Archive for First Tuesday

First Tuesday Talks SEO

// May 8th, 2007 // 6 Comments » // First Tuesday

Vinny Lingham Talks at First Tuesday

“Businesses must wake up and smell the coffee when it comes to online marketing or they will be left behind,” says Vinny Lingham, founder and Chief Strategy Officer of online marketing company incuBeta.

That was the introduction by Vinny at the second First Tuesday meeting held at Wanderers this morning (8th of May).

The topic of discussion was centred around search engine optimisation and how it is changing the face of (online) marketing.

Vinny started the presentation by showing us a couple of video clips, Shift happens and the hugely popular Numa Numa dance video.

Some interesting facts about searcing and SEO:

  • 88% of web traffic comes from search engines
  • Flash or graphic intensive websites are not search engine bot friendly – if the bot cannot find you, your website will not rank high on the search engine directory

There are tons more facts and figures and one just needs to do a search or reading blogposts on SEO to find out more information.  e.g. Return on effort (from Vinny’s blog)

Some examples used during the presentation include:

I’m quite glad the discussion didn’t delve too much into Cost-per-Click (CPC), Adsense, Cost-per-Acquisition (CPA) etc. as these have been mentioned many times before. 

On the other hand, the discussion and Q&A session from the audience was interesting.  It was refreshing to hear that SME’s are on the forefront of SEO and online marketing in South Africa and that corporates are lagging behind. For example, someone like Elitemobile is giving Vodacom a run for its money in terms of conversion rates.

First Tuesday is also launching a blog to get some discussion going and it will be available at http://firsttuesday-sa.blogspot.com.

There’s A New Alpha On The Blog

// April 3rd, 2007 // 5 Comments » // Blog Stuff, First Tuesday, Media

Mike Stopforth, Afrigator, First Tuesday

A new Alpha emerged today on the Blogosphere and it’s called Afrigator. Visually leaked this morning at the first, First Tuesday meeting during Mike Stopforth‘s presentation and then later via our ever nimble bloggers, Rafiq, Tyler Reed, Matthew Buckland and Chilibean.

Just like Matthew, I checked out the link for Afrigator on my HTC to find a damn slick looking site. Kudos to Mark Forrester for the design and co-founders Mike Stopforth and Justin Hartman for what looks to be a pretty neat social media aggregator for the african blogosphere (afrosphere they call it). It has a nice ring to it…

So, in this new world of social media, the alpha is the individual in the community whom the others follow and defer to. I’m looking forward to see how this site develops and grows. Guess we will soon see what happens to the betas of the world…

Afrigator