Die Antwoord (The Answer) is an assault on your senses and sensibilities. Die Antwoord is all over Twitter now and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they become a trending topic this weekend. Die Antwoord is an Afrikaans zef rap-rave band from South Africa.

You heard that right. Afrikaans Zef Rap Rave. That is not the best known musical genre. As Vice magazine queried in October when they interviewed Ninja, the lead singer of Die Antwoord:

“…nobody from South Africa ever really makes it overseas. You do realise that?”

Die Antwoord would have none of that. Ninja spurns those assertions in their track ‘Enter The Ninja’:

Fuck you all who said I wouldn’t make it
Who said I was a loser
Who said I was a no-one
But look at me now
All up on the interweb
World-wide, 2009 Futuriste

Die Antwoord have come from what is often (wrongly) seen as a cultural backwater to be the music sensation of 2010. They have overcome the stereotypes about Afrikaans (the baddies in ‘Lethal Weapon 2′ anyone?).

But theirs is a marketing storm that money can’t buy. How did they do it?

They have been bubbling under the radar for a while, before this week’s explosion. I know, because I am one of the lucky ones to have been following them since their inception. I’m Afrikaans myself and one my guilty pleasures is reading Watkykjy, the legendary Zef Afrikaans blog that became Die Antwoord’s home.

Die Antwoord on Google trends

Watkykjy has been going since 2000 and regularly attracts about 100,000 unique users per month. But it’s much more than that. Watkykjy is home to an identity. The home of Zef. As such they have been organising events and parties as well.

Die Antwoord got their own little buitekammerttjie (little outside room) on the Watkykjy site about 10 months ago, where they had a number of tracks available for free download. Watkykjy also regularly plugged the band to their fanatical audience. Die Antwoord became headline acts at Watkykjy jols (parties). Die Antwoord even made a song Wat kyk jy! Still, these were parties inside a small subculture. How did it break out?

Die Antwoord aren’t loaded (not yet anyway). But around them gathered a bunch of talented individuals who loved them and saw their potential. People like Rodger Ballen, an American Photographer who lives in South Africa and who has shot the cover for their $O$ album. Leon Botha, an artist, Hip Hop DJ Solarize and the world’s longest surviving Progeria, opened their sets. People like The Wedding DJ’s.

As someone who knows them intimately said:

They don’t have huge budgets. Just friends with a passion for what they do. Sean (photographer and the guy that shot the Zef Side video) is a case in point.

http://www.metalbox.co.za/

He’s a young guy who’s friends with Ninja and Yo-landi and just understands what they are trying to do.

Still, the video had Die Antwoord’s signature all over it.

If you look at the work he’s done for Die Antwoord you’ll notice how it’s completely different to some of the other shots he’s done for other South African bands. That’s Ninja’s next-level influence.

The video made a difference. For impact (awareness), little packs a punch as a good video. It is very well produced and high quality (just like the Enter the Ninja video above – the artwork of which was made drawn & painted Ninja himself), and importantly full of Die Antwoord’s quirkiness. Still, this was done on a low budget.

The video by Sean and Die Antwoord

This is what Forrester spoke about in their Groundswell book when they talk of Energizing your crowd. Die Antwoord has support and a platform for take off.

Die Antwoord simply released their videos online, on YouTube and Vimeo. They started a Facebook Fan page. Next they built a good looking website (that nobody on an iPad will see), but through which you could listen to all their tracks for free. (Note to all you SEO heads, it’s Flash so technically not good for SEO – still the content is so good – it doesn’t matter – this reeks of Linkbait.)

Screengrab from Die Antwoord's website

The most important thing

And that brings me to my last point. Yes, Die Antwoord had the backing of Watkykjy and a few other fans with blogs like me. But what really matters is their talent on several fronts. The music is tight, the hooks catchy, the look disturbingly cool. And they have a narrative (brand if you like).

Besides their sound, their Zef look, their accents, where they’re from, all of this is loaded with meaning. They disturb, they delight, they smash stereo types, they’re sexy. It’s remarkable.

This is the first lesson of social media. If your product is a dud, forget it. Buy advertising, that’s your tax for being boring as they say.

If it’s good, you’ll have an army of crazed advertisers to support you at a very low cost.

