How insignificant? Not to the guy buying the product! For us yes. We look at things like bandwidth. For the non-technical guy, email accounts matter. Tattoos in a wrapper!

There are lots and lots of examples. Sometimes we tend to forget to do it though. It is vitally important although seemingly insignificant. Never forget that!

(PS: Could find links to Cadbury’s chocolates, but not New Look or Black Cat! This image of the peanut butter jar is the best I can do! Swak…)

Cadbury Product Recall Information

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Marketing Stii

Why Web2.0 was created

Max Kaizen quoted something Paul Graham said in a comment on the post “Who dictates the evolution of the web?” that is very interesting. Its a long post, but worth the read:

Tim says the phrase “Web 2.0″ first arose in “a brainstormingsession between O’Reilly and Medialive International.” What is Medialive International? “Producers of technology tradeshows and conferences,” according to their site. So presumably that’s what this brainstorming session was about. O’Reilly wanted to organize aconference about the web, and they were wondering what to call it.

I don’t think there was any deliberate plan to suggest there was a new version of the web. They just wanted to make the point that the web mattered again. It was a kind of semantic deficit spending: they knew new things were coming, and the “2.0″ referred to whatever those might turn out to be.

And they were right. New things were coming. But the new version number led to some awkwardness in the short term. In the process of developing the pitch for the first conference, someone must have decided they’d better take a stab at explaining what that “2.0″referred to. Whatever it meant, “the web as a platform” was at least not too constricting.

The story about “Web 2.0″ meaning the web as a platform didn’t live much past the first conference. By the second conference, what “Web 2.0″ seemed to mean was something about democracy. At least, it did when people wrote about it online. The conference itself didn’t seem very grassroots. It cost $2800, so the only people who could afford to go were VCs and people from big companies.

And yet, oddly enough, Ryan Singel’s article about the conference in Wired News spoke of “throngs of geeks.” When a friend of mine asked Ryan about this, it was news to him. He said he’d originally written something like “throngs of VCs and biz dev guys” but had later shortened it just to “throngs,” and that this must have in turn been expanded by the editors into “throngs of geeks.” After all, a Web 2.0 conference would presumably be full of geeks, right?

Well, no. There were about 7. Even Tim O’Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn’t parse it at first. I saw him walk by and said to one of the O’Reilly people “that guy looks just like Tim.”

“Oh, that’s Tim. He bought a suit.” I ran after him, and sure enough, it was. He explained that he’d just bought it in Thailand.

The 2005 Web 2.0 conference reminded me of Internet trade shows during the Bubble, full of prowling VCs looking for the next hot startup. There was that same odd atmosphere created by a large number of people determined not to miss out. Miss out on what? They didn’t know. Whatever was going to happen—whatever Web 2.0 turned out to be.

I read another interesting thing Tim O’Reilly said a while ago when he was asked to give advice for 2007. The heading reads “Put yourself at the center of the action” It is taken out of Intelligence Magazine - the February 2007 edition. I’m not re-typing the entire article. Only the first two of his six points.

1. Be first

This is one of the immutable laws of marketing. Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No Idea.

2. If you cannot be first, create a new category so you can be first.

Who was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic? Amelia Earhart. New category. We did not have the first Web conference out there, but when we applied “Web2.0″ to the category, we created something new.

Although I’m pretty sure it was not the only reason why the term Web2.0 was created, it sure is a major reason! Interesting…

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Business, Marketing, Web 2.0 Stii

Turn up the Amps!

Mar 15

The dangerous duo is at it again… Get the new episode of Amplitude fresh off the shelve hot from the oven. An interesting chat with Eric Edelstein! And talking about the email SPAM thing, we all received the one from Mr Ramon Thomas. Stefano certainly give him a good indication of what he thinks…


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Go vote for your favorite logo!

Mar 07

Quirk colaborated with Neville from Muti so that you can vote for your favorite Blog Awards logo! This is hopefully the first of many such colaborations! Hopefully Muti can power the voting for blogs next year! ;-)

So hop on over and cast your votes! Quirk decided to be fair, they will include all 85 logos and the original. There are some pretty damn good ones. Below is my vote (I’m not so hung up about keeping my vote a secret like political parties is…). Different strokes for different okes, they say! Lets see how this plays out! Go now dammit, what are you still waiting for around here! Oh the link. Right. Here it is:

http://muti.co.za/sablogs

Quirk eMarketing


Muti Logo

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Have a competition Muti

Mar 02

I went to muti.co.za yesterday morning and again this morning and just realised, I’m going there right reason! I go there to see what is happening. What is news and news worthy. If you have a look at the stats pages, you will see that this week alone there was 109 submission (at least by the time I was looking) and most of the submissions was on things I like and find useful! I have most blogs feeded to my RSS reader. It is easy for me to stay on top of whats new(s) in the blogosphere. Trawling through the news sites is a little more work. I have them fed too, but they have a lot more to go through. Now, I rather go to Muti and see they’ve got a lot I’m passionate about covered! I’m really starting to see the value in it and starting to love it! (Well, I’ve always loved it, but you get the idea.)

