Social networking has changed the face of the web (and indeed everything else) in recent times, with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter spearheading the cause- redefining and giving new meaning to “socialization”.

Social media provide an interactive platform to connect and share with your friends and loved ones, likewise a perfect opportunity to grow your business, and now:
a source for spiritual revival.

The vatican has launched a website at www.pope2you.net, offering an application called “The pope meets you on Facebook,” which allows the faithful to see the Pope’s speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.

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The “Pope2You” Facebook app, lets you receive the messages of Pope Benedict XVI through the most important social network of the world. Essentially you can meet the Pope on Facebook, listen to his words, see his pictures, receive his messages of congratulations through “virtual postcards”.

Though you won’t get an email saying Pope Benedict added you as a friend and you can’t “poke” him or write on his wall, but the Vatican is still keen to use the networking site Facebook to woo young people back to church.

Pope2You allows you to share the most wonderful pictures of Benedict XVI with your friends on Facebook, along with his words of hope and peace. You can;

• Send the virtual postcards from the Pope to your friends.

• Download and read the Pope’s Message for the 43th World Communications Day.

• Spread friendship with the Pope and become a witness of Christ in the world through the web.

• Send now your virtual postcards

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At the beginning of the year I did a review on Global IT trends for 2009, and in that review I highlighted the growth of social media in 2008, drawing support from Chris Crum’s article on “the year in social media: 2008“. I also echoed the Baseline Mag’s prediction on the expected growth of Social Networking in 2009:

…. Social Networking will continue to expand in customer relationships with brands and corporate team building efforts as ways to help the bottom line. Organizations are increasingly looking to next-generation social networking tools to conduct sophisticated business intelligence and analytics. In many cases, they are mining data and looking for trends and patterns, such as which salesperson has the relationships to pull off a deal or which customers seem to have the biggest influence with others online

It’s only been 4 months since my review, and already it’s pretty clear that social networking is on the rise. Sites like Twitter, Linked In, StumbleUpon, PerfSpot, and of course Facebook have grown even more popular, making major headlines around the globe (sometimes for all the wrong reasons)- not to mention newer social networking tools which have been popping up all over the web.

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Social Media as a brand building tool

Most people still see Social media as just a place to hang out and see what your friends are doing. They just don’t realize what a powerful marketing tool the world of social media offers their businesses.

Social media offer more than just an opportunity to stay in touch with friends and colleagues, they also provide a cost effective platform for product marketing and brand building, and indeed the popular social networking sites, in terms of marketing, offer an extremely large target-audience, often running into hundreds of millions.

Facebook for instance, has seen its membership rise from 175 million in March, to a little over 200 million in May, and it allows you “create a public profile that enables you share your business and products with these 200 million plus users.

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Legacy social media such as blogs, and newsletters also serve as handy marketing tools. Blogs have literally been in existence for over a decade, and still play a huge role in market development. They give you an opportunity to build relationships with customers, and those relationships, of course, can amount to much better sales.

Similarly, online forums- the original social networks- are still extremely relevant. They provide you a perfect opportunity to know exactly what your customers and prospects are thinking. The levels of interaction they provide can assist you in creating a proper direction for your online campaigns, and should be worth considering.

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Making Social Media Work For You

An integrated social media marketing strategy can help your business increase brand visibility, improve customer loyalty, and gain important insights about the markets you serve.

Social media marketing is the possibly the most effective way of generating traffic, and as such the importance of social media as a marketing channel should never be underestimated. It effectively compliments your other marketing strategies, and is highly sustainable.

How so?

“Social communities can be a great source of web traffic on top of any traffic you are already receiving from search engines. While you can’t easily increase your search engine traffic, social media traffic can be very easily controlled through strategic marketing.”

Social Media news sites let users post links to news articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other web content. Then other site users can vote for that content, potentially sending it to the front page of the news site where millions of web goers are likely to see it and click through.

