Vincent Maher, strategist at Mail and Guardian Online and development brain behind Amatomu, swans onto the stage to talk about the online strategies employed by M&G in the last year or so.
With a budget of R0, Vincent was tasked with conceptualising and rolling out a social media strategy for M&G Online as a lead up to the relaunch of the new mailandguardian.co.za website.
The first project out the door was News in Photos, which evolved out of a need to have an easy to use photo gallery for the M&G Online staff, as well as encourage citizen journalism amongst M&G readers. It's been popular: a good example was a flurry of user photos submitted and shared after the snow in Joburg last year. This project also includes a visual swarm of what photos users are looking at at any one time.
Amatomu exploded onto the SA web scene next. Funnily enough, Vincent Maher and Mike Stopforth were brainstorming together about new web projects and came up with an idea for a blog aggregator. Vincent went away and started Amatomu. Mike went away and launched Afrigator shortly afterwards. Great minds. It took two days to get this site site into Alpha. Such a power coder, Vince is.
Amatomu serves to aggegrate and make it easy to browse blogs in South Africa. Beforehand, there was no single way to see all the blogs in South Africa, and while Amatomu requires a blog to insert a piece of code to be included (which therefore means not ALL blogs are covered) this is the most reliable way of accessing the majority of blogs in SA. Run off php, hosting works out to an inexpensive R7k per month. Based on Arthur Goldstuck's figures yesterday, Vincent concludes that Amatomu is tracking 72% of all blogs in South Africa.
It's been successful because of the competitive spirit and egocentricism of the SA blogosphere. Egos? No! :)
From there, Mail and Guardian released a Facebook app to distribute M&G headlines and then worked to migrate their Blogmark service to Amagama.com - run on Wordpress MU.
Next up was an entertainment events portal called The Guide, with a built-in social network called Yiza. They also built a jobs site called Job Connection and are involved in developing a student news portal called Campus Times.
Somewhere in between, mobile versions of The Guide, Mail and Guardian and Thoughtleader then followed. What is Thoughtleader?
It's been a runaway success for M&G. It's been monetised within six months, with 70 000 unique users and 10 000 newsletter subscribers (but only 300 RSS subscribers!). Vincent draws a line in the sand and states this is proof that when comparing RSS to email, email wins hands down every time.
Think of Thoughtleader as an invite-only multiuser blog, even though the users don't actually log in to the blog. 130 contributors have been invited write articles with an intellectual and thought-provoking slant, across a variety of industries and interests. All posts submitted by authors are approved and moderated by an editor.
Thoughtleader has taken care to give as many filtering options as possible, so users can access the content they're interested in as quickly as possible, instead of M&G deciding what's most important. So users can browse by author, tags, popularity etc.
Because authors write for Thoughtleader for free, they're invited to post whenever they like, about whatever they like. And some interesting news, niche versions of Thoughtleader are on the way: Sportsleader, Businessleader, Techleader and Medialeader.
Not enough on the list here Vincent. You're slacking :)
