Patricia De Lille has denounced the freedom of bloggers, asking government to crack down on bloggers. This follows a bout blog of criticism targeted at ID colleague, Simon Grindrod.
IOL reports that she’s even applying to use tax-payer’s money for a National Intelligence Service investigation to track the blogger down.
Fortunately, we live in a free and democratic country where this will not get very far. Perhaps, as Angus points out, MP De Lille will find a more sympathic government in communist China or North Korea?
The point of citizen journalism, as opposed to regulated mainstream media is free and natural expression of ideas by ordinary people (i.e. voting constituents). If these issues with Grindrod are being raised online, people are probably talking about them in natural conversation too. She could gain alot more benefit by paying attention to what is being said, and possibly responding in a public forum to the issues that have been raised. This is the meaning of “join the conversation”.
This is why your fellow parliamentarians Helen Zille and Ebrahim Rasool from the DA and ANC respectively have social-media profiles… And I congratulate them for that.
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Fast Company spoke with trend experts to create a slideshow called “Top Jobs in 2007“.
Interestingly, number 6 top job was “Viral Marketers and Media Promoters”:
“Not to be confused with someone in advertising or public relations, a viral marketer knows how to build an audience from nothing with little more than rumor and excitement. Viral Marketers begin “contagious” campaigns that spread largely through word of mouth and the Internet“
If this really does take off, then traditional media has another reason to be concerned, because alot of online viral marketing goes through unpaid channels like email, YouTube and blogs. This would mean more money going to intelligent marketing strategists at the expense of media owners.
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Media is being democratized, and now we all have the opportunity to create as much of our own online content as we want at virtually no cost.
There are millions of voices in the global conversation, all talking at the same time. It’s noisy and it’s cluttered, but miraculously the most committed people always get heard. These people are writing regularly and often about a subject they care about to a community of people that is also influential and passionate.
They might screw-up publicly from time-to-time, but nearly every celebrity and politician will tell you that that’s usually good for business:-p
We tend to forget about those companies that don’t contact us regularly and often. I’d like to suggest that you don’t be one of those this year.
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Since the September 11th Bombings in New York in 2001, many people have argued that Islam has come under attack. And when the cartoon controversy raged last year, many people in the press accused Muslims of being unreasonable.
What I find interesting from the Marketing perspective is that all this debate has served to dramatically increase the number of Muslims in America!
One of the reasons is that many people have gone to do investigations to find out for themselves what Islam is all about. Then with the information they discover, some find that they agree with the principles of Islam and they convert.
The Marketing Principle at play here is that no publicity is bad publicity. It’s far worse to be ignored.
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