“Finding the sticky” is a phrase I have heard a few times recently and it has been mulling in my head. It refers to a brand’s ability to find a foothold in a specified target audience. Think of a lollipop that you unwrap and lick and how sticky it is then, and if you stick it to a wool jersey or to material how it sticks. A brand can be seen this way, and thought of in this way. Your brand must “stick” with those that get into contact with it. Finding the key to making it stick is a journey in itself because in today’s modern world of mass communication we are constantly bombarded with information, at an unprecedented rate, which makes it tough if you are a company or organisation seeking to create brand awareness with a specific target audience. I’m not sure if brand uniqueness alone will suffice, because novelty is something that dies off quickly. Yes, its important to create a fresh and appealing look, but beyond that you must be more.
Sometimes I get the feeling that using and developing a content management system is and can be very subjective, depending on the situation. I have found that dealing with the Marketing agencies that specialise in SEO and e-Marketing services in South Africa, was almost like trying to buy a meal at Spur without the onion rings, you can do it if you want to but it kinda is part of the meal. What I mean by that is that the majority of marketing companies in South Africa will try and push their development teams as part of their offering, which makes sense, but I know of at least one instance where a development company withheld source code, and then expected further development costs for any iteration to the website. To me thats kind of louzy, in fact its a downright rip off. Why would a development agency want to retain the source code of a paying client, the operative word being paying? I also find that some of these development companies tend to have a hashed-together content management system, a system consisting of regularly-used scripts, and a system that is sometimes not very flexible. Which brings me to the title of my post, is content management a subjective thing? Yes it is, because no two organizations have the same need, and I feel that most development companies try to offer you some flavour of content management, and although they profess to have your requirements close to the heart, they often persist with said content management system.
After I wrote yesterday’s post I sent I communicated with Rob Stokes via Twitter and I got an immediate response, first from him and then his colleagues. They promptly responded and I am much happier for it! Thanks Rob and thanks to Quirk. Hope I didnt cause too much damage to you in terms of ORM.
Here is why I want to work with Quirk:
- I like their newsletter. I have been subscribing to it for a while now, 2+ years maybe, and I love the approach and the feel of the newsletter. Its informative, and they have a few quirky ways of saying things.
- I loved the emarketing seminar I attended.
- They are a progressive and innovative company, SearchStatus and BrandsEye come to mind.
- They give away a free ebook!
Tags: e-Marketing, Quirk, SEO, South African E-Marketing
I attended an e-marketing seminar hosted by Quirk, and presented by Rob Stokes (CEO of Quirk), in 2008. Before that I approached Quirk to give my site an audit, and sadly nothing came from it, and the feeling I got at that time was that they were too busy. In this week I sent an email to them from their website and also had a colleague of mine phone them, and again unfortunately they did not respond. I’m not sure what the reason for this unresponsiveness is but my initial impression of them was that they are a progressive and forward-thinking e-marketing and SEO company. I follow Rafiq on Twitter, and Rob Stokes, and I can remember Rafiq appearing on Carte Blanche a while ago, and if memory serves me correct he works/worked for Quirk. I can also remember someone from Quirk approaching me after I wrote an article on the need for content management, so it kinda baffles me why they are so sluggish in responding. I rated them highly, in the same category as Purple Cow, maybe better. And I mention Purple Cow because they have responded. I mean how come do Quirk appear on the top of the organic search for “e-marketing services south africa”. Strange. I mean my opinion of Quirk is becoming more and more tainted and disjointed. Are they a snobbish company only seeking to help those whom they think are good enough? I’m not sure.
So with this in mind I am trying to gauge the local South African market, in terms of who provides what services, and how good they are. I follow quite a few on Twitter so maybe a good place to start is by creating a list on Twitter. At the moment there are about 11 people on that list.
