Barrie Bramley

Recycle Message from MASSCASH

Barrie — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 06:10:50 +0000

I just came back from a 3 conference with MASSCASH. They’re a client I’ve done work with for around 7 years now. I don’t spend a large amount of time with them during the year, and during the last few years have only been involved at their conference. Change is therefore easy to spot. And change they have. In many areas.

As part of the ‘conference pack’ I was given a notebook and pen. On first glance it looked just like any other book and pen. When I got home and inspected it a little more I noticed a short message on the back of the book. It made for a powerful read and reminder about recycling:

The cover and pages of this notepad are made from recycled paper and board.

By choosing recycled materials you are limiting your impact on the environment and helping to save our planet.

In the last 30 years production of domestic waste has increased by 60%, we can recycle 40% of this waste but only 8% is actually recycled… please help us increase this.

One tonne of recycled paper saves 1.3 tons of wood or the average person’s yearly power consumption + 2 months of water usage. By simply recycling 25 000 tonnes of paper we could produce an extra 15 billion pencils or save 15 000 hectares of forest.

One tonne of (recycled) plastic save 800kg of oil or saves the 12 months power consumption + 1 months water consumption for 2 adults! The plastic used in just one bottle could manufacture 1 scarf! The plastic used in 27 bottles could be used to manufacture 1 sweater!

Think about what you use… help save our environment!

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I left my wallet and car key on @TheGautrain

Barrie — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:37:49 +0000

On Sunday my family took my mother on The Gautrain for her first ride. At 76, having lived her whole life in South Africa, it’s got to be one of those amazing achievements she possibly never expected to see?

We went from Sandton to Rhodesfield Station and back. On the way there I sat with our youngest and during the journey got up to chat to the rest of the family in the next row of seats. It’s a short ride as you know, and as I was returning to our youngest we arrived. In the commotion and rush to help granny out, I forgot to pick up my car key and wallet I’d left on the seat next to our daughter.

The long and short of it was that by the time we’d got to the glass doors to exit the station I realised what I’d done. I rushed over to one of the Gautrain security guards who immeadiately got onto his walkie talkie and suggested I get back onto the platform to see if the key and wallet were still where I had left them on the returning train? By the time I’d arrived back at the platform and found another security guard, I heard a guard on the train broadcasting that he had my key and wallet and would meet me on the platform.

After completing a few forms and inspecting my belongings with the Assistant Station Manager, I re-joined my family. 3 credit cards, R960, my wallet and my key all in hand. To be honest I thought I only had R900 in the wallet. I joked to the Security Guard and the Assistant Station Manager, that I thought they’d added R60 to my wallet : )

Im posting this story for two reasons:

To thank the 3 Gautrain people I engaged with directly, and the 3 or 4 others who helped along the way. Zembe Mngadi, the security guard on the train specifically (see his pic below), for picking up my belongings, keeping them safe and radioing ahead to meet me at the station. To Jan Ralikoentsane, the Assistant Station Manager, for his thorough job of ensuring I had everything. And to Zakhele, the Station Manager, for following up with me that I had everything and then assisting me to re-enter the system with all the necessary card-swipes completed.
Because we’re often completely over-whelmed in our country with stories of theft, corruption, violence, hi-jacking, etc that we forget that actually, South Africa is full of mostly amazing people, who are honest, helpful, live with high-levels of integrity, and want a better South Africa for one and all. The criminals we read about and are exposed to are in the minority and will not ever, I believe, change fundamentally who we are as South Africans.

Thanks once again to the Gautrain for another excellent and safe experience.

Zembe Mngadi

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HSBC looking at majority stake in Nedbank

Barrie — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 10:03:59 +0000

Of course this is old news to many, but in case you missed it:

NEDBANK GROUP LIMITED ANNOUNCEMENT
Nedbank Group Limited (“Nedbank Group”), the majority owned South African banking subsidiary of Old Mutual plc, released an announcement on SENS today. The following is the full text of Nedbank Group’s announcement: “Shareholders are referred to the announcement released by Old Mutual plc (“Old Mutual”) today. Shareholders are advised that Old Mutual has advised the Board of Directors of Nedbank Group Limited (“Nedbank Group”) that it has received a proposal from HSBC Holdings plc (“HSBC”) to acquire a controlling interest in Nedbank Group (“the proposed transaction”). The proposed transaction, if and when it proceeds, would be implemented by way of a partial offer, made to all Nedbank Group shareholders, for up to 70% of their shareholdings in Nedbank Group.

