Eric Edelstein

This afternoon I did a Pecha Kucha talk at the Graduate School of Business in Cape Town on social media. Looks like you’re putting on another A Plus course Dave!

Pecha Kucha is great - 20 slides, 20 seconds each - the grand total of 6 minutes 40, and the entire presentation is done on auto pilot…so regardless of whether you have finished speaking about a particular point, the next slide appears…

So I did a quick overview of Social Media, and unfortunately couldn’t stay for Uno’s talk, which I’m sure was interesting as he was going to delve much deeper into certain aspects of Social Media.

Nevertheless, I gave an overview of Social Media, both locally and internationally. Obviously most South African’s know about Facebook, as it’s the most visited site in South Africa according to Alexa (bigger than google as of a short while ago). Over 400 000 South African’s are now using Facebook, which is 10% of the South African Internet population, taking into account Arthur Goldstuck’s view that there are 4 million Internet users in South Africa.

What is also fascinating is that Facebook has only taken off in certain countries, as has other social media sites. South Africa is the 6th largest in terms of country’s using facebook.

But MySpace and Orkut are still far larger. Orkut is HUGE in South America, but even the google association hasn’t propelled it to take off everywhere.

But today google have launched their new social media platform - it’s a full time job just trying to keep up with what’s happening!!