Those of us who are addicted to our mobile phones (hold on, who is not?) know all to well that accessing social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is a lot easier on your phone than on a PC, and in many cases, a lot more useful. Instead of waiting until you are in front of a computer, you take out your phone and access the sites right on the spot, and keep your friends (or followers) updated. So here we have a great infographic from the guys at Flowtown to explain how phones have affected social media.

Some interesting Stats:

• People who access Facebook from their phones are twice as active on the social network.
• There is a good spread across all age ranges for people accessing social networks from their phones. Clearly, it is not only the young ones who do it.

If you cannot see the infographic, please click through. (more…)

I’ve attended a number of tech conferences in South Africa and at every one of them one of two topics seem to raise it’s head, and frankly I think we need to ban the types of people pushing these topics on stage from speaking…

Social Media Marketers

Every time I attend a conference I find that I would have much rather have been listening to one of the developers in the crowd than the person on the stage, this feeling is amplified when a self proclaimed Social Media guru takes to the stage. In South Africa this is especially true because we have a huge amount of talented devs often sitting in the crowd, and a social media evangelist hogging the lime light.

I have nothing particularly against Social Media agencies, but I do take issue with the fact that they insist that a room filled with a thousand tech savy geeks live tweeting from their latest Apple iSomething has never heard of Social Media.

VC and Angel Investors

Another group of people I think conferences can do without are all these VC and Angel Investor types. These blokes very often have never written a line of code in their lives, have a horrible track record in picking investments and most of them have never run a start up or even launched an app. Then we ask them to run onto the stage and for 30 minutes tell us what we should be doing as entrepreneurs thinking about starting up?

This is very much like having talent scouts running on stage explaining what they are looking for at a talent show instead of having the actual talent showing off their skills on stage. It’s always so sad to see all the people clamouring for attention from investors after they speak… Why on earth are we flocking to investors anyway? Shouldn’t they be flocking towards the talent? Put the talent on the stage for goodness sakes.

The Silicon Cape events have been trying to put the talent on the stage. They have this elevator pitch competition they always run, and although it’s a step in the right direction, I feel a 30 second time limit on a world changing idea someone has spent months, if not years coming up with, is grossly dehumanizing and insulting. I personally would never do an elevator pitch at a Silicon Cape event on stage, for that matter I refuse to do elevator pitches in general.

In Conclusion

Can we please for the sake of sanity put people on stage at Tech conferences that are actually trying to build tech? Investors and Social Media Marketers are essentially fanboys of tech, using it and investing in it but not building it. Can we get the engineers and tech entrepreneurs back on the stage please?

Quirk Education’s new digital marketing course, Applying Social Media to Business Challenges, kicks off on 28 June.

The content for the 5-week online course is largely drawn from Quirk’s own recent case studies, including campaigns that Quirk eMarketing has run for brands such as Mweb, Sun International, SA Tourism and Neotel.

Amongst other things, the course will look at:

• the challenges and opportunities in the social media landscape
• using platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs
• building communities around brands or topics
• how businesses can take a strategic approach to social media
• how to run integrated campaigns using both online and offline elements
• best practice for social media campaigns

This is not a basic introductory course, but rather an in-depth look at practical application.

“In the past year we’ve had amazing success with Social Media implementation for some of our big clients and they’ve reaped huge rewards as a result,” says Lyndi Lawson, Minister of Education at Quirk Education. “It’s on this experience that we’ve based the content for the course.”

Places are limited, and registrations close on 25 June. The cost of the course is R5,900 (including VAT), and there is a 10% discount on group registrations of three or more, and a 20% discount for OPA members.

Visit the Quirk Education site to register.

Reconstructed Living Lab is hosting a social media workshop in Athlone on 4 May, aimed at civil society and non-profit organisations.

Participants will be given an introduction to social media and will be educated in the use of social media tools such as blogs, wikis, file-sharing sites and mobile social networks. Guidelines and suggestions will be offered for how organisations can best utilise and benefit from social media, and the topic of drafting a Social Media Policy for non-profits will also be covered.

This is a hands-on, practical workshop, which means that participants will have an opportunity to use some of the social media tools and will come away with real skills that they can immediately put to use in their respective organisations.

The workshop will run from 09h15 to 13h30 at 66 Tarentaal Road, Bridgetown, Athlone (Western Cape). For more information, call Reconstructed Living Lab on 021 699 1453.

Facebook, the fast-growing free-access social networking website, has obtained a $6.5-billion valuation for its common shares.

There’s a catch though! This development, which stresses the website’s high ranking among the giants in the technology and media sector, follows Digital Sky Technologies, of Russia, agreeing to pay $14.77 a share for Facebook common stock. Now, the Russian company’s stake in Facebook will be 3.5%.

The deal shows that Facebook has a higher market value than many other established media and technology companies that make considerably more money. While CBS Corporation, which earned $13.95 billion in revenues in 2008, has a market capitalization of $4.06 billion, Salesforce.com has a market cap of $4.72 billion.

According to Mark Andreessen, board member, Facebook is expected to exceed $500 million in sales in 2009.

As of today Facebook has reached 250 million active users on its social network – up from 100 million nearly a year ago – thus ranking higher than the rival social networking website MySpace.

So how about, would you like to own stock in Facebook?

Image courtesy of LaughingSquid