SA needs more of this type of journalism
In late 2010 Barry Sergeant started asking some tough questions of Gold Fields’ R2.1bn BEE deal, in 2011 Lindo Xulu joined him. Gold Fields refused to reveal who the recipients of its BEE bonanza were. In 2011 Barry Sergeant and Lindo Xulu published the first of what would become several articles on Gold Fields’ controversial [...]
What the state of media in the US tells us about SA: The future is bleak
One of the lessons I learnt while I was the editor of Moneyweb was that current trends in the US media are a good signal of where our own media is heading to, in the next six months to a year. So when Pew released its latest report on the State of Media I decided [...]
Apple is now bigger than South Africa, but SA’s business don’t get it
Apple sold 92m iPhones and 40m iPads in 2011. It overtook Samsung in the last quarter of 2011 to regain its position as the world’s largest smartphone maker. More iPads were sold in Q4 last year than HP PCs. The iPhone 4s was in such demand in SA that in less than a month, Vodacom sold out [...]
More urban South African consumers have smartphones than any other country, it could soon apply to tablets
More urban consumers in South Africa have smartphones than any other country, according to a recent report by Accenture called “Always On, Always Connected- Finding Growth Opportunities in an Era of Hypermobile Consumers”. The report looked at consumer electronics products and their usage in Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Sweden and [...]
Do you have the right social media strategy?
When new social media platforms become popular do you believe you should jump to be on them? Do you know what your business priorities are? Have you translated them into social media objectives and strategies? Are you measuring these? Is there co-ordination on social media between various structures in your organisation? Are you spending a [...]
SA’s twitter community is small, very small
That’s if Portland and Tweetminster’s Africa tweet research is to be believed. After contemplating their research, it occurred to me that either it is seriously flawed or the confirmation bias bug bit me ie, I wanted the research to confirm my proposition that companies should take Twitter seriously. Their twitterville Africa research, which analysed over 11.5m [...]
A closer look at how Africa tweets
The wonderful people at Portland, an independent consultancy, and Tweetminster, a media platform that helps people and organisations discover content and insight around their personal and professional interests, at the end of last year analysed over 11.5m geo-located tweets originating on Africa and conducted a survey of 500 of Africa’s most active Tweeters. Their twitterville [...]
Facebook’s next move: The Facebook supermarket?
Deloitte’s “Global Powers of Retailing 2012: Switching Channels” report predicts that the “search for new markets, multi-channel retailing, more aggressive use of technology and social media and better use of data to understand consumer preferences will be some of the key drivers of the global retail industry” this year. A recent News24 online survey conducted [...]
Could Facebook move into adsense next?
Facebook’s autumn listing was covered in thousands of articles, by hundreds of TV shows and news bulletins but what happens after that famous day? How will it grow future profits? John Battelle reckons it could launch a competitor to Google’s adsense, I disagree, here’s why: Firstly, Google has built a sophisticated network to back up [...]
Google+ is Google, ignore it at your peril
I once read that every idea has been conceived and every thought thought. Reading and listening to other people’s views can become a pain, when what is common knowledge for you is expressed as a eureka moment by them until that moment is a eureka moment. Such a eureka moment occurred on Friday after a [...]