How To Search For Old Posts On Google+

I am writing this short post because I have noticed a growing number of people who constantly complain about Google+'s search feature.   

Yes, some folks actually do complain about the Google+ search feature!!! Here's a recent one, in a discussion on Mike Allton's post on G+ 

Yeah, wow! I know!
I find it pretty amazing as well!!!

So anyway, I decided to share this simple tutorial on how to make use of the Google+ search feature to find posts that are 3 days old or those that are 3 years old. 

But let me quickly point out to those who actually compare with Facebook, that first of all, even though I have really come to like G+, I am not one of those people who get combative in favour of G+ against Facebook or any other network. To be honest, I couldn't care less what side ends up winning the Fan Wars; Just like I couldn't care less who "eventually won" the iOS vs. Android Fan Wars, and all of those shenanigans.

By the way, if you are African, and you are new to Google+, please take a look at this post. You might also want to look at my ZMOT article if you are a social media marketer or other digital marketer of sorts. 

STOP COMPARING APPLES TO LOLLIPOPS!

So having said all that let me now clarify the unnecessary Facebook/G+ comparison:

I know without a doubt that the Facebook search feature is by far the most wretched of all social network search features. i.e. their desktop search on Facebook (I don't use Facebook on smartphones, but I guess if it sucks on desktop, then surely it must also..........). 

I am willing to bet that what those folks mean by "easily finding previous posts on Facebook", is that they merely go through their notifications to find old posts. 

And yes indeed, Google+ purges notifications after you have treated them (i.e. visited the post you are being notified about). 

So this poses a problem to a user who probably has a reason to return to a post he/she had been engaging with, but is not currently getting any attention (and therefore not triggering any new notifications).
To solve this problem from the perspective a Facebook user is pretty simple:

Simply click on your Notifications icon on your Google+ and scroll down to select "Previously read" at the bottom, and voila!!! 
You are just as you were on Facebook! 
Yeepee!!!! 
:(

Google+ Ninjas Be Finding Sh*t All Day.....

So now I want to talk to you about becoming much more of a "finder" than you could have ever dreamed of being on Facebook or any other social network:

Say you want to find some very interesting and very heated argument you had about Tesla Motors and Solar City on some guy's post that you don't even know or follow, and it happened sometime in 2013. 

Please! Attempt to tell me you have a prayer of finding such on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn?!

Now let me show you how to do it:

Searching is about strings or keywords (for now). So in the G+ search bar, you would need to remember certain keywords (the more unique they are the better).

You could pick [Tesla]; you could pick [SolarCity]; you could pick [name of poster] (if you remember their name - especially if he had some unique name like Wolfgang Bohemian or something. lol ). 
It could also help if some term like [Lithium-Ion] or [fossil-fuel] was repeated by you are some others within the comments. Then finally you would need to add [your name], but only if you participated in the comments of the post. So 3 to 5 keywords should take you to that post with ease. Try it!

Here's an example from how I found the post I mentioned earlier:

This next example is one where I hadn't engaged on the post. It only flashed by on my stream, and I came back the next day to look for it. And voila!

Again, let me say you can try it with this very post (i.e. the one attached to this article > Here <  )

If you want to find this post 4 years from now, simply go to G+ search and type [Rotimi Orims] + [Google+ Facebook Search] + [Your name].
If you are not following me, and you did not comment on it, then try it this way:
[Rotimi Orims] + [Google+ Facebook Search] + [the name of the person who surfaced it into your stream] (they either liked it or commented on it).
Or you may add the term [Search Africa] in it as well.

The idea is that, if the post was memorable enough to make you want to take another look at it, then surely if you tried a bit harder, you would remember some keywords and terms that were used in it or in its comments!
And you would find it easily......on Google+

By the way, if you want to become a Ninja-Shogun-Samurai Google+ searcher (Translated: If you want to learn more useful tips) then you can turn to this resource here. 



Thanks for reading.


If you have anything to add to this (and I am sure there is much to add) please feel free to do so. Also feel free to ask any questions about anything you like. You would also find I am quite open to harsh criticism and interrogation, if that's what you prefer. ;)

Yemi Osinbajo And APC’s Failure At The ZMOT.

APC Announces Prof Osinbajo As VP Candidate!

A few days ago (DEC 15th 2014), the APC (All Progressives Congress) finally announced their Vice Presidential Candidate for the 2015 Presidential Elections.

This delay should have been the perfect opportunity for the Branding or Marketing agencies that handle the APC’s marketing campaigns.


Why do I say so?

