Viral Marketing is one of the eMarketing services South Africa is yet to fully embrace and utilise to its full potential - even though it is tremendously powerful and provides an ROI right up with the rest of the high return yielding services.

The reason for this slow uptake is two-fold:
Firstly, South Africa is rather short in the bandwidth department. Individuals lack the breathing space to send really cool emails/videos around (we tend to get into trouble…or burst our all too expensive cap).
Secondly, the market place is still quite unaware of the strength of this eMarketing service.

Last week was an interesting one for me and it shed a lot of light on just how fruitful the next couple of years are going to be for South Africa – certainly from an online perspective.
It started off on Monday (as weeks tend to) when I flew to Jo’burg and met with Stafford Massie of Google South Africa for a very interesting and reassuring chat. From what he was saying, Google has a very wide eye focused on South Africa and I believe that we may find some online infrastructure assistance coming from their solid hand (but that’s just a feeling...).

On Friday I was lucky enough to meet with a group of young directors and producers from West Fort, an up and coming film/short/advert Production Company. It was heartening to see their (Shukra and Amr) attentive focus on both the micro and macro elements of production.

While talking to them, one of the focus areas of conversation was their perception of the Viral Marketing in South Africa. From their responses it was clear that they had not only thought this element through, but had active plans to implement it. They also let a little slip about the change in the online climate and it appears that the interest for viral videos is growing rapidly. Excellent news for both the state of South Africa’s online affairs and for those of us who assist in its development.

Needless to say, South Africa is becoming an increasingly rich climate and the addition of viral advertising as a mainstream mechanism will, in my eyes; notch us up to the next level.
Anyhow, I’m back in Jo’burg once again for something completely different and will hopefully come back with some new and interesting tidbits.