The Semacraft Blog

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.

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

Brands have been establishing outposts on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn now for a number of years. The last two years have reached fever pitch. Here are some basic realities of these profiles as we have found in our very unscientific survey.

• Many brands that have started experimenting on these sites update their content by logging in directly.
• There are organizations that use third-party services such as Co-Tweet and Hootsuite to update their content.
• Some organizations have been outsourcing the management of their outposts to agencies.
• Many profiles managed by agencies and/or brands with social media teams are updated by more than one person.

Here’s my take. The weakest link in the chain is the username and password. The efforts that have been made by criminal cyberspace gangs over the past decade to harvest identity data should worry administrators some. The Mariposa bot was a big wake-up call for us.

What does this mean for brands with a presence on the social web? Simple. Your website used to be a primary target for hackers. Now it’s going to be your social web profiles. Here’s a scenario.

• Brand A is a gourmet restaurant franchise.
• Brand A’s employee 227 manages the Twitter and Facebook profiles. He loses his laptop computer to a thief and the said computer ends up in the hands of Gang Y who find information valuable. Information such as usernames and passwords.
• Gang Y log in and sends messages to followers/fans inviting them to download x-rated videos at a special discount rate because they are fans of Brand A.
• Brand A discovers the breach when followers/fans begin to complain. As far as they are concerned, the messages came from a valid account they have a history with. They probably won’t believe it when Brand A claims to have lost control of their profiles for a period.

That, I think, is a veritable disaster. Does your business have a disaster plan for this sort of thing? Do you have policies or a strategy designed to ensure login credentials are secure or determine what to do when they are compromised?

Here a five things that can help you get a handle on things.

1. Have a strategy that ensures passwords across the organization are strong and that explicitly directs what is to be done in the event of a breach.
2. Lock things down. When you discover you’ve been hacked, revoke all access to the profiles other than direct login via the social site’s login page. Change all passwords immediately.
3. Report the attack. It’s important to show some proactivity to reassure the both the fans/followers as well as the site that you are back in control.
4. Tell the story loudly. Let your fans know you were hacked, which messages were not from you and that you’re back in control.
5. Plug the leaks. Sometimes weak passwords are not the problem. It could very well be poor enforcement of security such as leaving logged in laptops unattended in public spaces.

Help me grow and improve this list. What’s your take?

I had a conversation with a client who was looking to roll out a social media campaign recently. They seemed to have all their bases covered. They had formal authority from management, great sources for content, a team of creatives working on copy and graphics, a monitoring platform…I was quite impressed.

And then I asked, ‘What happens if your Twitter account is hacked and porn related tweets are sent to you 20,000+ followers?’

There was dead silence.

It was only then that I realized how much even we had failed to emphasize this aspect of online security adequately in the recent past.

Do you know what you would do? Does your organization have a policy on how to respond to this type of situations?

Let us know what your Plan A is.

Watch this blog for a social media crisis response strategy uploading real soon.

Despite your best efforts to define & document the Terms of Reference, document the scope and educate your clients on what to expect (realistically) from a product deployment, things don’t always go like they should.

Sometimes, you’re too good for your own good and your clients come to expect the moon when what can actually be realistically delivered is Mir.  Pointing them back to the TOR and Scope documents sometimes becomes an emotional, difficult process that has you and your staff wondering why you picked this website/scrm project in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »