Well done  to everyone  who voted for our majestic Table Mountain! The announcement was 21:07 in  the V&A Waterfront. We were all  gathered  at Sevruga Shushi Restaurant, waiting for the announcement of  the  top 7 wonders of nature. It was a nervous, nail biting moment  but but some how I just had that feeling that Table Mountain will come out tops.

The  New7Wonders of Nature are as follows: Amazon, Halong Bay, Iguazu Falls, Jeju Island, Komodo, Puerto Princesa Underground River and  Table Mountain. I am proud to say that I was part of the Social Media Factory team that did the online campaign for this historical even.  Table Mountain is  360 million years old and is on of the oldest mountain on earth.

Social Media Factory in collaboration with Table Mountain Cableway  did a outreach programme to teach disadvantage children computer literacy and and getting them to vote. From February – November more than 120,000 unique visitors per month  was directed to www.votefortablemountain.com. A record breaking 3million votes was casted via the Mxit platform in one day. The Table Mountain fanpage reached an amount of 14,000 fans over a 8 month period and @votefortablemount twitter reached more than 2 million twitter users.

You can read more about the online campaigns and the outreach programme here

Saturday past was the big day for me, did the “I Ran-D For Hope” campaign. I woke up with a cough, headache and felt a bit flu-ish, however ,after a good ,healthy breakfast ,I felt good and ready for the day. My background , I am not professional runner and this was the first time I did a road run, this distance. The journey was from the foot of  Table Mountain to the RLabs office. While making my way to Table  Mountain, I realized, just what I got myself into,and the realization…there  is no way out “this is going to be a long day for me”.

The first stretch from Table Mountain to Mike Sports was down hill all the way .  Mike Sports was  the first water stop. I enjoyed the first stretch and we did it at a fast pace. When I came to Woodstock, I grew tired and my legs started to cramp, all that went through my mind was”  its still a long way home”. Then,Just when I felt like giving up the RLabs team, Hectic nine 9 and Fiona Fury( Table Mountain) came pass with motorbikes and made a noise and cheered me on. That gave me some extra miles

Coming down Blossom Road, this was the home stretch,  I had little to no energy left. While waiting for the traffic car and the motorbikes to escort me into Bridgetown, where RLabs are situated. I took a break to stretch. A  few minutes later the traffic cars came with the motorbikes. I was escorted through Bridgetown,the people came out to see what the buzz was about, I took that opportunity to encourage them to vote for Table Mountain.

As I came through the gates at RLabs it was  amazing to see all the students  standing outside as I’m making my way to RLabs. This whole campaign was about them and to raise funds for their end of year graduation. The students also contributed extensively to the Vote For Table Mountain campaign. My overall experience, I enjoyed every moment of it and it was nice to have a team and people that supported us.

A big thanks to our sponsors

Our Partner Vote For Table Mountain

AS we continue seeing the rise and growth of Social Media accross various industries, it is clear that we are seeing large volumes joining the bandwagon. Below we share some of the statistics proving that Social Media is still breaking ground. How long this will last will depend on how its being used by businesses, non-profit organisations, governments, communities and youth at large.

1. One in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook ( This number is calculated by dividing the planets 6.94 billion people by Facebook’s 750 million users)
2. People spend 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
3. Each Facebook user spends on average 15 hours and 33 minutes a month on the site
4. More than 250 million people access Facebook through their mobile devices
5. More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook
6. 30 billion pieces of content is shared on Facebook each month
7. 300,000 users helped translate Facebook into 70 languages
8. People on Facebook install 20 million “Apps” every day
9. YouTube has 490 million unique users who visit every month (as of February 2011)
10. YouTube generates 92 billion page views per month (These YouTube stats don’t include videos viewed on phones and embedded in websites)
11. Users on YouTube spend a total of 2.9 billion hours per month (326,294 years)
12. Wikipedia hosts 17 million articles
13. Wikipedia authors total over 91,000 contributors
14. People upload 3,000 images to Flickr (the photo sharing social media site) every minute
15. Flickr hosts over 5 billion images
16. 190 million average  Tweets per day occur on Twitter (May 2011)
17. Twitter is handling 1.6 billion queries per day
18. Twitter is adding nearly 500,000 users a day
19. Google+ has more than 25 million users
20. Google+ was the fastest social network to reach 10 million users at 16 days (Twitter took 780 days and Facebook 852 days)

source: http://instagr.am/p/N5Yzc/

Yesterday I was taken out of my comfort zone doing a talk at the WTF11 conference. My topic of discussion was about how Social Media is “Industrializing Digital Minds”. After giving an  introduction of what I was going to talk about, moving over to the next slide technology failed me and I had to improvise by getting the Ipad. I must admit this got me a bit nervy because there was no visuals for the crowd.

It was a journey that started forty years ago where a few friends wanted to connect people and build a community through football.  This was all done with good intentions  but  it turned out to be the birth of the American Gang. Today ex-drug addicts and gangsters is tapping in the Social Media to do  good and build communities to share stories of hope.   Two of the project  that I highlighted was “Drug Advice and Support”  a platform that was created for people with social ills, mainly focusing on drug addiction, these  people can freely express themselves to advisors that was once addicted to various  substances. We are currently supporting more than half a million people across South Africa.

With Social Media being the training ground, we saw the potential and the power of Social Media and how it can sustain the lives of people that is unemployed. This was the birth of the “Social Media Factory”, A Social and New Media Agency powered by community members. The Social Media Factory offers Social Media Training and Workshops, Event Coverage, Social Media Strategies and Campaign Management Strategies.  Trained community members who are unemployed are given opportunities to create an extra income through being part of a team managing social media strategies for businesses, organisations, schools and public figures.