Nicisms

Every year around this time there is a buzz. It’s a very strange buzz that arises and expands beyond industry, colour, creed, or any other classification you can think of. January/February is a very special time for me. It’s a time where people think things through, imagine things, create and define things. It’s a time when predictions are made or attempted and a time when everyone seems to be looking for the next big thing.

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?

I just received the Bizcom newsletter. In it there was a very interesting salary survery. I downloaded it, opened it up and scrolled slowly down to the online survey results.

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.

It’s fast moving towards the final day of 2008. What a year it has been. I usually (much like many bloggers) put together an end-of-year post that sums up a few things and pulls together events all nicely. I am going to be composing one of those articles but this isn’t it.

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 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.

Sarah from Babazeka recently got in touch with me and presented me with a sterling idea that we’ve now been running on SA Rocks.

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 am going to buy all my holiday gifts online.

I will only shop from local online stores/products.

I will keep the price per gift under R120.

Those are my holiday shopping assurances.