Anyone who understands the insightful marketing concept developed by Google, called the Zero Moment Of Truth will understand what I mean. But if you don’t have an idea, I will try to explain here. You can get further enlightened by investing a few minutes of your time reading the following articles: Click ►here and ►here. 

If I had been part of APC's marketing agency, I would have told them well ahead of time that if Prof. Osinbajo was going to be one of their potential candidates to be possibly selected as Buhari's running mate, then they must have to let me create several web pages ahead of time, that fully introduced the man, his history, his beliefs, and hopefully add some data about the man.

Politicians Have Their Own "Customers" Too

ZMOT strategy is not only powerful for diverting wondering online shoppers to my clients' websites; it can also be a very commanding tactic for political strategy and propaganda as well.

People use their smartphones, their tablets, their laptops, and soon even wristwatches and glasses, to browse the internet or social media in order to find quick info on anything (product, service, brand, person or fact) that captures their curiosity at anytime of the day, and wherever they are.

It doesn't matter what the thing of interest is, people know they can immediately do their homework online, and get instant information on it.

The world has never been as incredible as this. Information was never so accessible. And this new reality changes so many things about human behavior now and more so in the future.

However, most organizations in Africa seem to be taking these changes too lightly for their own good. 

Yet it is crucial that you, who are smart, actually start to pay close attention to such developments. 

APC clearly did not. 

They had a perfect opportunity to set the agenda on what kind of information searchers would find on Osinbajo. 
Because the man was almost completely unknown at the time, they could have controlled, at least the first wave of information that the public got about him.

And not just that alone, they could have also used the opportunity to inform the public about things they (APC) would like people to know about Buhari (their front-runner), and any additional details about their party they would like to address.  

That is a powerful position to be in, for a political party, wouldn't you agree?

If I had been part of APC's marketing agency, I would have told them well ahead of time that if Prof. Osinbajo was going to be one of their potential candidates to be possibly selected as Buhari's running mate, then they must have to let me create several blog articles and several semantically marked-up, static web pages that fully introduced the man, his history, his beliefs, and hopefully add some data about the man.

Then I would wisely insert other information that APC would like to get to the electorate along with this information. Just as I always advise my clients that they should always let me know whatever big things they are planning to do, ahead of time. They often don't know how they can use such occasions to greatly magnify their brand message on the Web.

APC lost a great opportunity because the world would not go rushing all that much to search about Rotimi Amaechi or Babatunde Fashola, since they already know those two very well. 
But no one had ever heard of Yemi Osinbajo. 

So why not ensure that your party tells the VERY FIRST stories about him to the electorate? 

And why leave potential voters at the mercy of online news mongers or gossip bloggers?

I mean really think about this....

ZMOT Is A Bridge Between Stimulus And Shelf

APC failed to capitalize on a perfect opportunity to dominate where it mattered. They should have taken advantage of the powerful STIMULUS that was sure to ensue from their announcement of Prof Yemi Osinbajo as Buhari’s running mate. 

Someone in APC should have seen what was coming. Or, why should such a large organization not have a competent internet savvy marketer?

Within hours of the announcement, hundreds of thousands of potential voters would have immediately gone to search Google for the words, “Yemi Osinbajo”: A search string that would continue for a while, no doubt.

In traditional consumer behavior, the customer goes through certain steps:

Stimulus - is a message about a product that reaches the consumer. Like an advertisement, word of mouth, or an announcement heard on TV. 
Don’t forget that a political candidate is also a kind of product being "sold" to a “buyer” of some sort.

Shelf stage - is where the customer goes to the store to buy the product. Or to vote, in the case of a consumer of governance. 
This is known as the First Moment Of Truth, or the FMOT. It was coined first moment of truth by Procter & Gamble Inc. because their researches found that it took a less than a second browsing through a shelf at the store for a shopper to come to a decision on what to buy. 
In politics however, we must quickly realize that it is illegal to do any form of “marketing” at this FMOT stage though (i.e. on Election Day).

The Experience Stage - is known as SMOT, or Second Moment Of Truth. You've bought the product and are using it. Your experience with the product could go a long way in dictating whether you would buy that product again. 
In politics, this would translate to you voting for the candidate for a second term.

Now, the internet and the connectivity of mobile phones has forged a new model. It has added a new and larger stage in this customer algorithm:

The ZMOT or Zero Moment Of Truth now fills the crucial gap between the Stimulus stage and the FMOT stage.

Stimulus can no longer do any more than tickle the curiosity of consumers these days. It’s no longer enough to send them directly to FMOT to buy. Rather, stimulus more likely sends customers online to do more homework. 
And there is likewise a new mentality that marketers can use to engage them there. Even in such an industry where the “product” being marketed is governance, and were decision making takes longer than a moment.

Their branding or publicity department should have already had their ZMOT messages ready and waiting for the Party's leadership to make the announcement that sent Nigerians off to the ZMOT.

ZMOT Strategists Would Have Been Prepared!

So back to APC’s announcement:

A competent digital marketing strategist should have easily foreseen the fact that announcing the name of someone who is relatively unknown would immediately cause such a name to start "trending" in cyberspace.

Within hours of the announcement, hundreds of thousands of potential voters would have immediately gone to search Google for the words, “Yemi Osinbajo”.

Soon after that, thousands were sharing what they found through Google on their Facebook and Google+ social media profiles.

Funny enough, information about Yemi Osinbajo would have still been trendable, even if the party had ended up choosing Rotimi Amaechi. All they would have needed to do in such a scenario is, during that eagerly awaited announcement, to say, "the party seriously considered Prof Yemi Osinbajo before finally opting for Amaechi", and boom! Osinbajo would still trend a bit. 

That's another ZMOT trick. But you likely won't be lucky enough to convince the party to do that. ;-)

Please note that I am not stating any form of allegiance to APC or any other party with this post, I am simply just analyzing things and pointing out how organizations waste opportunities to fully capitalize on the new digital age. 

The handwriting is on the wall!
We are in  the age of Digital!



Thanks so much for reading.
Please share your thoughts, contrary-opinions, and questions on this matter with me here.
Also consider reading more about the ZMOT here.


By the way, I also write about non-marketing related stuff as well.

Zero Moment Of Truth Part 2 : The Enthusiast

In my prequel to this post, I did a few introductions and tried to give you some ideas as to how important it is for you to take the Zero Moment Of Truth seriously. In this article I am going to try to guide you into thinking with a ZMOT mindset, and in to realizing how that can greatly improve your marketing efforts. 

The idea behind this second part of my post is to try to start you on a journey of becoming a ZMOT enthusiast like myself. Because by first becoming enthusiastic about the ZMOT, you would indeed learn much quicker, what you need in order to gain the necessary advantage for your business, your brand  or your product in this new digital age. 

Now some of the actual experts of this topic like Jim Lecinsky, Todd Pollack and Brian Solis have released articles and books that actually explain this concept much more indepth. 
But the dimension that I bring as a very keen enthusiast, is such that anything I write, I try my possible best to make you (the African reader) understand what we are talking about, and how you could easily bring it into reality in our environment.

1. Mobile Is A Must

One day, I was asked a question by a hopeful blogger. He asked, "Even if people want to use the internet to read and learn, the NEPA (electricity) problems in Nigeria make it so difficult for most People. So how can I find people to even read my blog?"  

So I told him that there was a relatively easy way to fix that problem. But he quickly added, "and you know that most people cannot even afford laptops or iPads".
So I said that that was even what makes my solution more of an advantage for him, if he could implement it.

"So what is this magic solution of yours"?

And I told him to have a mobile optimization plan! 

I know that may sound too simplistic, but then just try to wrap your head around the scenario that the vast majority of websites in Nigeria (I cannot say much about the rest of Africa yet) don't account for mobile users. 

And yet, from a marketer's perspective, you wonder why mobile internet is not more or less compulsory in Nigeria. 

No wonder Facebook usage in Nigeria is so phenomenal?
Because Facebook is one of only a few websites known by Nigerians to have a version that is comfortably responsive to mobile phones of different screen sizes. This point cannot be over-emphasized.

Meanwhile, the reasons why Americans and Europeans use smartphones to surf the web may be indeed very different from the reasons why Nigerians do. Nevertheless, what is certain is that smartphones have become key players in this whole global online struggle for our attention. 

Therefore if you are doing business and you wish to attract large amounts of people (whether American or Nigerian; whether for your corporate branding, or for lead generation, or for online retail) your website has to be able to communicate clearly through a mobile phone interface. Not to mention the added advantage you get as a mobile phone user can instantly make a call to your business, or at least store your phone number, when he sees your contact page on your site.

2. Social Media Re-visitation

Ever since people realized that social media networks were useful for marketing, we have been seeing people just going about dropping links and promoting stuff everywhere like crazy. 

Some of us have clearly forgotten the "social" in this whole social media thing. So we spend so much unnecessary energy dropping links all over the social sites, presuming that others are using the internet for the purpose of searching for promotional links to click on. 

