I have come across many businesses in South Africa today who ask me, “why should my business advertise online?” It is no secret that businesses in South Africa had not realised the full potential of online advertising yet and the returns and rewards that this medium of advertising offers.

In the more developed countries, online advertising has become a multi billion dollar industry with many large corporations spending large percentages of their marketing budgets on online advertising. The main hindrance businesses in South Africa currently have with online advertising is that there are not enough people in South Africa who are online to advertise to. Not every household in South Africa has a computer let alone an internet connection. A large percentage of the South African population is still not online. Getting connected to the internet is still very expensive in South Africa. I would not be surprised if the cost of internet connectivity in South Africa is amongst the most expensive in the world. Read the rest of this entry »

I will not forget the first time i logged onto Facebook and created my profile. This was about two years ago and then no one hardly knew anything about Facebook. I remember then, the social network with all the buzz was Hi5.com and then MySpace became bigger after that. Today the talk is about Facebook when it comes to social networking and almost everyone you can think of has a Facebook profile. What is it about social networks that get everyone hooked onto them?

What makes a social network great is the ability to communicate and interact with people you know or you share similar interests with and be able to communicate with them from one central place. From a user’s perspective, social networks are great due to the reasons I have just mentioned. But let us now look at how social networks affect businesses. Read the rest of this entry »