What I’m finding interesting is the Stats page (on the main menu bar). It is interesting to see who is submitting what and earning how many kudus. Maybe it would really do Muti good if they got onto the competition bandwagon like Quirk did with their SA Blog Awards logo competition and get a company to sponsor some prizes for the top submitters and top kudu earners in a month. April will be a great month.

“Don’t be an April’s fool to miss this one…”

Oh, and note to Neville and Quirk and everyone else having communities voting for something, the muti platform could work great. Neville, how about you create subdomains for competitions, submit the nominees in there and let the voting public go like/dislike on it.

Let me explain:

Maybe it would not work EXACTLY with the same model muti is currently working on, but that can be tweaked! It will do wonders for Muti’s exposure… ;-)

Dave actually had a brave, wonderful idea with muti too…(Therefore this post. Credit goes to you, buddy!) Thanks Dave, you actually got me thinking about this. I will let you tell the folks the idea…

fred

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27dinner, where marketers and geeks collide…

Mar 01

…and the result was a big BANG! Another You-niverse was created. (Great one RafiQ!) It was awesome! I’ve had conversations with GIANTS like Uno, Stefano, Graham, Mike, Dave, RafiQ, Miguel, Max, Angus, Verity, Chris, Jimmy, Stuart, Deon, Guy, Alan, Shelly, Shane to mention but a few. I know not everyone was crazy about the idea and the speakers, but I think an event like this is priceless. Thank you Cerebra boys for orchestrating such an awesome event.

We geeks are good with machines, not so much with people. Therefore it is EXTREMELY important for me to rub shoulders with some great marketing/business minds. Share innovative ideas. Create new ones. (Check out Uno’s awesome idea!).

It was even more of an honour for me to have met and talked with Uno, Stefano, Graham, Dave, Chris, Shane and Gerry till early morning hours. Great, GREAT guys! And they are extremely clever.


Ok, I got to punt Code Igniter on a video clip somewhere!

Stefano, unfortunately we’ve sold infoactive before the website was done, therefore there is no site up! :-D

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Branding your URLs with Code Igniter

Feb 22

HUH?! Yes folks! And it could prove invaluable in SEO too! Code Igniter got a setting that allows you to append any file extension to a URL.

I’m going to use muti as an example:

The URL to their latest submissions is http://muti.co.za/new

If it was done in Code Igniter I could tell it to append the URL with the extension .muti or .africa
It will look like this then:

http://muti.co.za/new.muti or http://muti.co.za/new.africa

Now, I’m virtually sure you could achieve the same with Apache mod_rewrite!
Cool Idea2.0 eh?
Code Igniter

PS: Ok, this was kind of useless information. I reckon if you really want to do it you could simply put your name in your url anyway… Just thought its a cool feature and the fact that you don’t need to worry about it as it is done automatically! ;-)

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Amplitude 6 is out! Get it while its HOT!

Feb 09

The dynamic duo has done it again with some good muti

They interviewed the legendary Neville Newey from muti.co.za. What an interesting interview! Well done guys!

Hop on over and get episode 6 of Amplitude NOW!


amplogo-1.gif

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Web3.0 vs the Semantic Web

Feb 08

I came accross a new social networking site called convinceme.net over at Vincent Maher’s blog. Convinceme is a debating site where you can put two topics against each other and compete for votes. In the end, the side with the most votes win. You can also create an account and add arguments on why you are voting for a subject.

With regards to my previous post, Semantic Web (Web 3.0?) which sparked a mini debate between me, Vincent and Charl I thought well lets take it much further and go debate it publically on Convinceme. So go cast your vote on what the name for the next generation internet technology should be. Should it stay the Semantic Web or should it be called Web3.0?

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Marketing, Semantic Web, Techie stuff, Web 2.0, ideas 2.0, web development Stii


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