The Semacraft Blog

Tis the season once again. Family, friends, food & facetime…the four F’s of Christmas. I also think it’s the one season in which social networks are unable to fill the relational void they fill the rest of the year. Nothing can truly replace facetime. That’s why people travel so much at this time of the year and airline ticket prices are at their most expensive.

Make 'face-time' part of your holiday

As we go into 2011, businesses will move from social business experimentation to social business strategy in a bid to mainstream the social web into business operations. But let’s not forget that family, friends and food need facetime to grow. Take your online communities and create offline opportunities for them to strengthen their ties.

We hope to see more of you in offline events in 2011 than ever before.

Have yourself a very merry Christmas and a radically better 2011.

Social media, social networking, crowd sourcing and websites/applications that leverage these for a cause are becoming ever so popular. How many of them actually deliver the results the project owners hoped for?

Participant's at a previous workshop

Semacraft has organized a workshop facilitated by Muchiri Nyaggah where contextually relevant & actionable skills will be learnt and practiced.  Featuring local bloggers and social media personalities, the workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to learn as well as apply strategic planning skills to develop measurable plans for web strategy.

The Agenda

• The Internet Landscape (from social media to crowd sourcing and all points in between)
• Turning visitors into advocates (How to go from casual consumption to active participation)
• Understanding relational ties & why they matter. (The impact of online relationships on Causes)
• Platforms for mobilizing citizens (what is available)


Niti Bhan of Aalto Design Factory facilitating a previous workshop.

• Crafting a plan (putting it all together measurably)
• Putting It All To Work

Venue: Navigators Complex, Kindaruma road, off Ngong road, Nairobi.

Cost: KSh. 6,500.00 per person

Please click here and register and receive the workshop pack and location map.

Diffusion of Innovations is a theory that explains how, why and the rate at which new ideas spread through groups of people. I won’t go into the technical details Everett Rogers posited in his works on the subject, but I will provide some of my observations on the opportunities now present on this side of Open Graph for social CRM. I shall distill these further in future posts over the next few weeks.

Diffusion of Innovation

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I am yet to bump into a business that sets up shop but goes out of its way to ensure the reception area is unmanned 24/7.  I’m not quite sure how many are like me, but if I walk in and find no one to serve me, I’ll probably go and not come back. Of course ATM lobbies don’t count.  For consumer-facing businesses, spending time and money planning and putting together a great reception is a no-brainer because we have no problem seeing the relationship between the brick and mortar storefront and our ability to compete and grow.  So why do so many businesses ignore the online storefront they put so much money into designing, building and marketing?

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Starting a new project can be daunting. The scale of the project is not always what is most daunting but the scale of management’s expectations, or even your own. Social networks have become the foreign lands every brand feels the need to setup an embassy. But how much investment is needed? How do we measure this new thing? Does it have an ROI? What if it fails? These questions, and more, keep many brand profiles on social networks at the experimentation stage for long periods of time. So the young chap who spends inordinately long hours of Facebook gets the job of setting up and managing the profiles and is then left to his devices.

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