Nedbank Group’s initial assessment of the proposed transaction is that HSBC represents an attractive international banking partner and shareholder of reference and has the potential to provide Nedbank Group with benefits which should enhance Nedbank Group’s ability to strengthen its position in the
South African banking sector. Nedbank Group believes that there is a substantial opportunity for it to expand both within the South African and African markets in due course.

The making of a binding offer by HSBC is subject to a number of pre- conditions, which include, inter alia, due diligence of Nedbank Group by HSBC and a number of regulatory and other approvals. In order to satisfy these pre-conditions, a period of exclusivity has been granted by Old Mutual Group to HSBC.
There can be no certainty that these discussions will lead to a transaction.

Whether or not successfully concluded, the proposed transaction may have a material effect on the price of Nedbank Group securities. Accordingly, shareholders are advised to exercise caution when dealing in Nedbank Group’s securities until a further announcement is made.”

For further information on Nedbank Group Limited, please visit the corporate website at www.nedbank.co.za.

For further information on Old Mutual plc, please visit the corporate website at www.oldmutual.com

Date: 23/08/2010 07:32:00 Produced by the JSE SENS Department. The SENS service is an information dissemination service administered by the JSE Limited (‘JSE’). The JSE does not, whether expressly, tacitly or implicitly, represent, warrant or in any way guarantee the truth, accuracy or completeness of the information published on SENS. The JSE, their officers, employees and agents accept no liability for (or in respect of) any direct, indirect, incidental or consequential loss or damage of any kind or nature, howsoever arising, from the use of SENS or the use of, or reliance on, information disseminated through SENS.

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MTN uses Eskom as a back-up. That’s Ayoba!

Barrie — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:32:09 +0000

An article on MyBroadband caught my attention recently while doing some research. The story is about MTN installing it’s own methane powered generator.

In an effort to increase savings for MTN through the development of a self-sustaining power supply initiative MTN has invested in a 2-megawatt (MW), methane-driven tri-generation plant, which is the first of its kind on the African continent.

On the one side of the story MTN is doing stuff for the environment. On the other side, MTN is not relying on Eskom as it’s primary source of power. In fact it’s using Eskom as a back-up.

We needed to ensure that the company’s expansion and growth plans were not hampered by energy shortages or a lack of the power supply we require at the MTN campus to drive the business forward.

I smiled in reading it. Most companies are installing generators as a back up for when Eskom goes down. Here’s the first example I know of where a company has turned that equation on it’s head and is using the National Power Supplier as the back-up. It’s a 5 year roll-out to be fully operational, and time will indeed tell as to whether the R22 million investment was worth is?

There will be thus less dependency on the already overstretched ESKOM power grid. I am mindful of the fact that our electricity infrastructure requires upgrades in some parts of our country, to an extent that reliability on current outmoded forms of energy is no longer an option,” said Pule.

Now that’s Ayoba!!

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Mind Games – games where thinking REALLY counts

Barrie — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 07:20:18 +0000

Got sent a link from Faaiez (twitter username : )

Very short article from The Los Angeles Times profiling some new games that require you to really engage your mind in order to play them. Engage as in, in order to move things you have to think them into action.

Charlatans and con artists have laid claim to its power for centuries. In science fiction, Jedi knights call it “the Force,” and the mind-bending X-Men (and Women) are old hats at it.

Telekinesis. Harnessing the mind to control your surroundings. It is the stuff of fantasy.

Now, that fantasy is crystallizing into reality.

Of course this technology is destined for greater things. Our cars, houses, planes, artificial limbs, wheelchairs, etc, etc will one day be controlled by simply thinking.

I often wonder how this will all be so? Let’s be honest, most of us battle to think about the stuff we have to deal with now. And based on millions of years of human history, we don’t think that well. Imagine when our minds are needed to control more than just ourselves? What damage will we be capable of then?

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Cell C may need more than (Trevor) Noah’s Ark to get them out of this one?