This is particular true for sites like Twitter, where users can access public timelines of other users, without neccessarily having to be friends with them (or follow them in case). Practically all the major news and web content providers are on twitter, including; Google, CNN, and BBC.

Social media channels will help your business grow by creating a community of supporters who (if nothing else) would recommend your products/services. It is common knowledge that word-of-mouth has and always will be crucial to marketing success.

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Are you using social media as a marketing strategy?

Leave a comment and let us know how effective is has been for your business. And hey, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter- http://www.twitter.com/dtechblog

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Some Facebook users have lost access to their fb accounts, due to a phishing scam which has been making the rounds. The scam, which spoofs Facebook, “lures users to enter their information at a site FBAction.net which displays a false Facebook login page”.

Within a short amount of time, users that enter their email and password find that their password has been switched and all of their friends have been emailed from the account.

According to reports- yesterday afternoon, Facebook users began receiving emails appearing to be from Facebook carrying an invitation from a friend. Clicking on the link takes you to the pseudo Facebook site, where you are asked to enter your account credentials.

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Pseudo Facebook login page at fbaction.net

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Millions of accouts have since been compromised, and according to Webpronews reports;

“Facebook says it has blocked the domain from being shared on the site, removing referring content, and resetting passwords of senders so attackers can no longer access Facebook accounts. In addition the company says they’ve asked Markmonitor to blacklist the domain and they’ve reached out to ISPs for information to file a civil suit or criminal case. ”

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In what is probably the “biggest” news in the month of April, Facebook has officially opened up its activity stream to developers through the launch of the new
Facebook Open Stream API.

So what’s the big deal?

Apparently, the new API would allow developers build applications which would enable users “read and interact with their stream”. According to Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, “the entire feed will be available through a single API call”- meaning a developer could recreate the entire Facebook home page if he wanted to or take parts of the feed and remix it to make something more interesting.

The move is in line with Facebook’s  “steps toward greater openness” as it looks to bolster its efforts in this regards. In a post on the Facebook developers blog, it said- “we believe users must have full control and choice and that’s exactly how we’ve designed Facebook Platform and the Open Stream API”.

One can only imagine the numerous possibilities this platform provides- quite endless really. But of course, there are certain limitations. According to Erick Schonfeld, Facebook still only allows developers to cache data for 24 hours, so an application such as a search engine for instance would only be able to return search results for a day.

I however felt uncomfortable with one particular statement in the post covering this new development on the Facebook blog;

“…With these new methods, you can access the stream on behalf of a user and then filter, remix, and display the stream back to that user however you choose, wherever you choose, in the manner most relevant for the user experience.”

Maybe I don’t get the full import of this statement, but shouldn’t this raise some security (not to mention privacy) concerns. Whatever be the case, this surely provides the network a perfect opportunity to provide a richer user experience for its 200 million users.

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Facebook’s redesign has come under intense fire from a large section of its 175 million users. The new design has been described as being complicated, less practical, hard to use, etc. Some have even referred to the new design as “a cheap replica of twitter”, with others going as far as calling it ”completely stupid”.

What is more, several New Facebook haters’ groups have emerged, such as “1,000 000 + to bring back old facebook” , “10,000,000 AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK, CHANGE IT BACK!“, and “MILLIONS AGAINST FACEBOOK’s NEW LAYOUT & TERMS OF SERVICE”, having memberships of 436,635, 493,545, and 2,680,309 respectively.

Additionally, results from a Facebook app which allows users to vote on the new design show an increasing number of people opposed to the new design. According to Jason Lee Miller, 94% of almost a million votes turned out to be against the design.

Facebook had earlier reverted its terms of service due to opposition from its users, we’d just have to wait and see if this repeats itself. It’s also worth noting that a couple of people have reportedly deactivated their Facebook accounts because of the new design;

“I deactivated my account when they first redesigned Facebook, not only because I didn’t like the new layout but also because users hadn’t been asked their opinion before they made that layout which was definitely not user-friendly… It’s a shame, Facebook was rather cool.”