ZMOT mindedness makes you a lot more creative and much more effective with your social media marketing campaigns. It opens your eyes to see what many other digital marketers don't see. It will help you remember or realize that you yourself don't go around looking for links to click on.

There is always an important trigger that gets you to click on a link. 

Zero Moment reasoning also protects you from coming into that irrational mindset of those marketers who would do anything to see their website rank on the Top of Google Search result pages; As if ranking on the Top of search automatically means that people would throw their hard earned money at your website.

A ZMOT minded marketer understands that there are more than one way to catch a fish. 
For example, I can show you a nifty way of using a combination of Facebook, Google+ and Youtube to do a lot of damage, even if you don't have a website. I talk more about using video for ZMOT warfare in this article here.
But if I started to explain those things here now, this article could become a book. I am always reachable at the Digital Africa Community. There I can take questions about ZMOT, FMOT and other areas of digital marketing.

Now there are many other techniques to ZMOT readiness like using AdWords PPC campaigns and one magical thing they call Remarketing, or taking advantage of Affiliate bloggers, and my own personal addition, the use of digital print and direct mail solutions. But for the sake of your time reading this article, the 3rd and last tactic I will mention here is learning how to stalk users at the review sites.   

3. Raptness To Reviews

Again, I'm not sure I know how people behave in Ghana or South Africa, but here in Nigeria, I know that word of mouth is an extremely powerful form of product promotion. So if you can put words into Mr A's mouth, that could easily lead to Mr B buying your product.

I mean, I have literally seen people come to a store specifically to purchase an iPhone, and right there in an instant, they ask some other customer for his advice, and he suddenly turns into a smartphone expert; And before you know it, the lady who came to buy an iPhone4 is going home with her brand new Blackberry Z10.

In fact, more or less, everyone in this country is a consulting physician (both medical and trado-medical).
You feel slight dizziness and a throbbing headache? Your next door neighbor, the bank manager, prescribes an anti-biotic for you. Just like that!

So whether you realize it or not, most of your potential clients or customers are easily susceptible to influence from others. At some point in their journey, they could easily have been your customer. But along the way, someone prescribed an alternative for them.
And this behavior is happening on the internet as well, so it is not wise to ignore it. You must learn how to benefit from it. 

You might not be able to prevent or rescue every one of your potential customers from those self-appointed experts, but there are ways that you can work on wrestling some of them back to your own offering. And of course, you can generate your own "experts".

In this other scenario, try to imagine you didn't log out of your Yahoomail, before you visited the Trip Advisor website to check out affordables hotels in Abuja. Incidentally, your Facebook account is associated to your Yahoomail.

Now you are gazing at the hotel at the top of the page that costs only N5000 per night; it looks like a good option for you. Then suddenly you notice that some people you know have already spent time at some other hotel below, and they gave it very good reviews. It costs only N400 more than the one you first noticed. And these people you know are people you really respect.

This could happen because Trip Advisor is using your Facebook friends list, and it doesn't even occur to you what's going on, or why they are showing you what your friends have reviewed.

This is a real ZMOT phenomenon. It happens everyday, and nobody really cares to ask why.
But what you should be asking is, how do I capitalize on it?
That should be he question every merchant is asking in this era....how do I win the zero moment of truth?

And the more you think and strategize in this mind frame, the more likely you would come up with answers for your digital business goals. The technology is available to help you win some of the battles, you just have to discover what they are, how they work, and how to use them. 
The more you actively take part in ZMOT warfare, the more you'll learn; and the more new tools you would discover. This is my advice to you if you have a small business. 

However, if yours is a large company that can afford it, it is best you hire a ZMOT Coordinator who is, at least, handy with his AdWords and Google Analytics, and has a ZMOT mindset. 

ZMOT ZERO MOMENT OF TRUTH Infographic-Shoppers' Path to Purchase via Cool Daily Infographics

Now, someone might ask, "hey why do I need a consultant who claims to be ZMOT-savvy?", "Can't I just give this article you've written here to my already existing traditional marketing department to handle"? 

Well, you could try that....But you should be careful about how they run with it. Afterall, those guys are coming from a mindset that is quite different from ours. A mindset where so many boundaries and limitations exist. 

So someone else could say, "Or I could even read through this article several times over, add some extra research, and do it all by myself?"

Well, actually you could. And in fact I am hoping you would. 
I am hoping that all those who pay attention to my articles would become ZMOT-minded marketers, and do their own marketing by themselves one day. This would open up huge opportunities for me with the larger businesses, who are always the slowest to adopt these kinds of ideas. 
However, their current paradigm is such that they always seem to want to minimize risk and pay more attention to financial budgeting, rather than statistical and analytics data.