Barrie — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 07:25:44 +0000

I’m sure it started out as a great idea at CellC Marketing HQ? The mobile phone industry has a mostly terrible name when it comes to customer service. Lines drop all the time, prices cripple you, data crawls regularly and call centers frustrate whatever life you still have, right out of you.

So it was a no-brainer to come up with a bold PR/Marketing angle of honesty, integrity and openness aimed at the bruised and beaten South African consumer. You know the story if you’ve been in South Africa these last 2 weeks. But in case you need an overview, care of The Daily Maverick and Mandy De Waal:

On Wednesday 28 July a mysterious Internet user going by the moniker of SABobbyT posted a video clip on YouTube of popular local comedian Trevor Noah going ape about mobile networks in general and Cell C in particular. In just four days Cell C found the offending link, watched it, decided to respond publicly, briefed its big agency (Ogilvy) to swiftly book media space in the Sunday Times and Rapport and to develop an advert apologising to Noah. The ad was created, approved and placed in record time before the advertising print deadlines for the two weeklies closed.

So what exactly did the ‘then nearing Super-Hero status’ Cell C CEO do? More from Mandy De Waal and The Daily Maverick:

Two “mea culpa”’ full-page adverts signed by Cell C’s CEO Lars P. Reichelt later, and the Twitterverse was abuzz with chat about social media hero Trevor Noah, how he had stood up for the small guy and what swell people Cell C were for coming clean. The story was getting airtime and was reported on by no less than Bloomberg while other media pundits were calling the effort a marketing “master-stroke”.

However, what started as a ‘master-stroke’ is fast turning into a sinking ship (in some circles anyway – search cellc on Twitter and scroll through). You can read other’s views on why they think this has been a ‘master-sink’, here, here and here, but I’d like to comment on simply this:

What Cell C and Trevor ‘I need a lifeboat’ Noah missed in all of this, is that they picked a social media space to execute their very clever campaign. They used a new world platform with old world marketing antics. They just don’t go together easily.

The Social Media space has, at some levels, become a sacred space created away from the power, smoke and mirrors of traditional media. There’s a new set of rules that governs, towards the promise of more authentic and honest dialogue. It’s a space that belongs to everyone, equally. No matter your status, your money, your power. In the world of Social Media we can all stand together as equals. You may be able to shout further than I can, because of the size of your network, but you can’t shout any louder. Your view is as important as my view.

So when Cell C (powerful and wealthy) steps into ‘our space’ and sends communication to apparently ‘one of our own’, who can shout quite far with his ‘friend base’ of over 120 000 on FaceBook, and thereby invites us to accept their communication as honest, transparent and full of integrity, and then confesses to this being simply a marketing campaign, you can understand why people are responding the way they are.

My prediction is that Cell C and Trevor Noah will lose credibility through this event. It’s a classic case of two parties not understanding the shifts that have taken place in this new-way-of-connecting-world. Of course they wont lose on every front. Some people out there (see Twitter again) love that they’ve been pranked (or should that be Arked? Or even Noah’d?). But this will remain, for a long time, as a case study of how you don’t do social media.

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How much Klout do you have on Twitter?

Barrie — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 10:20:46 +0000

I mainly use two online apps to run the Twitter accounts I run. And I use these two because they do very different things. There are some things I need to do from time to time where the one trumps the other, and visa versa for other things. So there’s no getting rid of either of them.

CoTweet (I do wish Co-Tweet had an iPhone app)
HootSuite

Anyway, a possibly meaningless introduction to Klout. It’s integrated into CoTweet, but you can get there without CoTweet (click here).

The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. The scores range from 0 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses over 25 variables to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. The size of the sphere is calculated by measuring True Reach (engaged followers and friends vs. spam bots, dead accounts, etc.). Amplification Probability is the likelihood that messages will generate retweets or spark a conversation. If the user’s engaged followers are highly influential, they’ll have a high Network Score.

We believe that influence is the ability to drive people to action — “action” might be defined as a reply, a retweet or clicking on a link. We perform significant testing to ensure that the average click-through rate on links shared is highly correlated with a person’s Klout Score. The 25+ variables used to generate scores for each of these categories are normalized across the whole data set and run through our analytics engine. After the first pass of analytics, we apply a specific weight to each data point. We then run the factors through our machine-learning analysis and calculate the final Klout Score. The final Klout Score is a representation of how successful a person is at engaging their audience and how big of an impact their messages have on people.

