What will we all be doing in 5 years? Who can tell.

I studied to be a journalist. No, I studied to be a print journalist. And now I work in and around mobile social networking strategy and development.

Let’s just quickly repeat that: Mobile social networking strategy and development. I am almost 100% certain that when I started studying at Rhodes University in 2003 that my current job didn’t even exist.

There is one job in particular that is going to need a lot more focus in the coming years:

New media sales and advertising.

The reason that I think this job is becoming increasingly important and increasingly neglected is because there is a marked lack of skilled and experienced people to fill this position.

What does this position entail?

Sales and advertising has traditionally (back in the old days) been about selling and advertising products. Getting people to buy in to your product or getting advertisers to place an advert in to your publication, on to your store walls or on your car and so on.

Sales and advertising is becoming a much more complicated and intricate art. You cannot just sell banners, text links, full page adverts, splash screens, in-video sponsorships or product placements. Social networks and new media businesses need to have a salesperson who understands every aspect of the business. This person needs to be able to cross sell, integrate campaigns, work on new media, old media and media that might not exist yet.

What does this person need to succeed?

This person needs to understand CPC, CPA, CPM, CPSA and how to make these models work. This person needs to not only know what CRM stands for but what it actually is and how to make it relevant to the client.

This person needs to know who the client is or should be and how that clients business or latest campaign fits in to the business of a new media business.

Sales is shifting as fast as media is shifting and technology is growing and developing. The trick here is that technology, websites, mobile content and advancements can push forward as fast as they like but if there is no team able to monetize the products, there may as well not even be a product.

It’s time start thinking about integrated salespeople, sales teams, sales in relation to your core business and if sales actually might be your companies core business.

I think it might be. I have been watching closely over the past few months as newspaper after newspaper has fallen away in the US. It’s a very scary and very sad situation that American media finds itself in. Resistance to change over the past few years has positioned many papers in a dire situation where it’s a matter of shit or get off the pot. And many are shitting themselves.

Boston Globe is a one example that I have been watching withe extreme interest. Boston.com is a great resource that has not been used effectively enough to pull Boston Globe out of financial trouble.

The resistance to change coupled with a severe drop in advertising and circulation (with thanks to a recession and online media emerging as a force in the media industry) has left the Boston Globe almost crippled. Many people are set to lose jobs and Boston, the city, is set to lose it’s competitive media market. If Boston Globe closes down the city of Boston will be left with a single daily newspaper. This defeats the purpose of mainstream media acting as a democratic watchdog or fourth estate. With one media organisation remaining things are not looking good.

Enter hyper-local, location-based news content fed to mobile phones produced by hyper-local citizen media producers who put content up via cellphones on to hyper-local portals.

This is what Martin Langeveld of Nieman Journalism Lab had to say on the topic of Boston Globe:

Langeveld’s advice is to go (almost) online-only with Boston.com, and to launch or subsidise a network of hyperlocal sites all over the area, and launch a network of local niche verticals focussed on weather, traffic, jobs, entertainment, education and more. He proposes a tiered, variable pricing model for all, with most of the content free, but paid premium access for a “small but highly-engaged group.” This income could be supplemented with transactional revenue, through selling theatre tickets, for example, or facilitating restaurant reservations.

This model could also expose the Globe’s city-wide reach to a hyper-local market of advertisers (a longer tail than they would previously had access to). This coupled with a free/premium hybrid mode and the paper could be on its way back up.

Regarding the print side of things it’s a simple mechanic to alleviate some immediate strain: Make the paper a weekly and include the news created over the week from the hyper-local portals and citizens media. Pull city-wide, larger advertisers in to this weekly printed publication to subsidise the cost of the print and drop the price to allow for quantity to be sold and to make the paper appear to be more accessible to the everyday person in the street.

There is no quick-fix for papers such as the Boston Globe, that is certain. But it is imperative that these papers start to adapt or simply succumb to a swift death.

Basically it’s a live mobile streaming service. You download the software to your phone. Open up the application and click “Stream”. The video is then recorded and streamed live to your Qik profile.

Find me at qik.com/nicharry

This really does illustrate the independence of an online brand. Sharply contrasting how beholden old-media is to their advertisers. I love this sort of campaign, I love the brashness of it and I love that they had the balls to put it out there.

There are many posts that discuss transparency online in a personal sense. Don’t lie, cheat, steal, defraud or do anything that might dent your reputation online. But I am referring more to the concept of honesty when selling online to the less knowledgeable.

This has become an absolutely imperative part of selling and talking about online with people. Many companies and agencies are interested and intrigued by online at the moment because it is the direction in which the world is moving. But there are dangers.

The main danger that I have come across is the overselling of the potential of online right now. Many companies almost have their finger on the pulse of things. But this means that they know of Facebook, Youtube and other sites that they can use in a social arena to promote their products. Yet many of them think that the viral nature of the social web world wide applies directly to South Africa. It doesn’t. Viral in SA probably means, if you’re lucky, a few thousand views of a video and a couple of blog posts. In the Western world viral translates to a few million views of a video and a few hundred thousand links to or embeds of a video. Those are the cold hard facts and expectations should be readjusted accordingly.