So they are not likely to take a chance on investing on a ZMOT-manager or an inhouse digital marketing team until they see the result of my ZMOT strategies through those who have used it and profited from it, at lower levels. 

Yet, this leaves you, the small or mid-sized business owner, with the opportunity to become enthusiastic enough about the ZMOT to learn how to get a head-start and an advantage for your self, and hopefully taking some of their market share while they are still asleep.



Thanks for reading.
Feel free to drop a comment or question below. I'm always here to assist. Also consider reading my post defining ZMOT in Nigeria, using Nigerian examples.

Zero Moment Of Truth - Part1

The ZMOT is not such a complex thing to be honest. 
In fact it could be incredibly easy to understand, especially if you already know a lot about how the internet works, coupled with some reasonable knowledge about the business process of marketing (which usually involves advertising, publicity and sales distribution). You need a combination of these two, if you want to really enjoy this article. 

So consider the zero moment of truth as that point in a customer's journey where she/he bounces back and forth looking for answers about a product or service she/he may be interested in. She/He uses Search, Reviews, Ratings, Specifications Data, and even user comments as a guide to come to her decision. So clearly, you can see why you need to play a part in at least adding something to the conversation that leads to this decision.

WHERE TO SLOT ZMOT 

There already existed a tested and trusted marketing model that was conceptualized by Procter & Gamble and has to a very high degree, revealed the strategic points in a customer's journey where it is best to try to capture his attention.

STIMULUS – When the customer sees an advert of any product or service that may interest him (let's say a pair shoes) and does get interested; or he saw the ad and suddenly remembers that he had already planned to buy a pair of shoes at some point.

SHELF – First Moment Of Truth – The customer has finally taken the decision to go to the store to get those shoes. There are some customers who go out with a plan not to return home without a pair of new shoes, no matter what. There are also some customers who never really have an idea of what they really want to get, so they rely on cues from shop attendants or other shoppers. Traditional marketers realize that the packaging and labeling of the product can go a long way in winning the First moment of truth. They also know that by having their shoes advertised boldly all over the shoe section of the store,or maybe even having sales agents in the larger stores, could help to nudge undecided customers.

EXPERIENCE – The Second Moment Of Truth – this comes after the customer has purchased his shoes and has started wearing them. Chances are that the customer will report his experience with the shoes (and possibly with the store where he bought them from) to the next person. 

This is why good marketing actually begins at the point where you ensure the quality of the design of your product. It is important for your marketing that customers don’t go about saying bad things about your product or about your store. 

Or rather, if you’re just the dealer and not the manufacturer of the shoes, then hopefully your sales-reps and floorwalkers are respectful and patient with customers. 
Because that is the experience they take away from your business. 

But most customers would definitely say something, whether it is good or bad. Whether it is about the shoes or about your store. 

The idea at the Experience Stage (Second Moment Of Truth) is to get them to say more of the good stuff. Especially about your store, if you’re the store owner.

Zero Moment Of Truth 
To be honest, going by today’s turbo-charged rate of information & technological advancement, we could almost say that ZMOT (since 2011) is already an old marketing concept. I have already given an intro on it for an African audience in one of my previous articles about ZMOT in Africa. But a good way to summarize it here would be to just say that ZMOT is that virtual valley of decision that your customers go to after getting inspired by an advert that catches their attention, and before going to a shop to spend their hard earned money on the product that is promoted by that advert. 

So despite the way I listed these terms to make the introduction, ZMOT actually slots in between Stimulus and Shelf. So now, I'll try to explain how it works...

DIGITAL MARKETING, ZMOT TARGETING

A ZMOT Ready Marketer first of all has to be a Digital Marketer. He then has to be the kind of DM who has his eye on almost every area of digital marketing, as well has having a decent understanding of typical offline advertising as well. But in addition to those, he has to be aware of the importance of the ZMOT, know how to identify the ZMOT moments in his industry, and he must be able to respond swiftly to take advantage of them.  

By now, the reason should be quite simple, if not then allow me to illustrate with this example:

Imagine you’re on an island where 10,000 people plan to buy shoes within the next month. Now imagine if there were 10 shoe retailers on that island. Then assume that all these shoe retailers have basically the same quality of shoes and they all sold at the same exact price.

Now, all things being equal, and if they all did some local advertising in the same magazines and on the same tv stations on the island; then there actually isn't much reason to doubt that their total units sold could be almost identical as well. 

