Listen to the Digital Edge podcast about podcasts which features lots of people involved in the SA podosphere including me.

Gino Cosme asked this question today.

Is social media marketing about giving a brand a voice and starting a conversation for the purposes of swindling people to buy a product? Or is it about creating a utility they can’t live without?

An interesting conversation is emerging.

Check out this from Vincent Maher at Vodacom.

Today is a big day on the Grid – we’ve just launched a 25-episode documentary about youth culture in Soweto, the famous South African township. The documentary, called Mobikasi, is the first to be delivered exclusively by a locative mobile social network like the Grid.

For me the exciting thing is the emphasis on great content. That’s what success here is all about.

There is nothing better than third party endorsement. One of the greatest social media thinkers, Vincent Maher, in the universe says I am cool. Lord take me now.

A case study of the Woolworths podcast recently appeared on the UCT Grad School of Business blog. It does a good job of illustrating how podcasting can work for brands. Click here to read it

I recently commented on a blog post on marklives.com about the digital divide and realized that I should turn it into a bigger post here. It was in response to a post saying that the digital divide is closing. Here is what I said: Continue reading this post…

I recently gave a presentation and ran a workshop on podcasting at Digital Citizens Indaba in Grahamstown. Here and here are the presentation slides I used. I also used Lee LeFever’s video ‘Podcasting in plain English’ which you can see at the side of this site. If you’re new to the idea, have a look it will help a lot.

For the Highway Africa conference, I also ran a new media and podcasting workshop for 40 people from community media in South Africa – radio and print. You can also have a look at the presentation here.

(All files are in PDF format and are about 1MB in size)

Lee Lefever’s Common Craft videos do a fantastic job of explaining many new media terms “in plain English” Here is his “podcasting in plain English”. Perfect to anyone new to the idea. Have a look.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-MSL42NV3c

Podcasts and podcasting

What is a podcast exactly?
A podcast is a digital radio (or video) programme downloadable from the internet. Podcasting started to take off around 2004 and it zoomed from ‘geekdom’ to mainstream so quickly that ‘podcast’ was voted 2005 ‘word of the year’ by the editors of the New Oxford American dictionary. Podcasts started as audio blogs. People then figured out a way of distributing them using the same RSS feeds that were being used to distribute blog post information. It was then possible to subscribe to a podcast as one would a blog. Suddenly you could listen to a whole range of programmes and voices whenever and wherever you wanted to. It was radio without a station telling what you could hear and when. Plus, just as blogs have allowed people to become writers without having to deal with a media channel controlled by someone else, podcasting has allowed anyone who fancies it to become a broadcaster.
Continue reading this post…

Cadburys and their advertising agency are probably still draped over each other in post orgasmic bliss having achieved the social media marketers longed-for climax with their drumming gorilla. Continue reading this post…