Unfortunately the “people in the know” often oversell the potential of social media in South Africa to get the hype up and the profit margins higher. This is bad. This sort of selling is doing detrimental damage to the truth and success of the market in SA. This sort of selling makes it very difficult to create a consistent and successful stream of clients, revenue and business in the online industry. People are being burned and are staying away from spending money online because of misleading sales and delivery pitches. Return of investment (ROI) is being oversold and underdeliverd. Again, this is bad.

Honesty is key. Clients need to know the truth and still want to go forward with a campaign and experiment, play in the space and engage with one or two hundred people in stead of hoping to gain one or two million. It wont happen so don’t sell it that way.

So what is the next big thing? What is going to make you famous? What will be the next Facebook or Google or fraction of these giants?

I have been hearing um’s and ah’s of the next “Killer App” or killer application. This phrase is taking a few different forms. Some more literal than others.

Andy Hadfield, on his blog, asked if Twitter is going mainstream. I knew what he meant but wanted to push the conversation to a different direction. I wanted to know what defines mainstream in South Africa since many of the online guru’s in SA think that the next Killer App is literally that, a single killer application that will launch a career, make a million or few and destroy the opposition.

This, as far as I can see, is an online impossibility right now. In fact, I think that it’s almost an impossibility for the next few years if you are talking strictly about fixed line internet. Even the coming Internet/broadband/fiber-optic revolution is going to take a while to penetrate the masses and therefore no online killer app in South Africa alone is going to be anything close to a killer app. It just wont.

Here’s a quick quote from my comment on Andy’s post:

I would be more inclined to argue that our precise problem here in SA is that we think a couple of thousand people makes something mainstream. The bare fact of the matter is that it needs to be a tool that is mainly used to be called mainstream (in my opinion only). Thus we could almost call facebook mainstream and be justified in that branding.

We could call Mxit mainstream and I would argue that Mxit trumps what twitter is trying to do.

So instead of us trying to push twitter in to the mainstream we should be looking at the ways the the majority of South Africans communicate (cellphones perhaps) and custom build a twitter-like solution that isn’t going to cost a bomb and provide the same functionality. Or would we call that Mxit or The Grid?

I think we need to think bigger, take products to market and then make them mainstream instead of trying to manipulate the word mainstream to suit our needs.

Simply branding something mainstream because the word was featured on the cover of a magazine with maybe 30 000 circulation cannot make something mainstream.

evl – “The prevailing current of thought, influence, or activity” – can you honestly say to me that twitter is a prevailing current of thought in the South African population, no, the South African ONLINE population. Even if we get the number of twitter users up to 10 000 South Africans that’s still probably between 3%-5% of all South Africans online on fixed internet using twitter. that’s not mainstream. that’s irrelevant.

There are three ways that I think Vincent will begin to see more local millionaires.

The first

is hyper-local content. That is what I think the next “Killer App” is. Hyper local is where it’s at when you combine it with the massive cellphone penetration in this country. An application like twitter is one that can be exceptionally successful in South Africa and reach mainstream status but while it is an online-centric application or service it is going to stay on the fringe in South Africa. We need to make hyper-local content contextual, relevant and easy to access. As far as I can see or believe in SA right now the contextualising of hyper-local and simplified content is going to be the winner.

The second

is a combination of things. The first entity is Africa. It’s one of the few untouched, untapped media markets. The second entity is mobile technology. The combination is a mashup of hyper-local, mobilised, African-centric content. I think that this, moving forward, could potentially be the combination of things that take South Africans in to the next realm of success (or the first depending on where you sit).

The third

is foresight. This is something that copyblogger has blogged about recently. We cannot beat those who entered this market first at their own game, especially not from where we sit.

From the Copyblog post:

The truth is, some models that worked a few years ago for early adopters are difficult if not impossible for new players to successfully get going today.

The key to avoiding this frustration is to see where things are going and become an early-adopter in the next big wave of the commercial Internet. Of course, even if you’re already doing well, it never hurts to take a look forward, right?

We need to sit where we sit, contextualise our problems, learn about our opposition and where the market is moving and make the first move. If we don’t make the first move we are going to be behind the early adopters again and have to wait man more years to have another chance to become the early adopters.

I am interested to know what others out there think the next Killer App will be, whether it is literally going to be a single application, a concept, a mindset, a minsdhift, a community or a project. Where’s the money at and is it actually about the money?

Here they are – click to enlarge.

So where to you stack up? Where do you fit in? You can download the full document by clicking here.

It’s interesting for me to note that the “heavyweight” jobs aren’t even surveyed for anything less than 5 years experience. I completely agree with this method of sorting as I think there are too many overpaid, under-delivering “guru’s” in the online market.

This post is a collection of answers from some of the top people, movers and shakers and industry leaders in the online market. I asked them two questions:

1. What was the single most defining moment in the South African online industry in 2008?

And

2. If you were to make one prediction for 2009 what would it be? And don’t tell me that mobile is the next big thing!

So let’s dive straight in to the answers:

Fred Roed, CEO of digital marketing agency, World Wide Creative.