I’ve enjoyed engaging with their system of measurement, simply because it goes beyond the usual measure of ‘how many followers’ I have? A friend, for example, who has three times as many followers on Twitter than I do, but our Klout Scores suggest I behave in a very different way to how he does, and because of that, according to Klout, I get a higher score.

Sometimes I smile when I look at what Klout feedbacks to me, because it sounds a little like a personality assessment based on my Twitter behaviour. Very flattering and all mushy and gooey. Who knows, perhaps this will even be a significant measure of who we are in the future. Can it be any less accurate or definitive than some of the measures we use today? Maybe even an extra layer to be applied to the Talent Matrix being implemented inside of companies the world over? At least the feedback is objective, instant, and I know exactly what’s expected of me to move it : ) But this is a conversation for another day…

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Flattr Update – How paying for content is shifting and changing

Barrie — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 07:14:45 +0000

A while back I wrote about new models for paying for content online. One of the new developments I wrote about was Flattr. It’s a ‘closed system’ that allows you to pay people for the content they produce, as long as they’re part of the Flattr system. I like the ethos behind their model, and I think it has great potential to begin to shift our mind-set around paying for content.

I signed up for Flattr at the beginning of July. To be a part of Flattr will cost you a minimum of a 2 Euro per month. It’s an investment in other people’s content, and not a payment to Flattr.

At the end of July I had been allocated 6.31 Euros, and a total of 7 of my blog posts had been Flattr’d 14 times. I’m chuffed with the results, and assuming Flattr is able to sustain the growth of their database, it can only be a good thing.

If you produce content (blog, podcast, vidcast, etc) I’d encourage you to look them up and apply for an invitation to get into their system.

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Talking to Blackberry Messenger from an iPhone

Barrie — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:47:29 +0000

When you talk to BlackBerry users, one of the biggest features they seem to have adopted lock, stock and barrel, is BlackBerry Messenger. In my opinion it’s become a massive brand loyalty draw card. I’m an iPhone evangelist and whenever I ask BlackBerry users why they don’t move to an iPhone, their Messenger programme often comes up as a primary reason.

So today I consulted my online tutor (Google) and asked her if there was a solution? And there was. Except it doesn’t seem to be with BlackBerry Messenger directly? (I did find some ‘illegal’ solutions)

What I did find is that there are now common apps for both platforms. WhatsApp, for example, is now available for both platforms. iPhone users can get it from iTunes Store and BlackBerry users from the WhatsApp site directly. But WhatsApp doesn’t communicate directly with the BlackBerry Messenger platform. I guess BlackBerry knows how powerful a draw card it is as well, and wont open up the platform? And because Apple doesn’t have a native ‘messenger’ app on the iPhone it seems BlackBerry is guilty of building the walls here.

I’d be interested if anyone else has found a work around to this? If there is, it’d open up an amazing business channel for cheap communication that, in a South African setting, would take a large chunk of revenue from the rip-off artists we’ve come to know as Vodacom, MTN, Cell C and Virgin Mobile when it comes to their SMS rates.

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Square – A new and very clever way to take credit cards

Barrie — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 07:02:51 +0000

In researching for a presentation to one of my clients last week, I came across this innovative way to process credit cards (coming out of the US). It’s from a business that calls itself Square. Simple name, simple product and service. So clever, and I love clever people who’re able to take the complicated stuff and make it so so so easy to use. Square describes itself as:

0 to $60 in under 10 seconds. - Start accepting cash and card payments with Square. No contracts, monthly fees, or hidden costs. Effortlessly manage the money you take with an easy and intuitive interface.

And if you watch the video below you’ll see how well they’ve done it. A little ‘square’ piece of plastic that plugs into your audio output jack on your iPhone/iPad/iTouch or Android (Google Phone), an account with Square, and you’re good to go. They claim no paper, you can sign on the device and pick up your receipts online.

How do you suck up credit card details through an audio jack? I love clever people.

Wonder if we’ll see something like this in South Africa? Or anywhere in Africa?

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