Why I Love The Internet

Yesterday, I watched the TED-Talk interview featuring Google CEO, Larry Page, and I discovered this inspiring 2 minute video of Zack Matere, a Kenyan farmer who used simple searches to cause awesome change in his environment. 
watch here ►►►African Searcher

It almost brought tears to my eyes as that Mr Matere's community in Kenya did not have much access to the internet. Just like I feel frustrated that many Nigerians still do not have that much access to it as well.

My frustration comes from the fact that (just as Zack Matere in the video) I have known for a while, how simple searches can cause a dramatic change in your life. And how that change can affect people around you. 

Search has been the thing that has given me hope since 2005 when I first started to become actively involved with the internet. Social media is great too, but Search has kept my insatiable thirst for knowledge constantly hydrated. 

Through Search, my business partner and I discovered amazing things about printing and improved the quality of our lives by leaving our regular jobs to become pioneers in the digital print marketing industry in Nigeria. 

Through search, I was able to magnify my education in cognitive psychology, improve my knowledge of marketing, and appreciate certain aspects of modern branding and advertising that my lecturers back at the University of Lagos just weren't able to teach me.

A more recent example was the day that I decided to search the term, "Nikola Tesla" after watching the movie, 'The Prestige' for perhaps the fifth time. 
I not only got to read amazing things about the legendary scientist, but I also discovered Tesla Motors - an American automobile manufacturing company - a carmaker with a difference.

I got to read some of the blog articles of Tesla CEO Elon Musk (born in South Africa by the way) and immediately became a believer in the Tesla cause. Musk may not be the richest man in the world, but to me he is an entrepreneur to be emulated. The most remarkable one I currently know.

So search led me from a simple curiosity about the depiction of Nikola Tesla in a movie, into discovering fascinating human aspirations in SpaceX, Hyperloop, and awesome cars that I expect and HOPE to change the world forever. 


Anyway my point in all of this is that the internet has been a great source of possibilities, inspiration, hope, and happiness for me. And living in this present Nigeria with all of its.....issues, I just cannot imagine how my life would have been without the world wide web and without search. 

I hope and pray I would be able to touch more and more people's lives like Zack Matere did in Kenya, with the little knowledge I have about the internet. And hopefully, those people would be able to touch other people's lives by sharing the knowledge that they in turn gain from their own unique searches.

EDIT (11/14/2017) :
To follow up on the inspiration I got from Tesla, let me just add here that I've since got a Green Card and moved to the USA in DEC 2016, and thanks to how much I had learned about Tesla (thanks to Search), I now work at Tesla. 

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. :-)   

Online Marketing & Cashless Nigeria

Many people in Nigeria love to carry cash all over the place. And I cannot understand why a young woman who imports and sells original beauty products doesn't desire to set up a website with delivery services.

To find out the relationship between the two sentences I just made, please read on.

How Cashless Nigeria Can Boost Our Economy.

The CBN's resolve to enforce the use of ATM machines, POS terminals and online banking in Nigeria may be a curse for many traders in Alaba International Market and Idumota, but it is certainly a blessing for those of us in the online marketing industry.

Just think about it, the Federal Government is trying to make sure that 160+ million Nigerians have the ability to do their shopping on the World Wide Web. How can that be a bad thing for me?

ATM machines reduce stress for banking hall staff. Online banking reduces stress for you (the customer).
Shopping with your debit card on a POS instrument helps you keep your cash for more handy uses. While online purchase gives you the benefit of buying things you cannot get in your immediate location.

So How Can This Boost Our Economy?

One word.
INCLUSION.

For a very long time, the Nigerian youth have been excluded from virtually anything that can put them in a position to gain economic ascendancy or even to merely earn their financial independence. They have been battered and methodically barred from politics (which sadly and unfortunately is the most lucrative industry in this country). They have been effectively excluded from the crude and refined petroleum steeple-chase. And the miserable souls have even also been tactically (however unintentional the tactics are) cut off from any hopes salvation that could come from venture capitalism.
It is pathetic, really.

Yet, with the World Wide Web comes suddenly the opportunity of autonomous wealth creation. Now you have the chance to forge your dreams into reality. You can give life to your ideas by taking advantage of the vast array of free tools and free knowledge online. And such knowledge that you cannot get in a million years, from any of the high cost university in Nigeria.
You even have a ready market for whatever product or service you are selling. And you have more than 2 billion people to choose from, who browse the internet everyday all over the world.

So how’s that for inclusion!?

So now you understand the relationship between the two sentences I made at the top of this article:

You may say that a cashless Nigeria would slow down your business, or force you to have 10 bank accounts just so you can save the daily earnings from your beauty shop.

But a cashless Nigeria could also force you into running your business in e-commerce mode; which puts you into a completely different atmosphere of earnings.

Think about it. Or ask us why at Online Africa

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!
:)

Do follow this blog.
Like it.
Share it.
Then connect with me on Google+
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