Just to give some background as to what my current needs are. I am involved with a B2C startup that aims to provide e-learning with the use of content from key strategic content partners. The content partners are World Class and have been around for a long time and their content has proven very successful. Our current need is to work closely with someone who can provide SEO and eMarketing services. We are developing our web-presence from scratch, and the idea was to incorporate key emarketing and seo objectives from the get-go. They key deliverable is to achieve first page SERP, since we believe our ROI will be closely linked with where we appear in search engine result pages. I have already contacted two companies from the Twitter listing, so we will see how it goes. I would have loved to get more than just the input of one company.
I have been at my current job for a year and a half now and in that time I have come to see and appreciate what I believe are not good manager skills. With that in mind I have been thinking about what I would like a manager to be, or how I would like him to treat me. Before my current job I had another job for about four and a half years, and in that time I had 3 managers and I saw how they acted and reacted in situations. So I feel I know and understand what I expect from a manager.
Firstly, a manager is a leader, and leaders lead by example. In other words there has to be some form of servant-leadership from the manager toward his workers. I’m not saying be feeble or bend to every whim of your workers, but rather have some humility towards them and treat them as grownups. One thing that I don’t like is to be micro managed, in other words be checked up on and so on, which makes me feel like I am seen as a school child. I have enough self discipline to realise and understand when I must work. I also find that some managers have small egos and need to either belittle someone or make an example of them in front of colleagues. I have had several instances where this has happened and this is NOT something a leader or manager should do.
Another thing that I have found in the last year is that managers sometimes make commitments to deliverables without any prior communication with team members which to me is BIG problem, because it creates distrust. If the deliverable being committed to is a long term one then it should be discussed with team members as well and ideally no commitment must be made.
Keep the social life out of it. I have had several instances where a manager has crossed the social line and it resulted in uncomfortable situations at work.
Respect people’s private time and life. I have had several instances this year where it seemed as if the measure of one’s contribution to the team was measured by how many late hours they spent working. I have also had a manager tell me that I must work ‘until 4 am’ because a team member was working till then. This is unacceptable, because working late does NOT prove you are actually working. For all intents and purposes you could be fixing bugs because you made decisions in an earlier situation and now it seems as if you are being a ‘good team member’. It is my opinion that one can work well and effectively without working until 4 am in the morning. You do have a life that you are entitled to.
After following a link from Kevin Dente to a twitter client called Mixero and installing it I thought I would just list my 2 favourite Twitter clients, why I like them and what I dont like. First of all to those who do not see or understand the value of Twitter, its NOT Facebook and it does not attempt to be Facebook. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that has taken the world by storm and clearly if you do not “get it” you may never. I have had friends asking me “What is Twitter?”, “Is it like Facebook”, and I’m like you don’t get it so leave it. I use Twitter for one primary reason, fresh content. I get updates from top Microsoft guys in a quicker way than say through an RSS feed, and Twitter seems nicer than RSS feeds to me. So that is why I keep going back to Twitter, because knowledge is good, and if you know about things its always good.
In essence Twitter uses a 140 character mini-blog post from a user, me or you, about anything you think is important, and sometimes what some people say is important. Scott Gu is easier to follow through Twitter, as is people like Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack. The social media’lites also use Twitter extensively. So when you post a Tweet (thats the term used) you have a choice of ways to do it, each with their drawbacks:
- Twitter: Go straight to the source, to the fountain, to the mothership. You will need a browser for this though (Internet Explorer/Chrome/Firefox) and although it does the job, once you close that browser window the connection to Twitter dies and any new content coming through wont be seen. Your Twitter page itself also refreshes content, but you need to click on a UI (user interface) element to get it to show the new tweets. So this is not my favourite way of connecting to Twitter. I do like the once-in-a-while changes to the main twitter login page though.