“I deactivated my facebook account, giving myself a well-needed break. Hopefully, when I activate it again in a month or so, they will have gotten their act together. Somehow, I doubt this will happen.”

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If you logged in to your Facebook account this morning, you would no doubt have noticed the glaring “Terms of Use Update” which read;

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Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new
terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have
decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the
issues that people have raised..... 

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Facebook creator, Mark Zuckerberg, in a post on the Facebook blog, said;

This move comes 2 days after (not implying any connection whatsoever) Independent filmmaker Luis Moro and his wife, producer and actress Bobbi Miller-Moro accused Facebook of Censorship. The couple initially accused the 175 million strong Social Network of deleting Luis’s account for “political reasons”, a claim which Facebook said was absurd.

According to the couple;

“All he was doing was posting about ‘The Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act’ in Cuba-related groups, and to friends with the same interest,”.

“When I posted on my status ‘My husband’s account was deleted by Facebook’ it was erased 3 times from the main wall! I could not believe it.” Mrs Moro added. She went on to say that her husband’s account was deleted Monday evening after Luis sent out word about the proposed Cuban travel bill.

In Facebook’s defence, Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook categorically stated;

“That system is designed to keep spammers and potential harassers from abusing Facebook.  It is triggered by a user sending too many messages or friending too many people who ignore their requests.  In this case, the user ignored at least one of the warnings when he was spamming people with messages and friend requests to promote his cause and was automatically disabled.  The suggestion that our automated system has been programmed with a certain political agenda is absurd.”

“In the press release the user acknowledges receiving warnings from our automated system,” he further added.

Though Luis’s account was restored and an E-mail apology issued, Mrs Moro wasn’t “so sure her husband wasn’t targeted”, citing Facebook’s alleged history of censorship involving words and phrases like “anti-war,” “Gaza,” and “Palestine,” as well as the much publicized row with breastfeeding mothers.

Anyway, returning to the changes, Facebook says “we’ve changed the terms back to what existed before the February 4th change, which was what most people asked us for and was the recommendation of the outside experts we consulted.”

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When Craig Newmark started his “email list for friends and co-workers about events going on in the San Francisco Bay Area“ in 1995, he probably never thought that his hobby would grow to become one of the “busiest sites on the internet, helping people with basic day-to-day needs such as finding a job, an apartment and a date, all within a culture of trust.“

The Craiglist Network- a centralized network of online communities featuring free online classified advertisements and forums on various topics, has local classifieds and forums for more than 550 cities in over 50 countries worldwide – community moderated, and largely free.

Of the 50 countries featured on Craiglist however, only 2 are from the continent of Africa- none from West-Africa !!

For a continent the size of Africa- the 2nd largest in the world, having an estimated population of 975,330,899 and 54,171,500 Internet Users, you can’t help but ask why?

Nigeria, for instance, has an estimated population of 140 million- 10 million of whom are Internet users according to Internet World Stats;

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Nigeria’s Very Own Craiglist

Oluwaseun Osewa, the founder of Nairaland.com (arguably Nigeria’s most used Forum), recently stepped in to fill the vacuum (if you will) and provide a service which caters for “a need that Craigslist hasn’t seen”, with the introduction of Nairalist.com

Nairalist.com is a free local classified advertising service that supports the listing of personals, vacancies, cars, flats, products for sale & services in any of the 37 states of Nigeria. The site was built from the scratch using Python by Seun Osewa (the Nairaland Boss) and was launched on the 7th of January and has been featured once on Hacker News.

The site features categories which include Jobs, Dating, Housing, Vehicles, For Sale, and Services, and had 1660 non-spam adverts and about 290,000  page views as at February 7 2009.

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One of the first things you notice about the site is the speed at which pages load. The minimal graphics no doubt had to a lot to do with this- a definitely well thought-out move, seeing as majority of Nigerians rely on Dial-Up connections for Internet access. Nairalist now only needs to gather as much momentum as possible, and the sky would be the limit.

