Here’s a question: Who bans access to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Gmail and pretty much every other social media or social networking site you can think of? China, you say? Well, you’d be right. But the answer could also be: most of corporate South Africa.
Here at Grubstreet I’m my own boss, so I say that I can access anything I like. I’m a great boss! But what about you poor suckers out there? Does your company block sites that you can access from work? Does your company talk about “social media strategies” and then stop everyone at work from actually accessing social media?
Do South African companies appreciate the power of social media as a business tool or do they simply not give a toss? Well, here’s a chance to share your views with the Grubstreet survey. Take a few minutes to complete the survey and let’s see where Corporate SA is on this.

Please retweet this post or share with your friends so we have a good sample. Sharing links at bottom of the page.

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The Washington Post, that august liberal American newspaper, made a rather alarming decree last week: that its reporters and managers must watch what they say on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter lest they show any form of personal bias or opinion.

According to the blog of the newspaper’s ombudsman, The Post’s managing editor responsible for features and its website told his 90 Twitter followers last week:  “We can incur all sorts of federal deficits for wars and what not.  But we have to promise not to increase it by $1 for healthcare reform? Sad.”

There was another tweet that also expressed an opinion on a hard news story that, when The Post released its newsroom guidelines for interacting on social media, the manager realised was not up to scratch so he cancelled his Twitter account and recanted the error of his ways. The tweets were “personal” observations, the manager said. “But I also realize that… seeing that the managing editor of The Post is weighing in on this, it’s a clear perception problem.”

The guidelines say:

“When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment. We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism.

“What you do on social networks should be presumed to be publicly available to anyone, even if you have created a private account. It is possible to use privacy controls online to limit access to sensitive information. But such controls are only a deterrent, not an absolute insulator. Reality is simple: If you don’t want something to be found online, don’t put it there.”

TO READ MY FULL MONEYWEB COLUMN, CLICK HERE.

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There were some fabulously offbeat stories on the web this week. First up, the Republicans in the US launched their revamped website in laughable fashion. Politco reported that among the hiccups on the first day were the posting of administrator passwords, a list of  party accomplishments that ended in 2004 and a “future leaders” section that was devoid of material.

Then in the UK, bloggers and Twitter users erupted to bust up a legal attempt to stop media from reporting questions posed by a lawmaker in a parliamentary debate, a classic example of the anarchic citizen power of social media. Read the story at TimesLive here.

Over on Mashable, there was a cute little story revealing that the “I’m feeling lucky” button on Google searches  takes you to the search results of the user who searched just before you with a link to a great blog about the wacky Japan’s Ogori Cafe in Japan where you get what the person in front of you ordered.

Business Day’s The Insider column had a classic little story about the website of a New York restaurant that generates realistic-looking fake expense receipts for recession-hit diners and back at Mashable there was a story about a fun new website, Book of Odds, a reference site on the odds of ordinary life from the chances of golfers being hit by lightning to owning a pair of high heels. It’s all US-related info, of course, but you can while away an entertaining half hour on the site. And I love the name – Book of Odds – sounds like wizardry.

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Scrubs star Zach Braff made this funny video this week after news of his demise started flying around Facebook and Twitter. Click here to read the Mashable story about how it all started.

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Vodacom’s social network, The Grid, already has one million users and under the guidance of new media guru Vince Maher (co-founder of Amatomu and now Vodacom’s portfolio manager for social networking ), it’s something to watch — especially if you’re in media.

If you’ve never heard of The Grid, here’s how’s it works: using the triangulation of cellphone towers The Grid pinpoints members’ locations on a map. Just like Facebook or Twitter, you can send messages, chat, link up with friends, upload pictures and video. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, The Grid is designed for your cellphone (though you can access it on the Web) but it’s not limited to Vodacom’s users.

So why do you need to know about it? Because it has amazing potential for extremely targetted advertising and it may end up being a threat to the ad revenue of traditional and new media. Grubstreet spoke to Vince Maher about this spunky social network.

GILL:  How many users does The Grid have? What are the main demographics? I presume they’re mostly in their 20s.

VINCE: The vast majority are between the age of 20 and 30. We have recently gone over one million users with our expansion into Tanzania in April.

GILL: What kind of marketing have you guys been doing as it’s pretty under the radar?

The home page of The Grid on the Net.

VINCE: We market to users already using mobile Internet, so we use Google, Admob and the Vodacom properties like Vodafone Live! to grow our user base. Of course, a large portion of our growth is viral and word of mouth as young people look for the next cool communication channel.

GILL: At what point do you reckon you’ll have critical mass after which I presume you’ll start marketing The Grid in a much bigger way?

VINCE: That’s an ever-shifting goal post but I think it is currently around 2 million users, which is where Facebook is at in South Africa right now. We have seen a much faster growth than some of the other social networks (one million users joined since last year this time) because we made sure that we offer rich features on some of the less expensive phones and we are more than just a way to send cheap SMS.

GILL: Because it is so targeted, I see The Grid as a threat to the ad revenue of websites and newspapers, especially regional papers’ classified sections. What’s your view on this?

VINCE: That may be the case but no more so than any web classified. We are very open to partnerships with local newspapers to plug our location-targeted advertising into their existing offering and working with us.

GILL: Do you foresee that the big corporates will advertise on The Grid?

VINCE: Most definitely, we have the right demographic of users and they like interacting with big brands.  There are several very exciting projects coming up that will add a lot of value for our users so it’s not just about displaying an ad. It’s about doing something meaningful.

GILL: Is a social network enough to sign up users and sustain usage or do you think you need something more in terms of content?

VINCE: Our users currently generate a lot of content themselves in the form of photos, videos and text every day. Ultimately, they are there to interact with each other, they know where to find general news if they want it and the kind of content we are focusing on finding is the stories that happened on your street corner or down the road from your house or shack.  In this light we see partnerships with local news providers as key to getting the right geo-tagged content to the right people.

* Read my column about The Grid at TechCentral, an excellent new news website run by former Financial Mail hack Duncan McLeod.

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I’m having some success in marketing Grubstreet through social networking – especially Twitter, Muti and Facebook (the big American bookmarking sites are absolute dogs as you’re just swamped by the Yanks). Like most bloggers, this is in fact my main marketing option as I don’t have a budget to speak of.

I’ve come across a very useful guide to marketing through social networking done by South African internet entrepreneur Philip van Zyl, which you can download free (part of his marketing campaign for his business). The guide isn’t just for new-media businesses but for the bricks and mortar guys too.

Philip knows his stuff as he founded People Surveys, an online surveying platform used by for companies to run their customer and employee surveys and clients included Woolies, Metropolitan, ADT, Virgin Active and Kalahari.net. These days he lurks in the little village of Greyton in the Western Cape and is setting up a training business for small businesses wanting to grow through social media.

The guide is well worth a download it as it gives you a very handy rundown on who’s who in the zoo (and aimed at us Saffers), step-by-step tips and sage big-picture advice: such as making sure you know what your business goals are before launching a marketing campaign and that social networking won’t work for you if you just see it as a means to an end — you really need to play with it, enjoy using it, understand it — otherwise the canny users out there will spot you for a phony.

And what’s not to enjoy about social networking? It’s great to interact and banter with like-minded people that you can’t sit down with over coffee as they live in other towns. I’ve found that people in the blogosphere  are very cool — intelligent and generous with passing on their knowledge. They’re people like us.

Click here to go to Philip’s website and download the guide.

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