- Tweetdeck: I have been using Tweetdeck for quite some time now and I like it primarily because it allows me to update Facebook statuses and Twitter at the same time. I also like it because it notifies me when new Tweets are made. I dislike it because the UI that appears when a new Tweet comes in can get in the way sometimes, even though it has a close buttons
- Seesmic Look: I like it because it has been written using WPF and it looks slick and pretty. It does not display notifications of new Tweets though, which I wish it had
Tags: Twitter
I started this blog about two years ago while I was still working at another company and in that same year I won an award at my company for Innovation. At the end of 2008 I resigned at that company and moved to another company, where I am presently working. I can honestly say that in the year and a half that I have worked at this company I have gained some significant skills, particularly C# skills and web development skills (in particular AJAX). I have gained some SQL Server skills too and I have come to work in a bigger team than I had previously. Being in a bigger team makes you more competitive, and it also makes you more aware of others, but it also exposes people’s weak ego’s. This blog has not had that much traffic, but I didnt see it as a money-making thing, I just wanted a place where I could try and express what I experience, and I think for that purpose I have succeeded.
Here is to another 20 years!
Types in C# and the .NET framework are the fundamental building block of program design, and in C# they are divided into built-in, primitive types, and user-defined types. Generally speaking the user-defined types refer to classes, and classes are essentially made up of built-in types and other user-defined types themselves. Primitive types can also be seen as value types, that is a type that has a value in memory, usually called the stack. This is in contrast to reference types that are on the heap, but actually have pointers to themselves on the stack. C# offers the following built-in types:
- Byte
- Char
- Int16
- UInt16
- Int32
- UInt32
- Long
- ULong
- Short
- UShort
- Decimal
- Double
- Float
- SByte
- Single
- Boolean
- Int64
- UInt64
Tags: C#
You all love the Springboks right? Those men in green who do South Africa proud? Well I guess the Kiwis or Aussies or Pommies or…err wait ok dont like the Springboks that much. But I love em and the other night I started thinking about writing an app that will allow me to select a Springbok squad (or two or three) from the Super 14 teams that are currently playing. So what I did is I honestly collected some player and squad information and put it into a database, and the way I did this was to use HtmlAgility to screen scrape player information from www.sarugby.net, and I did it quite easily and successfully got some information and managed to store it. You can see on this page, albeit it might be a bit slow in coming through, that you can search for rugby players here and once you have found a rugby player you can also get the rest of his team mates in his squad. Scary what you can do with a good HTML parser. I then took the information and created a few objects with properties and methods, and then I stored the information. Note that my intention is not to make money! I just liked the code that went into it. And the data that I stored I made available through an incomplete interface here. You can click on the squads to the right, which displays the players for that squad and if you click on a player you see their information displayed. My next idea was to assign each player to one or more positions and then in the left hand pane create icons that represent rugby jerseys, and then make the players you select “addable” to the left until you reach the maximum number of players allowed.
I enjoyed doing it anyway, and I’m trying to do small projects at night to keep me motivated.
Tags: C#, HTML Agility, Springboks
I am busy doing a CBT course with the idea of writing MCTS exams and I started by doing some stuff on C# and the .NET framework that focuses specifically on types. The .NET framework is a strongly typed framework and what we mean by strongly typed is that each variable (or type) that you define or create in you’re code must be assigned to a type. C# in particular is a statically, manifestly and strongly typed language. The .NET framework uses the Common Type System (CTS) which means that the type int in C# and the type Integer in VB.NET refer to the same Int32 type in the CLR. It makes sense therefore that in C# you can define types of int as Int32, which means int is just an alias for Int32. Basic/intrinsic types refer to int’s, bools, long, char, unsigned int, unsigned long, byte, short, sbyte, unsigned short, float and decimal. Its important to understand this because memory in the .NET framework is divided into data structures, named the heap and stack respectively. The basic types are seen as value types that are stored on the stack in a Last In First Out basis. Enumerations, structs and constants are also seen as value types. In contrast user-defined types (objects) are stored on the heap. References to the objects are stored on the stack. If for instance you have an instance of StringBuilder called strb1 and another instance called strb2 and you instantiate strb2 be setting it to strb1 then both instances will point to the same reference on the stack. If you then set the value of strb1 it will have the same value as strb2, and vice verse.
Tags: C#
