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Catherine Parker is a social media and search consultant and web copywriter. Via her first love, copywriting, she fell into the search engine marketing industry, working at Quirk eMarketing in Cape Town, followed by Greenlight Marketing in London, and then iProspect in San Francisco. Most recently, she headed the in-house SEO team at online content network CBS Interactive (formerly CNET) in San Francisco. First exposed to social media as part of SEO strategy, she’s since recognised its value to businesses in its own right. Now based in Cape Town, Catherine runs Rank&Copy, which helps businesses grow their brand online through paid and organic search, social media campaigns, and sparkling web copy. Her book, “301 Ways to Use Social Media Now in Your Marketing”, is due out in September 2010.
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Success in the mobile space is all about “glocalisation”, says Ralph Simon from mobile strategy company Mobilium.Speaking via Skype from Russia at the Tech4Africa conference in Johannesburg, Simon talked about the importance of making content that’s in line with global trends but that is at the same time locally relevant in order for it to spread most effectively to its intended audience.This was echoed earlier by Catherine Luckhoff of Bozza, the South African mobile content distributor, who talked about ...
As the co-founder of SOFTtribe limited, one of the leading software houses in West Africa, Herman Chinery-Hesse has been described by the BBC as "Africa's Bill Gates". Chinery-Hesse is known for designing software that is "tropically tolerant" in that it takes into consideration Africa's specific environmental, political and societal challenges.In a recent interview with the BBC, Chinery-Hesse said: "I think that there is so much opportunity in Africa, there is so much underdevelopment, there is so much that hasn't been ...
As one of the youngest and most influential marketing strategists in the world, Josh Spear owns Undercurrent, a New York-based consultancy that applies a digital worldview to the challenges and ambitions of complex corporate organisations.Nominated as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, Spear serves on the Global Agenda Council on Marketing and Branding. He has been an active participant in the World Economic Forum in Davos since 2008. Most recently, he has been advising Millennium Promise, ...
A leading figure in the British user experience community, Cennydd Bowles is a user experience designer and writer based in Brighton, England. He works in design and strategy at Clearleft, a UK-based design agency well-known as a leader in user experience, and his book, Undercover User Experience Design, written with colleague James Box, has been acclaimed as "a must-have for your bookshelf".In a recent blog post Bowles wrote:Design is inherently less predictable than most other product fields, since it ...
As the founder of the non-profit African Institute of Technology and Fasmicro(AFRIT), Africa's first integrated circuit design house, Nigerian academic and inventor Ndubuisi Ekekwe is a strong campaigner for Intellectual Property Rights as a means of monetising technological innovation in Africa. He also believes that a change in educational mindset and an emphasis on hardware production are two factors that will help propel Africa's success in the technology sector.Ekekwe is a TED fellow. In his "idea worth spreading" he ...
From rural communities to small business owners, the impact of mobile technology in Africa is widespread. In addition to the impact on commercial business, education and services, the popularity of mobile entertainment has also grown exponentially. But is mobile changing the way consumers engage with this entertainment media, and is the media itself changing in response to the platform?In the run up to the 2011 Mobile Entertainment Africa conference in Cape Town on 23rd and 24th August, we pose these ...
Angel investing came accidentally to UK-based Permjot Valia. As the sales and marketing director of Ernst & Young, he became involved in their entrepreneur programme, which in turn led to his new career of investing in startups.By his own admission, Valia’s success rate is a statistical anomaly: while an average of only 3% of investors successfully exit a startup via an IPO, the first company he invested in went public within just seven months.Visiting Cape Town this week ...
Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and platforms like Ushahidi, highlight the rise of the civic economy - one in which value is placed more on relationships between stakeholders using that platform rather than on the value of the actual commodity being exchanged.Speaking at the NetProphet conference in Cape Town, SwiftRiver’s Director of Products Jon Gosier compares this new value-based economy to bartering marketplaces in India or Africa. The relationships between the barterers in these places determine whether they’ll interact ...
In the last two articles on Memeburn, I covered the basics of how to set up and how to use a Flickr account to grow your brand online. Once you’ve set up your account though, like any other web presence, you need to allocate time resources to promoting it - both inside and outside of Flickr.If you're spending a large amount of time and effort uploading photos to your Flickr account as a business owner and/or entrepreneur, it's prudent to ...
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