The right buzz for your business.

Word of mouth marketing has for ages being one of the most effective means of marketing. Get the people talking, build the buzz, create the Band wagon effect, and crowd sourcing. The concept is mostly the same in all these methods ‘Get the People talking about your product’.  The power is given to the consumers.  The existence of these social planets births the social media by giving product developers the opportunity to advertise their brands via these social platforms. So the question is how do I get my products and brands to penetrate into this little galaxy and become an integral part of that world, that big world that is now competing with the real world.

One of the ways of achieving this is  crowdsourcing or better yet Nairatweets. It is easier for people to convince their friends to buy a product than for a billboard to do so.  So you have a social planet on the one hand, u have the product on another. Naira tweets bridges the gap. Nairatweets offers a platform that connects businesses and service providers with a large number of regular people and celebrities who are willing to tell people in their sphere of influence about the business or service. Naira tweets offers you social crowd sourcing so instead of the usual rhetoric in adverts, social users compose their own adverts in a language their friends can relate to and it goes out to their social media circle on twitter and Facebook. So you sign up your products with nairatweets, the social users get to work; they compose adverts in the language best understood by their friends and followers for your campaign. Of course the advertisers have the final veto power to accept or reject what a social user has composed about them before it is released into the mainstream. You can track what they say, when they say and how they say it. Visit www.nairatweets.net to register and get your product trending today.

The church: A failed state?

Nigeria as a country is predominantly made up of poor , uneducated and ignorant people looking for their daily bread and with little value for delaying gratification. More than ever the role of bridging the gap between the poor and the rich is a responsibility for our "good" wealthy men. By good I mean any wealthy individual with a conscience and I'll assume all our religious leaders fall in this category.. assume (but our politicians are most definitely NOT included).

My parents attend an orthodox church (name witheld) and one that has a university. When they wanted to start building their university they levied or got donations from all their member churches. My parents' church had to squeeze money out to pay for a university. A few years after the university was built I don’t think any member of their church could afford to send their child to the university and one would expect a form of compensation e.g. offering scholarships to outstanding students from some of its member churches but till date there isn’t one. Then I wonder what’s the sense in a poor mother paying to build a school and keeps praying her child gets educated and the child isn’t even offered a slight chance of getting educated not even from a scholarship. So even if he's the most brilliant student in Nigeria his chance being educated is tied to his mother getting money.

I ask myself, if missionary schools where as expensive and didn’t offer scholarships will my father and mother and a host of other people have the education they had. Missionaries came, brought their money invested their time to educate us and gave lots of opportunities. Excellence was rewarded with scholarships even to study abroad then and the system produced very great minds, Soyinkas and co. If we are to assume our government has failed what has the church done to create a system that gives back to the community. In reality a university should be self running and profiting but if you had gone to a bank to borrow money to build won’t you pay interest? So the least one can do is to convert the interest to opportunities for your members who served as a bank for you.

Personally I knew someone a year ago who was really struggling, had no house, no job and knew nobody in Lagos. He worked really hard in church so much that his pastor noticed and on a fateful day gave him N1 million yes 1 million naira. But that gift as experience later taught me was as good as a curse. What he really needed was a job, a house and maybe a few connections something that would make him have a steady income stream and make something out of his life on the long term. I won’t criticize the pastor for his actions but I think it’s better to teach a man how to fish than to give him a fish even if it’s a million naira fish. With that level of diligence I’m sure on the pastor’s recommendations, some of his wealthy members won’t hesitate to employ the young chap.

About a year ago I worked from home and because I barely had light (NEPA), I'll go to the UN library not far from my house and would read and work from there. Today I have an office I can go to everyday. Andrew Carnegie one of the wealthiest philanthropists of all time built  about 3000 public libraries and I’m sure over time had given millions of people an opportunity to improve their lives far more than giving handouts of thousands of dollars would have done. So what we really need isn’t money but opportunities to develop ourselves, get educated and have a chance to create a living for ourselves.

I’m not attacking churches or pastors it’s just that I think they are the only credible institution we have left, If our politicians don’t care about us, I think our religious institutions still or SHOULD care (Just like maltina does). I feel in empowering our community and giving everyone an equal opportunity to excel, what our government has failed to do we will be able to correct.

#LightUpYaPockets a story of betrayal

The tortoise once went to the hyena to borrow a pot. He asked for the biggest pot the hyena had and promised to return it two days from that time. The tortoise returned the pot but he also gave the hyena back a smaller pot and told the hyena that his big pot gave birth to the smaller pot while it was at his place. This obviously sounded too good to be true but the hyena accepted the pots. A few days later the tortoise comes back again to borrow a pot, this time the hyena gives him two hoping the pots will probably give birth to twins. Alas the tortoise comes back a few days later looking so dejected and told the hyena that his two pots died a few days before then and he had buried their remains. The hyena was dumbfounded but for him to have believed that pots could deliver other pots left him with no choice but to accept that pots could also die.


Its amazing that our 'youth' accepted the gift of N50,000 for transport within Lagos and N150,000 for others. they inadvertently endorsed the high cost of governance and its impact on our lives. If you could accept that with no remorse then the day you ask your government for light, good roads and other infrastructure and they tell you the cost of governance is so much they cant accommodate all that who are you to say otherwise. Or you challenge your senators for collecting huge sums of money for sitting, you also did that by collecting N50k for transport within Lagos. like seriously N50,000? are u flying a chopper from d island to the mainland?