Leon Botha - DJ Solarise - Die Antwoord

Who needs you - Yahoo! and Flickr

Just the other day I noticed that Yahoo! had plonked their logo next to Flickr’s. Yahoo!, in case you didn’t know, bought Flickr a couple of years back.

Why have the Yahoo! logo next to Flickr’s? It certainly does not enhance the Flickr brand, although I suppose it might give Yahoo! a little leg up.

Curious, I went to have a look at the Yahoo! front page to see whether it still resembled a portal. And, oh goodness me! It does.

What follows is a post I wrote in 2002 and updated in 2004. Now updated for 2009.

–

Does the portal concept still make sense on the Internet?

Let’s restate what a portal was supposed to be: a website that offers structured pathways into the web (as opposed to dynamically generated as with search), offering a wide range of services and content. Almost all you need really. A one-stop shop.

These portals will be the gateway through which most internet users would pass to the rest of the web. But to support the business model – sell media space – the real aim is to keep as much traffic within the portal and monetise it via ads. And if this can’t be done, to sell the links themselves.

When companies like Yahoo! and Lycos had their IPO’s, the market agreed that portals were a good idea.

But in the long run, for companies like Yahoo!, Lycos and MSN being internet portals has caused endless problems. They have been at sixes and sevens, trying to be all things to all people, fighting with their own internal subdivions over the use of an overarching brand, style, link hierarchies and placement and consistent navigation. All this strife as a direct result of being “portals”.

Yahoo! tries to be social

Picture by TJtalks

They have been slowly haemorrhaging users and not growing their reach, except in key services like instant messaging and email where they got an early head start and had good solid products. But they are losing ground to the MySpaces (2009 update: Facebook) and Googles of this world.

Portals are tied to an old fashioned view of the media.

A view that does not get that with the internet, power shifts away from large top down media companies. Away from companies that were set up to produce fairly general content to be consumed by large groups of consumers.

What they missed of course is that in reality we are moving deeper into a world where every person can become a producer and not just a consumer of media. This is a concept that companies like Google got from the start. (These days its often called social media.)

If you accept this vision of the changing media world – a world where it becomes easier and easier for anyone to create a website, post a comment, and upload a video – then it follows that on the Internet there will be a great number of websites. (Jeff Jarvis says we’re moving from an economy where we needed to manage scarcity to one where we need to manage abundance – in media at least.)

Yes, it’s true that entry points to the web are potentially very valuable. If you control these entry points you become the gatekeeper to this fragmented media landscape. Which is exactly why Netscape – the company that blasted the first hot air into the first net bubble – was thought to be so valuable. It was thought that through ownership of an internet browser, one could become the gatekeeper to the web’s content.

Following the same logic, the concept of the internet portal did make sense. That is, if the internet worked liked other media did.

Yes, until search engines evolved into qualitative rank listings, the media space and the links on a portal were significant. But the ever-expanding web universe and  the introduction of Google’s PageRank system changed the landscape dramatically. Google ranks a page according to how many pages link to it. Thus if web users link to your page, Google reckons it merits a higher value.

Web users won’t recommend a jack-of all-trades website by linking to it. It destroys their credibility if they recommend bad stuff.

And no single portal could possibly list and link to all the websites a single user would like to use. Users’ needs are too specific, various and constantly shifting. And thus websites – large or small – tend to link to the best services/ pages directly. Why send people to a general page first if you can deliver the right page right now? So it’s clear PageRank loves specialisation.

Search engines’ indexing hierarchy (I did not know the term SERPs back then) favour and therefore create a web where there are lots of specialised “champion” websites.

The result of all this is that search engines have become category winner selection engines. (Jeff Jarvis calls this ‘do what you do best and link to the rest’.) Users have come to know that, when used well, a search engine gives them access to the best web content and services. Once you follow this logic you can see how the old style portal concept is really dead.

(Just this week I read an Ofcom study that says that young people routinely trust search engines to give them the best links:

Among children aged 12-15 who use the internet, almost all have experience of using search engine websites (94%).

There is no clear consensus among search engine users, but 12-15s are more likely to respond that results are ranked on their usefulness or relevance (37%) or their truthfulness (32%) than they are to respond that websites pay money to be at the top of the list (14%). )

(More proof: SEOMoz – the search engine optimisation site – recently wrote an article on a web design trend – the Single Purpose home page.)