With regards to increasing traffic to the site, Mr. Osewa’s Nairalist would surely rely heavily on his Nairaland Forum which currently has a membership of 292, 262, and a purported average traffic of 10,000 unique visitors monthly- a feat he would no doubt be hoping to replicate with Nairalist.

The site has already seen an influx of listings ranging from personals to job openings, and the future definitely looks bright for Nairalist, especially as it targets a country where majority of the populace  love “new toys”.

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2008 saw a number of significant changes in IT trends globally, the most distinctive being the rise of social media in 2008. Chris Crum of Web Pro News takes a look at the Year in Social Media. It is quite obvious that there was a lot of activity in the world of social media.

There were also quite a number of changes in SEO trends in 2008, most notably Google’s Custom Search, and toolbar update, which saw a number of websites lose and gain PR.

As far as global IT trends for 2009 are concerned, there have been a number of predictions, especially on the growth in “Tech Spending”. Quoting the Wall Street Journal blog;

“Businesses and other organizations in the U.S. will spend $573 billion on computer software, hardware and services next year, just 1.6% more than they spent in 2008, according to new data out Tuesday from Forrester Research Inc. In contrast, U.S. tech spending grew 4.1% in 2008 and 7% in 2007. Earlier this year, Forrester predicted U.S. tech spending would grow 6.1% in 2009.

The results are based on several factors, including real gross domestic product growth and how technology is valued by businesses, says Andrew Bartels, an analyst at Forrester.

Despite forecasts that show real GDP declining, tech spending will grow slightly because “businesses have become more dependent on technology”

As the baseline mag puts it ;

“.. enterprises with a forward-thinking approach and a solid grasp of technology trends will have a distinct competitive advantage. The following technologies trends in areas like SaaS, virtualization and project portfolio management, among others, are likely to shape IT and business in the coming year, and they can give your company the advantage it needs to do business in this challenging economic environment.”

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Expected global IT trends for 2009

• Saas- Software as a Service
  Cloud computing environments will contribute to the expansion of SaaS into areas beyond ERP, CRM and HR management systems. Rob DeSisto, analyst for Gartner, says organizations increasingly see the benefits of moving large-scale software expenses from the capital budget to the operating budget.

• Document management and E-discovery
  Systems that retain, manage and retreive documents and data quickly and seamlessly will continue to rise in 2009.”Today, anything electronic is discoverable as any part of litigation,” Forrester analyst Kyle McNabb points out. “Developing rules and procedures is essential, and it is going to receive a lot more attention in the coming year.” Not surprisingly, the focus is rapidly moving beyond ERP and enterprise systems and into the broader realm of all documents and communications.

• Virtualization
  was a huge trend over the past 2 years, and will continue to expand in storage, desktop and data center technologies in 2009.According to industry estimates, 50 to 60 percent of all servers are now virtualized. The goal is to reduce server inefficiencies and lower costs. It is now moving into the realm of SMBs, and is also extending into storage and onto the desktop, says Moosa Matariyeh, enterprise storage specialist for CDW.

• Energy efficient Data Centers
  Data-center hardware in conjunction with virtualized systems, will continue to reduce power needs with more green componentry and infrastructure.Chip and PC manufacturers are moving toward more energy-efficient components including improved memory and resource management, but the big action in 2009 will be in the areas of virtualization and storage. Businesses are quickly recognizing that they have little margin for error, and energy costs are now a huge variable, says Anil Desai, an independent IT consultant.

• Security, Risk and Compliance
  Expect risk and compliance to be automated in intrusion, detection, authentication, patch management and security analytics.

• Enterprise mobility
  Being secure and synchronized to live data while on a host of pocket computing devices will continue to expand and improve in 2009.

• Social Networking
  “the champion of 2008″- Social Networking will continue to expand in customer relationships with brands and corporate team building efforts as ways to help the bottom line.Organizations are increasingly looking to next-generation social networking tools to conduct sophisticated business intelligence and analytics. In many cases, they are mining data and looking for trends and patterns, such as which salesperson has the relationships to pull off a deal or which customers seem to have the biggest influence with others online.

