“A Very Exciting Experiment”

by on November 30, 2008 at 9:31 pm

Michael Spicer, International Marketing Council trustee and CEO of Business Leadership, welcomed the bloggers at a lunch at Moyo, Zoo Lake. Here’s what he said:

We are here for the kick-off of a very exciting experiment. At the IMC, we’re in the business of telling South Africa’s story, and helping others tell it. We aim to promote this wonderful country of ours both as a destination for investment and travel, and as a source — a source of goods and services, a source of ideas and innovation, a source of hard earned wisdom in dealing with some really tough challenges.

Our guests, as you know, are well-established bloggers and they are here to blog about South Africa.

What’s a blogger? You might say that a blogger is to a traditional journalist what a hedge fund is to your father’s pension fund.

Bloggers and hedge funds don’t operate under the constraints that bind their traditional brethren, although, given present circumstances, how long that remains true for hedge funds remains to be seen.

But bloggers are unlikely to have their wings clipped any time some. They can call the shots as they see them in any medium they chose -words, pictures, sounds, video – and with very little overhead.

With flair and imagination and with something important, interesting or useful to say, they can develop huge followings and move public opinion.

Take the Huffington Post, where Mona Gable blogs.  It had a major impact on the recent American election.

Take Eliane Fioret’s Ubergizmo. Her site helps millions all over the world decide which gadgets to spend their money on.  Sony really cares what she says.

Graeme Wood will be contributing to several blogs while he is with us. His day job is at the influential Atlantic Magazine, where he blogs alongside Andrew Sullivan, whose blog is so successful that the IMC has bought ads on it.

The IMC has brought traditional journalists to South Africa over the past several years along with various public intellectuals. Most have gone home and written about their experiences some weeks or months later, or whenever they could get published.

By contrast, a hallmark of blogs is real time communication. If you’ve got an Internet connection, you have the potential to get yourself read, seen and heard instantaneously all over the world.

Another thing about bloggers is that they are constantly sifting through the vast quantity of material that gets added to the web every minute, looking for interesting items to link to or embed on their own on their own blogs. So the good stuff gets amplified.

Just think about that famous YouTube video of the herd of buffalo rescuing a calf from lions and then a crocodile. The viewership for President-elect Obama’s official YouTube offerings pales by comparison with the number of people who have watched that clip taken by a visitor to one of our game parks.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that Andrew Sullivan is wowed by something his colleague Graeme Wood posts on the americanscene.com, or is captivated (as who could not be?) by a Zadi Diaz video. He cites and links to them.  Suddenly a vast new set of eyeballs is on their work. And some of those eyeballs will be owned by people who will amplify Graeme’s post to a whole new set of eyeballs.

And none of the eyeballs will belong to someone who is sitting passively in front of a TV set. Rather they will be owned by someone who is actively interacting with blogs and other websites  —  and therefore awake.

For the next eight days our bloggers will be on a whirlwind tour of the country. They’ll be going to places both on and off the beaten track. Our hope is that they will find material and inspiration for some great blog posts which will echo through the blogosphere – and also linger there to be found in Google searches for months and years come.

Our bloggers will be seeing South Africa from many different perspectives. From the deck of a state of the art De Beers ship dredging diamonds for the floor of the Atlantic. From 3.7 kilometres underground at AnglogoldAshanti’s Tau Tona mine, the world’s deepest.  From balloons drifting serenely over the Magaliesberg.

They’ll be seeing South African satellites and our bid to explore the farthest reaches of time and the universe with the Square Kilometre Array.

They’ll be seeing where history began at the Cradle of Humanity, and where it was made and continues to be made in Soweto.

One point I’d like to emphasise to our guests is this. We’re introducing you to people and places we are proud of, and which we think show that South Africans are a creative lot who do difficult things well.  But we did not bring you here to be praise-singers.  We have no doubt that you will call it as you see it and we would not want it any other way. We will not tamper with you kneecaps for telling the truth as you see it. We value that truth.

Before closing, I’d like say a special word of thanks to everyone in the Brand South Africa team who has worked so hard to bring this project together. And I would also like to express our deep appreciation to Vodacom for so generously supplying with the hardware and the bandwidth to make this project possible.

With that, good luck, bloggers, have fun, blog on and blog well.