See it as an opportunity. Develop your sub-brand well and it will soar even when you’re not linking to it from your front page – like Yahoo! Pipes. If it does not work well, pull it. It’s instant feedback. Google did this with Google Video, while portals like Lycos were flogging dead horses for years via their homepage.

It gets worse.

What compounds this problem for the portals even more is that users are increasingly becoming so used to the mechanics of search and are increasingly using search as a way of navigation. For instance, when I want to look up information on Uganda’s dictator Idi Amin on Wikipedia, I just search for “wikipedia idi amin” via Google and click on the first link Google serves up. I’m there. Why bother entering the Wikipedia address into the browser and then searching Wikipedia for Idi?

Search as navigation is becoming an unstoppable force.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

The portals are squeezed on two sides. They are not specialist sites – the sites that tend to be recommended by search engines – and users don’t need portals to point them to these sites.

Time for a bit of futurology: users will navigate the web in two ways. By searching keywords like “web mail” and by searching for brands like “Yahoo! Mail” (and sub-brands and sub-sub-brands). In other words, when you search for something and you don’t have a brand in mind, you will just do a normal keyword search.

If you do have a brand in mind, you will Google/ navigate directly to the sub-brand you know and trust it to work well. (I for instance use Yahoo! Mail and I Google “mail yahoo” to directly go to mail.yahoo.com.) I never go to Yahoo first and then to Mail.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

And it’s already happening. I checked Nielsen Netratings’s stats and the majority of Yahoo! Mail users do exactly that and never ever see the Yahoo! front page. Even though Yahoo! tries to persuade us all the time to go and have a look. Many BBC Online users go to BBC News only and skip the portal front page.

But even Yahoo! has been realising that users come to it for specific good products and not primarily because they are Yahoo! the portal. That is why Yahoo has bought a huge and dynamic one-trick-pony, Flickr, but won’t be changing Flickr’s name. It would be stupid to change its name because a recognizable brand is paramount if you want users to find (search for) a service.

Nor have they been adding links from the Yahoo! home page to Flickr. It does not need to. Flickr is a top ranked website already thank you very much. (They have now – but it’s more a badge of honour and brand association than anything else.)

There you have it- The so-called Yahoo! home page is actually just a glorified site map. Why put your site map on your home page?!

The Yahoo! users increasingly go directly to the services Yahoo! offer, bypassing the front page. And you can bet your bottom dollar the successful Yahoo! channels and services are a success because they are good, not because they are featured on the Yahoo! homepage. Yahoo! should do them a favour and give them their own names and branding so that they can thrive.

People have been wondering why Google does not link to its other products from its home page. It’s exactly this reason.

Have we all been imbibing the cool aid? Are the likes of Wikipedia really crowd-powered?

In a recent well-argued article in Forbes – The Myth of Crowdsourcing – Dan Woods claims crowds don’t innovate, individuals do.

Crowds and uniquely talented individuals

“There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure. From their fervent brains spring new ideas. The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing.”

He goes on to point that what are often called crowdsourcing platforms really are virtuoso search platforms.

Apparently Dan Woods accosted Wikipedia-founder Jimmy Wales at a conference last year and asked him about how articles were created.

“He said that the vast majority are the product of a motivated individual. After articles are created, they are curated–corrected, improved and extended–by many different people.”

I agree with Dan Woods to an extent. Just like much of the sharing on social platforms is actually just egotistical self publishing, crowds are often driven by a few talented individuals. I have discovered brilliant individual photographers on Flickr, but you do have to wade through quite a bit of mediocrity first.

The LA Times’s experiment with a Wikitorial – an attempt to have a user-created and contributed editorial on the Iraq War – is proof of how the crowd can get it wrong.

“On Friday, the paper introduced an online feature it called a wikitorial, asking Web site readers to improve a 1,000-word editorial, “War and Consequences”, on the Iraq war.

Readers were invited to insert information, make changes or come to different conclusions.”

It did not last.

“A Los Angeles Times experiment in opinion journalism lasted just two days before the paper was forced to shut it down Sunday morning after some readers repeatedly posted obscene photos.”

Want to see something not very cool that sounds awful? Then look at MTV’s Amplichoir below. It’s part of a marketing campaign and billed as the world’s biggest crowdsourced choir. Users are incentivised to take part via a competition prize.

