07.18.08
Posted in Personal at 4:46 am by Christine
I thought you might like that title :p
SpitOrSwallow is in fact a website about wine created by one of my friends.
The About bio on the site reads as follows:
Spit or Swallow is a website for wine enthusiasts who visit a lot of wine farms. You can log your experience here and also read what others had to say about specific farms. We do not edit comments, so straight-shooters are welcome. Do you spit or swallow?
It’s still very new, and the idea is that they visit the wine estates in person to judge the wines, ambiance and scenery, restaurant and sometimes even the driving distance.
There are not that many estates listed yet, but perhaps you have been to the ones already listed and want to voice your opinion?
I personally am just looking forward to some great road trips to all these stunning wine estates!
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07.17.08
Posted in Events at 11:13 am by Christine
Myself and Carla attended the 2008 internetix today, accompanied by Joey and Tim.
The last time I attended an Internetix conference was back in 2005, it surely has grown since then!
Internetix is an annual conference sponsored by IS, Dimension Data, MS and Cisco. This year’s mission was to explore how technology is enabling Africa to Rise to her many challenges and unlock her true potential.
It was held at the Lagoon beach hotel, the venue is pretty awesome and being right on the beach has some spectacular views. The conference snacks were good as conference snacks are concerned. However the event planning itself in terms of size I found somewhat lacking.
It would have been nice for one to be able to have somewhere to sit down for the lunch at least firstly, and secondly the lunch was served in a narrow corridor (ok, about 7meters across) but put tables and pillars and a few hundred people in that space and it soon becomes almost unnavigable. The corridors and stair cases to the actual conference venue was also very narrow, and there was not enough seats for all the attendees.
But apart from that, I thought it was pretty good.
I decided to skip the last two sessions as well as the cocktail event, which I will probably regret - lol.
I twittered during all the sessions, but I now see that alas, my hashtag (#internetix) was not registered 
so I can’t give you a link to my running commentary. Let me try to recap:
I attended the following sessions:
- The world of 2010’s - Chantell Illbury - Understand your environment: certainties - China’s relationship with Africa is growing ‘Africa is our continent of choice’. Check out her 2010’s section on her website.
- Around Africa on my Bicycle - Riaan Manser - “No Food for Lazy Man!”. Pure inspiration! 2 years, 2 months, 8 days it took Riaan to circumnavigate Africa on his bicycle. He endured times of war, child soldiers, guerillas and faced uncertainty of life many times on this epic journey. Unfortunately Carte Blanche did not have the clip in their Video Library? But check out all the photos from his trip on his site. He is currently embracing a new challenge: to circumnavigate Madagascar by kayak.
- Evolution of Media - Stafford Masie - Stafford was a really engaging speaker. Although he did not reveal anything new, but merely showcased everything that Google is engaged in currently and might also engage in future - South Africa wise, it was a great presentation to watch. Masie: websites = social components. SA search query volumes small compared to rest of world. Google is: end user content & a moment of relevance. 1 in 6 Google searches happen on a mobile in Africa. We watched the McNugget clip, which gave instant stardom to these guys. It was part of a competion that McDonalds were running, driven by consumers. Consumers voted these guys the winners, and eventually this was turned into a TV ad as well…A superb example of how to get Consumer Generated Media right. Staying on YouTube, we also checked out some features not currently available in SA: adsense Advertising embedded within YouTube videos. This is tre cool. Masie showed some of the less common search operators some crowd pleasers included: “2 = 2 =” ; “what is hillary clinton’s age? ” etc. And in Google Earth we explored the potential for future advertising opportunities on street level etc.
- Web 2.0 and Social Media - Mike Stopforth - Another great speaker to see in action. Mike delved into explaining the power of social media and how big corporates need to realise that it is no longer about talking to your consumer, but talking with your consumer, and in most cases, it’s about the consumer leading the conversation now on behalf of companies without even realising it. A great clip that expresses this sentiment is Bringtheloveback.Com or watch direct on YouTube.