I hope some of the 'youth' present at the lunch read this.

where are tupac, biggie and dbanj

The past few weeks have been interesting with a the Obama/Trump birth certificate drama, Osama's death and the royal wedding but spun a few laughs too, one being Obama's response to Trump after he revealed his birth certificate, in his words.
"he (Donald trump) can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter. Like, did we fake the moon landing?.... And where are Biggie and Tupac?". 
All these news rode on the back of social media and we all had a good time discussing these issues. It got me thinking of the role social media has also played in our home soil, Nigeria then i asked myself where's dbanj.

Dbanj's last tweet was on 17 march, a day before the fateful interview he had with out president and he got a lil more than he bargained for. After using strong words like 'I'm representing the youth of Nigeria' and nodded even before he got answers his fans took things a little personal, so personal he totally went off twitter and couldn't reply any of his tweets. 
A few years ago he would hav gotten away with this but the truth is the world has really changed between the time he sang tongolo and him becoming a scape goat. What made matters worse was that most of his fans own mobile devices and the negative impact of their reactions might do a lot of harm to his reputation.

Social media has given everyone a voice, a voice dat can either make of break a public figure or any thing other entity and it's a sign of what's to come. Before now, public opinion was based on what the mainstream media (newspaper and TV) fed us, we didnt have a voice except when we argue with our peers on 
so I'll advice everyone, be careful what you do or say cos with social media, it only takes a day 2 go from hero 2 zero.

The Economics of doing whats right: Perception vs Experience

A few years ago Bank PHP came out with as string of adverts, “one day cars will run on water”, “Nothing is impossible”… and these adverts really did a lot of good to their public perception and lured a lot of prospectives to their halls but these adverts also raised the expectations of the public, so much that most people were disappointed by the experience they got after getting into their banking halls. They more or less created a good outlook for themselves but failed to work on creating a good experience for their customers.This strategy made them have good short term results but didn't translate to good long term results.

GTBank on the other hand took a different approach, they worked on creating a good customer experience more on the inside than outside without spending so much on fancy ads and killer campaigns. They developed an exceptional customer service, and focused more on giving their customers exceptional service. This ultimately gave them more long term customers and reduced their running cost because they focused on creating a good experience which later gave them a good outward perception. Today their results speak even when majority of the banks in Nigeria are going through a downward phase.

The same goes for governance, in 4 years Lagos state improved the living experience of Lagosians, kept the roads clean, and did the little they could do and that guaranteed a smooth return for the governor and made the citizens believe that change could come to their state and country.

A key in winning is having a good impact by creating a good personal experience with people you interact with as opposed to people having a good outward perception of you. This might take a little more patience and delaying gratification but on the long term one will always be better off for it because in reality, we are all in it for the long term

The Evolution of cool: A twitter story

Times have indeed changed on twitter, I won’t count myself as having a high tweet count but in my short time on twitter, I’ve lived in say 3 generations of twitter usage in Nigeria.

Generation 1: The rebellious era.
This era was one in which a few people got tired of facebook and its ‘social misfits’. They wanted a new place, somewer they had better control of. They were more of facebook rebels and didn’t mind the low population of twitter users then. I’ll put @exschoolnerd and @hexydre in this era and I won’t forget @iamquedy sending me dis fb message. “Come to twitter, facebook is brimmed up”. I opened my account in dis era but barely had 10 tweets.

Generation 2: One big happy family
People like me came into this generation, we wanted to be a part of the new system, loved d challenge n followed a few good people, @hexydre being one. This era is d era I like to call the ‘one big happy family’ era. Good tweets got u good follows, people wer polite and in all twitter was one big happy family.

Generation 3: The aftermath
A lot of people on facebook suddenly wondered where d cool ones had gone and gist of twitter being a ‘fun place’ started spreading and ‘they’ wanted in. They came in and it all changed. Started trouble, twit fights, #TeamFollowBack #TeamIfYouDontFollowBackIlYabYou then cliques started forming, Here u get more followers for having good tits than having good tweets. We started seeing crazy handles, @iwashgirlspant, @mukaila_toh_natty. People started doing anytin 2 get followers, ‘nakeding’ themselves, stealing tweets, googling tweets and trying to be all witty n smart. They just turned the peaceful blue ocean on twitter to a red ocean of big fish eating fish and shark eating big fish. And celebs also joined in this era n some succeeded in making us know how stupid they are. This is the era we are in. more fun I’ll say but def not one you should be a new twitter user in, cos d way up the ladder is a tooth for nail way and a dog eat dog way.
What comes next I can’t predict but one thing is sure, we are on the brink of seeing a 4th Generation.

This post is what I’ve observed IMO, not IMO state, (In My Opinion) for comments and reservation, tell me. @fehintolu
Thanks

The Last Vote Bender

Saw a video of a woman thumb printing several ballot papers and i was sad, in this present age, a young Nigerian sacrificing her future for a few thousands that will likely get exhausted in about a week.
I hope she's the last Vote Bender and the era of vote benders will finally be history.... I Hope