Maybe some would sell 1100 shoes that month, and others who were unlucky might do 900. Just humour me for now....

Enter digital marketing.
Imagine if 2 of those retailers decided to step up to owning websites; and they took on some online advertising campaigns (especially Enhanced Campaigns from Google). Imagine they did some pretty effective SEO, and some social media marketing. 

The dynamics would have changed because you would now have some shoe retailers encroaching on customers of retailers that are geographically far away from their territory. 

They have the shoes on display on the website so the customer from 20 miles away can gaze at the shoes from different angles and in different colors. 

These smart retailers could also offer free delivery to further convince the customer to shop with them instead of the retailer close by. 
At this stage it may not matter even if the near-by retailer has the same shoes the customer has seen on the web. What matters is the information, and the knowledge of where & how to get it. 

So thanks to their digital marketing campaigns, the 2 retailers with e-commerce websites could very well draw as many as 2800 and 2400 customers respectively, while the remaining 8 retailers may have to struggle with an average of 600 sales each for that month. Or it could even be worse for those remaining 8 guys.
It all depends on if one, or both of the ecommerce-smart retailers are willing to go the extra ZMOT mile. 

So let us just assume that one of them did. 

So this retailer has the normal brick & mortar store (i.e. a store that is physically on the ground – not one that operates solely online). He also has the e-commerce website where customers can order shoes and have them delivered to their homes. 

Then if he decides to upgrade to invading the zero moment of truth, he could take a size-able chunk out of the share of the other website retailer’s 2800, and even further flatten the margins of those retailers who are doing 600 sales per month.

How?

INFILTRATING THE ZERO MARKET OF TRUTH

By being at the ZMOT, our retailer can know when consumers are looking for shoes, when they are making inquiries about them online. He can learn about consumers, their behaviors and preferences before the other retailer who also sells online, and way ahead of the others. He knows how to fish out ready customers as well as future customers. This is the wisdom of the marketers who take the ZMOT seriously.

Research shows that in 2011, 84% of a sample 5000 people in America did research on a product after seeing an advert, and before deciding on buying it. There is also more recent data to show that this trend is increasing. Now I can easily guess what just popped into your minds. 
You are going to say that that is America! 
This is Africa! 

Yes, I know. 
And yet my point here is that just because we are not a continent that is particularly keen on gathering statistical data and analyzing such data, it doesn’t mean that we do not have the same sociological tendencies of shoppers everywhere. Afterall, we are all human.

For example, if you doubt that Africans are being affected equally (if not at a quicker rate) by the New Digital Age, why not visit Christian Amanpour’s Page on Facebook, or checkout ESPN FC? 

I am willing to bet that by just doing a quick scan, you are going to find as many African names (mostly Nigerian) in the comments as any other continent of the world. 

Africans are as driven to search out their interests and engage share their thoughts with others, just as Europeans and Americans are. And I dare say, Nigerians more so than anyone else.

Hence, there’s no wisdom in betting against the continued exponential growth of internet connectivity & activity in Africa and indeed the rest of the world.

The fact is that all human beings are social animals. We all have a desire to connect with others. And most of us find connection with like-minds from foreign lands particularly more fascinating. 

In fact, with all of the poverty that we face in this continent of ours, the obvious lack of many alternatives (such as large theme parks, space museums, video game arcade centers, ice skating rinks, and a truly infinite number of satellite/cable tv channels) no doubt leads many Africans to find more time and desire to connect online.

Google’s Jim Lecinski, says, “ZMOT turns small wins into huge ones — and potentially big wins into letdowns — millions of times a day, around the clock.” The idea being conveyed here is that your well executed tactic could lead you to huge gains from doing just a little thing better than your rivals. While they, with all of their big spending and expensive tv and magazine adverts, may fail to register their presence at ZMOT and as such suffer huge losses.

Please try to remember that ZMOT is the name for the virtual meeting ground where you will find your target consumer, not rigidly the name of your tactic itself. 

Anyway, I particularly like the way Dina Howell, the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi X, presents her argument on the ZMOT ( she was formerly in Procter & Gamble – at the time they came up with the First Moment Of Truth marketing model in 2005). Now she says, 

“Shoppers today want to explore and think about how products can improve their lives. They do reconnaissance to gain the insights they need, and they’re driven to bond with others and enrich relationships as they learn.”

The bottom line is that today’s marketers need to realize that shoppers’ decisions are no longer predominantly taken at Stimulus stage and Shelf (First Moment Of Truth - or FMOT) Stage. There is now clearly a 3rd pre-purchase battle ground. And from the simple bar chart above, you can tell that this battle ground      is getting more and more crowded.

