Cerebra

This morning the office was abuzz with talk of Facebook’s latest change – seems the company has rolled out preliminary testing on their messaging service. Basically, should you wish to send a private message to someone who is not a connection, Facebook will charge you anywhere from $1 (approx. R9,46) to deliver your message. If you don’t pay, your message will be sent to that recipients spam folder.

I tried to test this today by sending a message to a colleague who is not a friend on Facebook, and my message went through just fine. So although this testing phase has been rolled out in South Africa, it’s clearly only to a percentage of the South African users, for now.

The majority of all the sessions I attended had one key point - explaining how humans behave on the web, and how we can take "advantage" of that behavior.

Sounds easy, but it seems most of us, as much as we use the web, take little notice of the finer human nuances to how people share, gather, read and talk. In a talk about cyber bullying with the creators of itgetsbetter.org, they highlighted the fact that in certain communities people enjoy being anonymous. This simple human truth - that we all have secrets and don't necessarily share everything with everyone - is why many LGBT forums exist, allowing people to come together in a closed community and talk about their challenges or fears. Community, even in anonymity, is strong.

After 6 years of research into why businesses succeed or fail in China, Emily Chong, the AVP of Design and Marketing for Frog innovation specialists, tackles the subject of survival strategies for brands in China. The parallels and differences in marketing to South Africans were startling.

Here are some of the insights for anyone thinking of taking their products or services East, or for anyone venturing into new territories.

Stop thinking these are nascent markets

We’ve often heard that if it can’t be found on the first page of Google, then it doesn’t exist. Believe it or not, it does. I have identified several ways to optimise your searches on Google – through Boolean Operators, Phrase Searching and Google Search Tools.

If you’re searching for something specific the following tips will yield better results:

1. “Word word word”: This search will yield pages containing the exact search phrase you have placed in inverted commas. For example, if I had typed “Panda bear on a tree” into the search bar, only items with that exact wording would have shown up.
2. ‘-word’: The hyphen lets Google know you want this word excluded. I wanted to search for pandas, but I didn’t want to search red pandas, so I added the ‘-‘ before the word ‘red’.

If you use TweetDeck via your mobile device or through an app, take note: Twitter announced recently that they will no longer be developing and updating their TweetDeck mobile and computer apps using the API version 1.0 . In other words, use the web-based version or the latest and PC version or nothing at all.