Cerebra

Being told you are going on a family holiday when you’re not part of the family can be a pretty daunting thing.

I’ve been at Cerebra for just under three months now, long enough to be in on the jokes…most of them at least. Long enough to greet people by their nicknames, or even make new ones up. Long enough to feel comfortable enough to burst into song at any given moment, knowing that most people wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow or openly ridicule me.

As the digital space evolves and more and more businesses are competing for limited space on Social Media platforms, tracking your competitors is more important than ever. Not only can competitor analysis in the digital realm help form benchmarks to better your own digital strategy but it will also offer insights that traditional market analysis can’t.

Many businesses feel that it is important to make their own mark in their fields of expertise regardless of what competitors are doing. The general sentiment amongst brands seems to be that that looking to other brands to help form best practices or benchmarks is counterintuitive; Social Media does however propose a unique case.

That awkward moment when you ask your boss what your job actually is.

That’s actually how it all started, a conversation between and myself about what my job entails, after nearly four years as a Community Manager. When he asked what I meant, I simply stated, “Is my job to make the community care about the brand, or to make the brand care about the community?”

It was a tough question; we hadn’t considered that it could be both.

Cerebra was fortunate enough to be involved in last year’s Internet Show as an exhibitor and with a speaking spot. This year, I returned on behalf of Cerebra to what has evolved into The Enterprise Technology Show. Made up of the Internet Show, Loyalty World, The Marketing Technology Show, Big Data World Africa and The Mobile Show Africa 2014, the two-day show, exhibition and conference comprised of a completely free conference and an all-new VIP event, which included keynote speakers and focused, breakaway roundtable discussions.

Africa is the final economic frontier. Marketers are actively looking to market their brands on the continent, yet very few are investing time and effort into the continent to really understand it; even less into its social media habits. Mike Stopforth, CEO and founder, Cerebra, maintains that over the last five to six years of business, social media has forced companies, globally, to acknowledge the humanity of their brand and their staff.

"It is not about Facebook or the actual channels, but about people connecting and communicating differently than before. A company that says we want to be social and assumes that if they have a Twitter account and videos on YouTube they are... that's just wrong.