Thomas Otter » south africa

Being a Good Corporate Burgher.

Thomas Otter — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:52:21 +0000

While taking a break from a flurry of inquiry calls about ERP upgrades vs SaaS replacements, I ambled over to facebook with Nespresso in hand. A few years ago I met Dave Duarte, who introduced me to the Ogilvy Digital Academy in South Africa. There is a lot of innovative stuff going on in the land of my youth, so I follow the SA scene on Facebook and on Twitter. South Africa has had a lot of innovative advertising over the years, and I’m pleased to see this has well and truly moved over into the social side of things. Today’s offering really hit home powerfully.

Have a look at this video.

A couple of things stood out for me.

1. Innovative idea and great execution. Genius. Braille on the burger bun.

2. Wimpy get the fact that People with Disabilities spend money just like other demographics. Designing solutions and marketing for that segment makes business sense. Part of this is about equal rights and access, but it isn’t charity. Humour works.

3. The power of the referral. See the stats at the end of the presentation.

As part of my academic research, I’m looking at how enterprise software companies approach accessibility. Wimpy puts them all to shame. Well done Wimpy.

The World Cup and HR analytics.

Thomas Otter — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:51:30 +0000

Several vendors have sent me links to World Cup related versions of their analytics tools. Some of them are really clever. I can drill down into skills, real time results and so on. Neat stuff, mashing up data sources from all over the place, with compelling charts and stats, and good social sharing features. Easy to use, no training required.

Yet it is a sad indictment of analytics space in that vendors can quickly cook up engaging, immersing and rich dashboards for the World Cup, whereas most HR dashboards are poorly designed, unimaginative, dull and have very limited adoption.

My advice to analytics vendors. Take the learning from how you have visualized football players and apply it to your workforce analytics offerings.
My advice to HR departments. Look at the World Cup dashboards and do it with your workforce data. You have the data, you have the tools. By the time Germany are crowned champions in a few weeks time you could have it built and deployed.

Africa’s mobile advantage. Constraints as opportunity.

Thomas Otter — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:52:33 +0000

My wife took this photo as we drove between Knynsa and Plettenberg Bay on the Garden Route in South Africa. This shop sells mobile access.

A couple of days later I met up with Dave Duarte, Cape Town based marketing expert, UCT lecturer and entrepreneur . We had a long leisurely coffee that turned into lunch. Cafe Neo in Cape town is a buzzing spot, free wifi, an abundance of power sockets, great views and excellent coffee.

We discussed open source, software and law, social software, evangelists and analysts, ERP, start ups, but the level of mobile commerce and advertising sophistication really impressed me.

Dave mentioned that South Africa has one of the world’s highest usages per capita of mobile web in the world, strong SMS usage and high device penetration. For many South Africans, the mobile is their only electronic device. It would not surprise me at all if the Silicon Cape shows the rest of the world a thing or two about mobile commerce. Yebo gogo.