The question is, 

If you were the Director of ZMOT for the marketing division of a company like say Samsung in South Africa, Kenya Airways or maybe GTBank in Nigeria, what are the things that you would do, and what is the mindset you would employ in order to garner potential customers from this abundance of ZMOT-congregating web surfers?

Please feel free to leave a comment, ask a question, like and do share. :-)   

Learn Online, Do Online.

The earlier we Africans learn to take advantage of the internet, the better for us.
No matter how badly our rulers bruise our economies, there will always be some kind of "escape route" for those of us who are ready to learn, to read, to investigate, to SEARCH.

After watching the Youtube video clip of "My Oga at the Top" most of us laughed and laughed. Yet there are some of us that are only just a little bit more conversant with the World Wide Web than that unfortunate Government official in that video.

So therefore, Facebook is a good thing. So is Gmail. 
But for you to really start enjoying the World Wide Web, you have to start using Google, or any of the other search engines (Bing, Yahoo!, etc). You need to start visiting different kinds of websites to get different new experiences. It is just like moving from the village to a big city, or resuming at a great new school, like Unilag. 
You need to move around and make new friends, and discover new things that bring a new spark into your life. Otherwise, you may never get the best out of that experience.

I guess I have probably only succeeded in making some of you feel embarrassed. But if that's enough to make you want to do more for yourself than liking every post by Chief Ben Murray Bruce on Facebook, then I guess I've done a good service to you.Just to rub it in a bit, I should let you know that my seventy something year old mother currently reads news about Nigeria off the internet in the US. She is also doing other cool things for herself, like check her airline's frequent flyer mileage, her hospital appointments and even investigate buying a house in the US.

But now, I am guessing some of you might be asking, "so what will I use Google for?". "Where do I start to exercise my right to information?"

Well.....for instance, you may start with searching for "agbalumo" if you are a Nigerian. That should give you an idea of just how unlimited the information on the web really is. 
You may choose to learn "How to make jollof rice with all its ingredients". You may even decide you want to find "bus fares from Lagos to Abuja".
To be honest, your imagination (not mine) is the limit. But you must realize that the kind of information that the search engines return to you are not always the best they can be.

So it is always a wise thing to check the second, third & forth pages of the search results. Or you may retype and adjust your search query to make it more specific.
For example, if the results that you see for "opportunities for new entrepreneurs" are not exactly what you are looking for, you may make it more specific by typing "opportunities for new entrepreneurs in Lagos, Nigeria in 2012".
  
So go out there today and start surfing the internet!
Explore!
Learn and Be informed!
Search!
:)

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Rotimi ORIMS - ME

Get Web Literate

Online Africa would like to share with whom it may concern, that SEARCH is the most useful activity you can ever do on the internet.
I think it is unfortunate that most of us in Africa spend so much time chatting and arguing on social networks, and fail to realize how much learning we are actually missing as a result.
As a trained journalist (of the University Of Lagos department of Mass Communication) I have to strongly reiterate that popular saying that you all know so well....
"Information is power". 
And these days, it is absolutely free of charge.

Funny enough, I remember a while ago, when a former boss of mine bragged to me about his son, saying the boy was an "internet guru". 
It turned out the boy spent all of his time downloading hip hop tracks from Limewire, and listening to the Dudu Radio service. 
He had no programming skills. 
Plus he confessed that he had never done any kind of coding whatsoever.

So I realized that his father had thought he was guru because of how many hours of the day he spent on the computer he had bought for him, and how much it was keeping him in the house, instead of going out with his friends. But the most interesting thing about this story is that that man is not the only person making such a mistake. 
Most of us assume someone is very "good with computers" simply because we see them spending a lot of time with computers, or we see them use the internet often.

Yet if the only thing you are doing on the internet is to send and recieve your emails, or you're looking at your friends' photos on Facebook, or listening to music on Spotify or Youtube, then to be very honest, you are NOT an internet expert, or even enthusiast. 
And I dare say, you shouldn't even be fully regarded as being web-literate. 
The internet is primarily a gigantic global resource for knowledge and informarion. And it has also become a wonderful platform for e-commerce, and opportunity for entrepreneurs and self-employed individuals. But how can you understand what I am saying if you have not been truly excercising your right to SURF the internet? Your right to power. 
If we in Africa are limiting ourselves to chat rooms, or uploading photos from our mobile devices, then how will we be able to take advantage of all the knowledge and information available on the web? Seriously? 
Think about it, and ask me questions if you like.
I'm here to help, really!
You can submit your questions in the online community....Online Africa.

Make Your Website Work

The primary reason why any company embarks on building a website should be to help it achieve its business goals. So why are many entrepreneurs, companies and large corporations building websites more-or-less for the sheer sake of just owning a website?

When you build your website using a web developer that has little or no knowledge of optimization or online marketing, and ask him to simply build you the most attractive looking website, obviously you are just trying to get a website merely for the sake of owning a website for your business!

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I am not in anyway implying that it is a terrible thing to set up a corporate website for the sake of aesthetics and perhaps pride.
No, that’s not my point at all. In fact, it is indeed a good thing to have a website you can always refer your clients or customers to, where they can check out a branch of your business that is close to them. Or you can always warn your clients and customers to look at your site for contact information of your authorized dealers and salespeople, so that they don’t get scammed by crooks claiming to represent your brand.

So I will be the first to tell you that owning a website serves so many useful functions all at once. But what I really want to tell you is that if you are not using your website as a major marketing instrument; or as a means to increase your sales and improve your brand, then you are obviously underutilizing your website’s potential.

Now building a website that maximizes your brand for gains in business would require not just the services of a web developer or web design company. It would require the services of one or more Internet Marketing professionals as well. As a matter of fact, depending on the level of competition in your field, you would most likely need to solicit the services of this internet marketing professional AHEAD of the web designer.

…Why?

Well because many web designers are not even aware of some of the technicalities and nuances involved in building a website that woos the appreciation of your brand’s target market and commands the attention of its potential markets.
In fact, there are many web designers today (especially in Nigeria) who don’t even realize that the websites they are building today, were structurally outdated several years ago. Therefore if you hired a web designer who doesn’t even realize that things have significantly improved in his own business, how would you if the website he builds for you is good enough to help you maximize YOUR own business?
This is why a professional Internet marketing consultant who understands Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will be needful to you to help you ensure that you have the RIGHT web designer.
This SEO professional could even hire, or at least interview the web designer for you. Because it is much more cost effective for you to have your website built from scratch complying with the current standards of structural quality, than for you to go through a much more expensive process of having to tear down and rebuild some of its pages later on.
Apart from having a structurally high-quality website that is very friendly to the user, you also need it to contain strategic information that boosts your marketing and complies with Google’s standards.

Search Engine Marketing may be the most important thing for companies that hope to do business successfully in the Nigeria of the very near future. It is not exactly the same thing as the SEO (search engine optimization) I mentioned earlier, but it definitely entails it. And without going into too much academics, Search Engine Marketing or SEM gives you the ability to meet your potential clients one step after they think about the services you are rendering or the products you are selling.
Wouldn’t you, Mr 3D printer, love the idea that when strangers in Abuja search Google for “3D Printing in Nigeria”, they come up with your company website in Lagos? Isn’t that more target oriented than merely buying a center-spread, full-colour advertisement in a glossy magazine that sells nationwide?
Or you, Miss Events Planner? I bet you would love the opportunity to have your website listed among those that an excitable, soon-to-be bride would see when she searches Google for “elegant wedding planners in Lagos”; wouldn’t you?
Well of course you would!
This is where SEM/SEO professionals come in very handy indeed.

The last major area I wish to look at for now, is the wonderful and almost mystical land of SEO Copywriters and Professional Bloggers. In this land you have the professionals who are not just gifted writers or communicators to people. They are experienced in understanding the rules and penalties against those who try to deceive the users who search the internet’s search engines, and they also understand the principles that govern how the search engines themselves operate. Such principles that any ordinary gifted writer may not consider while writing. The truth is that there is a slight difference between a talented writer who writes to entertain or inform people, and one who writes for the purpose of entertaining, informing and cleverly persuading people to take a particular action that is desirable for you, the owner of the website. Such copywriters are quite different from your traditional advertising copywriters, even though some of them (myself included) may have that background. These SEO Copywriters are more conscious of how much the reader would be satisfied by the message as well as whether or not the message is potent enough to draw the attention of a casual web surfer to the message, to keep the surfer for longer periods in the website, to nudge the reader into taking some kind of action (like Subscribe to the site or purchase an item on the site), and also to encourage the surfer to re-visit the site on a future date.

Professional bloggers are also very interesting cases. The truth is that almost anyone can be a blogger.  And if he is lucky enough to have a timely & catchy topic to share with the world, as far as possibilities go, well then anyone could have a popular blog.
But a professional blogger does indeed