1. Barack Obama winning the election. This meant that digital agencies such as World Wide Creative could justify their presentations demo-ing how messages are accelerated online. We could say ‘See! Look how he did it!’

2. Hype around Mobile and Social Media will be removed from the industry, meaning that digital will go mainstream. Following the international norm, marketing agencies will increasingly use online as the major destination point for all the other channels to feed into.

Vincent Maher, Portfolio Manager for Social Networking at Vodacom SA

1. For me the defining aspect of the whole year is that there didn’t seem to be a defining moment. There we a few things that happened but none of them were defining in the classic sense. In many ways this is a sign of maturity in the industry and an indication of resilience to smaller influences.

2. The breadth and reach of social networking is going to increase through services like Google FriendConnect and Facebook Connect and this will also reveal several vulnerabilities in the form of viruses and spam across these networks. Location-based services are going to become more accessible on the API level for developers to incorporate and, importantly, the global financial meltdown is going to cull a lot of the flimsy Web 2 operations and make the industry a little more intersting.

Andy Hadfield, The Internet & Social Media Guy, FNB

1. The credit crisis. The credit crisis is probably going to precipitate Bubble 2.0 – which is excellent news. Unlike last time, there have been precious few IPO’s, which means while many web startups may go down – they won’t take public shareholders with them. And any bubble burst presents a great opportunity for web companies that offer REAL value to rise to the fore. Oh, and Twitter. But it seems 3 million really active users still counts for value in someone’s book

2. The battle to own the social profile will increase. FaceBook vs MySpace vs Google Friend Connect vs Et Al are going to muddy the waters for the first 6 – 8 months of the year. Hopefully, coming out of that will be value driven profiling services which allow you to centrally store your social profile, pick it up whenever you want and hop all over the web. Let’s face it: storing a picture, bio and web links is not a value driven social profile. These companies are going to have push the boundaries a little to force consumers to make a call on where their social data and social networking time investment will sit…

Heather Ford – Web social entrepreneur

1. Quality Vacation Club suing blogger Donn Edwards
(http://donnedwards.openaccess.co.za/) for defamation. I think it’s
important because, while the same comments have come from the
mainstream media, QVC has chosen to sue the blogger. It will be
interesting to see how this turns out – at the crux, I think, is
whether ‘fair comment’ on a blog is being seen by South African courts
as equal in importance to ‘fair comment’.

2. My prediction is that we’re going to see greater diversity in the
South African blogging community next year – people linking to those
outside of their social circles, invitations to bloggers’ social
gatherings like the 27 dinner, and more training and connections
(here’s hoping!)

Duncan McLeod, technology editor, Financial Mail, and editor of http://www.FMTech.co.za

1. Definitely Altech’s victory against communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri which now allows just about anyone to build a communications network in competition with incumbent operators such as Telkom, Neotel and the mobile phone providers.

2. Bandwidth caps will soar — people will get at least triple the bandwidth for the same price — as Seacom comes online. This will lead to strong growth in online business in SA in 2009.

Charl Norman is the co founder and chief operations manager (COO) for Blueworld Communities. BWCOM owns numerous niche social networks based in South Africa.

1. Blueworld Communities (www.bwcom.co.za) being acquired by Naspers – this paved the way for other acquisitions in our local space – Zoopy and Afrigator soon followed with investment from Vodacom and MIH/Naspers. This created investor confidence in our small local market and enabled other startups to more confidently seek investment.

2. The economic crisis will slow down venture capital investments and startups unable to figure out their revenue model will have their funding reviewed or forced to merge with other similar lower tier startups.

Users will own their online identity (e.g. profiles) with tools like Google and Facebook connect. Users will carry this identity along with them around the web forcing online communities like social networks to embrace data portability technology.

Social media will also become more mainstream as tools like Twitter will be adopted by the general public and not just geeks. Good companies will have concrete social media strategies as part of their overall marketing strategy.

Catherine Luchoff is joint partner and founding member of MANGO-OMC

1. There isn’t one particular moment I can single out as the defining moment of 2008. Rather, I consider 2008 to be a defining year: One in which social media, crowd sourcing and micro-blogging found their footing and laid the foundation for converged campaigns that will, and have, defined the way we communicate and consume information.

2. With filter failure on the rise and information overload rife, community manager positions and descriptions such as ‘trusted filter’ will become more prominent. 2009 will also be the year in which the foundation for a holistic measurement tool, one that takes all channels into account (online, offline and mobile), will be defined.

Interesting stuff. Hopefully those who didn’t get to the questions will be able to post their responses in the comments of this post. I sent the email out to ±25 people for their comment.

Considering it is the time of the year for Hallmark holidays, spending, red and silver shiny things we thought it would be a great idea to show people where they can shop online in SA.

There have been three posts so far. Get over to SA Rocks and have a read:

Shopping with Faithful to Nature

Shopping with The Wren

Shopping with Jezze

If you have suggestions for real local online gems that supply truly local and lekker content please contact me. For now, get shopping, get reading, vist and support the local sites.

I will only shop from local online stores/products.

I will keep the price per gift under R120.

Those are my holiday shopping assurances.