• Web 2.0
  Applications built-on Web technologies will continue to prosper and proliferate in new and more cost-efficient ways in 2009.

  Some organizations are now exploring Twitter or Facebook-like applications that allow individuals to push information out and create a simpler, organic communications structure. Others are using Web 2.0 tools to handle everything from asset management to business intelligence and analytics. Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media. says “We are seeing the Internet become a preferred platform for app development.”

• Project and Portfolio Management
  Robust Portfolio management systems that offer collaboration tools, business-process rules support, advanced reporting capabilities and governance tools will expand in 2009.
  
  PPM is evolving and bringing greater order to business-level decision making. Applications such as Daptiv PPM and Primavera are providing tools to mesh diverse workgroups, such as finance, marketing, human resources and IT–all while viewing groups of initiatives, conducting detailed analysis on them, and understanding underlying relationships across organizational roles and teams.

• Web and Video Conferencing
  Bigger pipes and converged data and voice networks will help spur more, cheaper video conferencing and use of video for connecting with new and existing customers.Collaboration tools are poised to go mainstream and further change the way business is conducted. According to the Boston-based research firm Aberdeen Group, 63 percent of companies say they will be using videoconferencing and so-called telepresence systems (essentially, a form of videoconferencing with high-quality images and audio) by the end of 2010.

There you have it. The future looks bright enough.

Seems the global recession played out differently for the IT industry. African firms and businesses will have to prepare themselves to meet these global IT trends, as the results would no doubt be a more productive year for business.

In an earlier post on this blog, we discussed the challenges facing the use of IT infrastructure in some parts of Africa. Recent studies have shown a slight improvement, but we aren’t there yet.

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A post on  Wired seems to suggest that blogging is “old-school” and that blogs are not what they used to be a couple of years ago.

Paul Boutin’s controversial article begins with some words of advice for intending bloggers;

“Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.”

“Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.”

So should we stop blogging then?

As expected, this article has started a variety of discussion across the web, with comments pouring in from all quarters. Though many seem to disagree with Mr Boutin, there are quite a few who share his sentiments.

Boutin seems to be of the opinion that blogs have become too impersonal and are being monetized.

“When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google’s search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for “Mark” ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No more. Today, a search for, say, Barack Obama’s latest speech will deliver a Wikipedia page, a Fox News article, and a few entries from professionally run sites like Politico.com. The odds of your clever entry appearing high on the list? Basically zero.”

In my candid opinion, and just as Mr Boutin’s article proves, blogs are still relevant, and are just about the best way to get the word around on the net.

In a completely bizarre incident- not to mention a huge blow to social networking- a man in the UK has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his wife over her “status change” on social networking platform Face Book.

Wayne Forrester murdered his wife Emma on 18 february 2008. The couple had been together for for 15 years, in a marriage which has been described as “volatile and unstable, characterized by periods of seperation and reconcilation”.

Forrester 34, said he killed his wife because she had changed her face book profile status to “single” just 4 days after he moved out of their Croydon, South London home.

Ms. Alex Lewis, the prosecuting lawyer on the case said “He was angry about an entry on Facebook he said made him look like a fool as she had advertised her marital status as single. He accused her of having an affair.”

Forrester said;

“Emma and I had just split up. She forced me out.”

“She then posted messages on an internet website telling everyone she had left me and was looking to meet other men.”

According to BBC news’ report;

“Forrester, an HGV driver, was drunk and high on cocaine when he attacked the mother of two in the early hours as she slept. He beat her, tore out clumps of her hair, and repeatedly stabbed her in the head and neck. Neighbours were woken up by her screams. They found him sitting outside the house covered in blood and called the police.”

Social Networking websites have been hailed as being amongst the best things to happen to the Internet, but this is just about the saddest event yet in their history.