It screams fake, sounds horrid and its pastel coloured iPod-esque backgrounds look contrived. Mr. Woods I’m sure would agree that this proves his point. It does not work because there is no talented individual(s) to make something of it.

But my agreement with Mr. Woods only goes this far.

YouTube is full of bad user-submitted videos – and the odd good one , but as a whole it is collective effort. Most quality Wikipedia articles may be driven by an individual user, but the whole is a “crowdsourced” phenomenon.

And both YouTube and Wikipedia have been increasing mechanisms that make collaboration and reaction to others’ contributions possible. This allows us to feed off, incorporate and build on ideas.

Curveball! Kutimans splicing together of YouTube videos into fantastic new ones, is that not evidence of a crowd of virtuoso’s being used and orchestrated by a virtuoso?

Where the crowd’s contributions stop and the virtuoso’s starts is not always so clear cut.

Creation vs Evaluation

There are of course two kinds of ways to tap into collective intelligence. And perhaps that’s where Mr. Woods confusion arises.

The one – like Wikipedia and like Flickr is where people – yes individuals – create.

But there is another form. i.e. to evaluate existing ideas and creations – and this often happens anonymously.

It’s when we look at the power of collective evaluation – like with voting mechanisms, market prediction systems or systems like Google’s Pagerank (effectively a voting mechanism that counts links to predict web page importance), that we can see a more pure form of collective intelligence in action. Google does an amazing job of finding good websites based on our links.

In other words, where we use collective methods for large scale evaluation and not ‘just’ for ideation or creation we have more pure examples of ‘crowd’ intelligence. But even these lines are blurring.

Digg and the Starbucks and Dell idea platforms allow users to submit ideas, and others to vote on them. Eat your heart out Mr. Woods.

Since fellow RAAKonteur Wessel wrote his post about PR, advertising and the new roles in communication, and David Meerman Scott’s penned his thought-provoking Is it time for companies to hire a Social Media Administrator, we can now officially add social media administrating to the list of services we offer.

And not just in one way. In two.

In a previous life, we built a website, blog and e-commerce solution for WHERE, a new and exciting (ethical) fashion brand. And last week they asked us to advice them on an ongoing basis on how to use the right social media tools.

Good on them. Good for us.

So now we make sure they have access to the right tools, use them well and that their website is in great SEO shape. We also double-check their blog posts and tweets if needed. And listen for them. That all makes it easy for them to be up-to-date, found and be part of the conversation.

But as with most new things, it was a particularly interesting exercise in how to quantify this service, a problem that was also mentioned in Jason Falls’ very decent blogpost about the culture clash between Social Media and Ad agencies and in Jay Bear’s comments on that post.

It’s not that straightforward to bill or staff for.

Because Social Media is about knowing the brand through-and-through-and-through. And through.

And, ideally, about being part of a brand 24/7, because your crowd doesn’t stop talking about you. Which means that even reacting quickly to a crisis can be a bit late – as Domino’s Pizza recently discovered.

Thirdly, it works best when you have the power to make day-to-day decisions without having to go through layers of sign-off procedures.

Based on those thoughts, I can see two models working:
1. A retainer model (we prefer to call it the ‘plug-in‘ model) where you’re really close to the brand (or the organisation) and you guide them on a day-to-day basis. This is more suitable for small to medium-sized companies, who can’t afford to hire a full-time person and trust you to do what is needed.
Will this be easily scalable when the brand becomes bigger? Possibly not. Option 2 might then make more sense.

2. A training model, which aims not only at consulting, but also at teaching key people at various levels. Those key people could be CEO’s as well as Brand & Product Managers. It could be someone from the Marketing department, a customer service rep or even a developer. Anyone who’s into and understands the medium and is keen to take on the role of ‘Social Media Administrator’.

Importantly, this training course should not only be on a strategic level, because Social Media is about ‘doing’ it. In other words, how you write a blogpost, what keywords you use, how to craft a Tweet, how to produce good audio for video. The list goes on.

For now, we use option 1 for WHERE. And we’re currently developing option 2 into a workshop about ‘Social Media in PR’, about which we’ll write some more soon.

Exciting times! And we’ll see if these options still stand in a year’s time. Or even in a few months.