- The Future of Search - Jeff Fletcher & Greg De Chasteauneuf - Besides Masie’s session, I was really looking forward to this one…But very disappointed in the presentation to be honest. Now I have no doubt these guys know what they’re talking about and are probably really passionate about search, algorithms etc. Perhaps I was just too advanced a delegate for their interpretation of their target audience…But not once did I hear anything in line with their topic title? They covered Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and a lot of psychological associations of search - old news…no pun intended. They hinted at discussing Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) of search algorithms and Image Recognition search from a more intelligent type of AI and algorithm, but that was ‘as futuristic’ as this presentation was. The two interesting tidbits that did come from this session was Tineye (prob as close to full image recognition AI as we currently are) and Searchme (a visual way to search + mixture of Meta & title SEO). The only other two elements that was mentioned during their talk was Audio searching or better known as audio fingerprinting (research paper) and mobile tagging (history of mobile tagging) - which are both also not new, or futuristic. Perhaps they meant “futuristic” in terms of South Africa usage?
All in all it was good to attend, ran into a few people that I know and recognise either from Twitter.com, or real-life :p
The sessions that I did not attend comprised of:
- Home entertainment over broadband | or Gaming | or Application Streaming
- Big Mamma and the horse - whatever that was about!
Anyone attend it and want to enlighten us about those?
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07.09.08
Posted in Events at 4:14 am by Carla Fourie
We are very excited to announce that on 2 September 2008 Christine da Silva from AlterSage will be presenting a workshop at the 10th Annual Conference on World Wide Web. Her topic will cover “The role of search: practical search engine marketing and other online brand building techniques.”
The World Wide Web Conference is co-hosted by the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) and the University of Cape Town (UCT) and will take place on UCT’s Cape Town campus. Five workshops, including Christine’s, will commence on 2 September. The Conference itself will be running from 3 – 5 September 2008. Numerous keynote speakers will present at the Conference and more than 60 peer-reviewed papers will be discussed.
Christine’s workshop will look at the evolution of search engines and user techniques. The workshop will provide attendees with techniques and tips to ensure that their information is seen in today’s environment. This can be done by increasing their online brand awareness and exposure, user base and ultimately the profitability of their online presence. For a full overview of Christine’s workshop, please click here.
We’re very pleased to be involved with the World Wide Web Conference especially since it caters for a wide variety of attendees: from students, to business people, to high-profile academics. At AlterSage we aim to educate others on how online marketing can work for them – no matter how big or small their business. It is still a very unknown area for many and therefore companies are too scared to venture into online marketing. Back at AlterSage, we host regular internal workshops to grow the AlterSage team to industry leaders and to keep them up to date with the ever evolving online industry.
If you would like to register for the Conference, please click here. For more information on the conference, you can go here. We hope to see you there J
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07.07.08
Posted in Online Marketing at 11:20 am by Christine
Search Marketing Agencies are seemingly constantly fighting battles to prove the worth of their services. Why is this? Especially when it just makes logical sense? In a world predominantly driven by search engines and online activity why is it that so many agencies and companies are still resisting the medium?
Mandy de Waal’s recent Search Marketing Report delved a little deeper into the South African environment an hesitancies from Traditional Media Agencies. The international environment has already adopted the success and achievements of working together with Search agencies and have seen the value proven ten times over.
As Search Marketers we’ve been fighting the traditional marketing agency buy-in battle for a long time. At first they feared us for the potential risk of stealing away their clients to the medium. It has taken years to convince them that combining traditional strategies with online strategies is first prize. Only very recently have we seen the two sides of marketing working together to produce campaigns that feature just that.
And it works.
Perhaps now that the importance of search engine marketing is becoming more apparent in the local environment is precisely the reason for our next battle.
Development agencies.
I personally hoped that we, as Search Marketers, had overcome most issues when it comes to working with third party development agencies. After all, it’s a win-win situation?!
The battle seems for site updates… To perform well at Search Engine Optimisation one must continuously make edits to your website, adding content and ensuring that it is structurally sound.
To save clients and their developers’ time, it is not unheard that the SEM company would implement the changes themselves, however there are some developers that do not like sharing their clients’ access details…for fear of whatever reason…
It is to these development agencies that I say “Embrace the Search Marketer”.
We are not here to steal your clients, or to cut you out of the loop.
We are here to assist you and save you time to focus on larger updates and developments.
Yes, I have seen some Search marketing companies insist that their clients move ALL their updates (and in some instances even their hosting) to them and away from their current web development/maintenance providers. Being an idealist, I believe that we could all work together and always try my utmost not to insist that we update and implement from our side. Unless of course the site uses techniques that blocks search engines from indexing it. Then we’ll advise, but never insist changing providers. We choose to focus on what we’re good at.
We need commitment and buy-in from the development agencies first and foremost.
If you work together with a Search Marketing Agency:
- Your company looks good. Your development, bespoke CMS and structure looks good, because the site succeeds in delivering traffic and conversions.
- Get more work. You might be issued more work from the client because of this success.
- Referrals. The Search marketing company might refer development clients to you, because you have a good relationship.
- Word-of-Mouth. The client might refer potential contracts to you, because their site was a success.
- Robust Bespoke CMS systems. The Search marketing company can advise you on global system capabilities such as Joomla, Drupal and WordPress etc and also help you to implement search and user-friendly methodologies in your bespoke systems.
- Leader of industry. Displaying forward thinking in terms of website set-up. Your ‘out-the-box-system’ just became that much more valuable.
To see all 10 reasons, read the Top 10 reasons on Techleader.
I welcome the opportunity to speak to development companies that are skeptical about such a relationship. It is win-win concept. Experience it.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 7:40 am by Christine
Recently Mandy de Waal caught up with us to discuss the state of the nation of Search Marketing in specifically South Africa’s environment.
She has written an incredible report which, with the help of other industry contributors, has really turned into a valuable piece.
Read the full report on ITweb or download the pdf article here:
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04.10.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:19 am by altersage
Now this is a feature that I’m looking forward to playing around with…
Industry Benchmarking, a beta feature now available in Google Analytics lets you compare your metrics against industry verticals. Of course for the moment its quite biased as it can only compare with other sites of similar vertical that have subscribed to sharing their data on the Analytics side. But as subscribers grow, so of course will data also… The data your receive is completely anonymous, so although you won’t be able to use it like Competitious or for ORM necessarily, at least you are able to get, well, a benchmark of the industry. Watch this space as we test away 
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Posted in Uncategorized at 10:39 am by altersage
So, I posted on the AlterSage FB group that I would do a round-up of the NMM Conference, but alas, time ran away with me….besides when there are already some great roundups available, I’m not going to rehash what’s already been said.
Take a look at the following sites / blogs of the conference:
I will however give you feedback from the workshop that we hosted on the last day. Albeit that we had attendance of about 10 people, I feel that we made a difference and contributed to their understanding of Online Marketing techniques. The feedback that I had personally received from the attendees of the workshop was that they would have preferred to have attended our workshop prior to the speakers, as then they would have understood the topics that much more. Well, I’m glad that I could at least make sense of everything they listened to, afterwards 
Joey and I also attended the Joburg 27. Vastly different format to the Cape Town 27, in the sense that it’s definitely more ‘business oriented’ whereas Cape Town is more informational and general community catch-up IMO.
In general it was great to make future business contacts, meet new people, catch-up with ones we already know, and also put faces to handles on twitter
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03.13.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:10 pm by altersage
This was of course the big news making the rounds today. AOL is apparently to pay $850 million to purchase the social network.
With MS investing a pretty penny (1.6 percent stake for $240 million) for Facebook, it was invevitable that another SE should invest in what is a very upcoming Social network - Bebo.
And by SE I mean, Google does of course own a percentage of AOL (back in 2005 it bought 5%) …so besides Orkut.com, now Bebo.com, which is making a bit of noise as the fast contender to FB.
We have already seen quite a bit of interest in the world of Application development enquiries for specifically Bebo…
Bebo itself is not that small with a global membership of more than 40 million users already, but according to statistics it does still fall behind on daily, and even monthly visits compared to FaceBook and MySpace.
Read more in the article which details a little further on the AOL Bebo investment.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 3:45 pm by altersage
I am…
This is a great little article on disconnect anxiety courtesy of AlterSage copywriter Lulie who is trying to tell me something…
If you can tick yes to at least 8 of these you might be a candidate too:
- Strongly or somewhat agree with the statement “My cell phone goes everywhere I go?”
- Use your wireless device “frequently” at home instead of your home phone?
- Strongly or somewhat agree with the statement “When I leave home without my cell phone, I feel cut off”?
- Spend four hours or more using the Internet—work or personal—per day on average?
- Used IM (instant messenger) in the last week?
- Have a Facebook profile that you visit at least once a day?
- Strongly agree with the statement “The world is not as safe as it used to be”?
- Used a laptop in your living room or bedroom in the last week?
- Text-messaged on a regular cell or sent email using a BlackBerry, Treo or similar in the evenings or the weekend in the last week?
…but that also makes at least 95% of everyone that I know candidates too
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