Reflections on a heart-warming campaign

Hannelie van As, one of the guests at the Picture the Change awards, shares her experience of the evening.

I was welcomed at the Nedbank Auditorium in true RamsayMedia style by the friendly Sandton office staff. The Nedbank Building lends itself perfectly to an occasion like this, with a high glass roof and two rows of trees forming a welcome line....

Apps: the new business frontier

Its Sunday afternoon, I’m sitting outdoors; sun’s shining – 26 degrees – the umbrella’s up, a lazy breeze blows through my hair. My phone chimes, I reach over… the message on the screen reads: “Facebook: Greg uploaded a pic.” My interest is piqued, so I click and the screen fills with an image of my father taken when he was a teenager. Emotion and memories fill my heart and mind.

Blogging: building a like-minded community

There are more than 200 million travel blogs on the internet, with thousands of new ones going up every day. How do you ever get yours to stand out?

Single Sign-On, the key to unlocking social media

There’s a new buzz word in the digital space: Single Sign-On. It has become the magic key to unlocking social media for businesses, providing a wealth of information that allows them to build relationships via their websites that were previously only possible with social media.

Have you hugged a gecko today?

No? Well you should. Or at least, hug its toes in a symbolic gesture to celebrate stickiness. Those of us who sail the media ocean have faced a barrage of hurdles over the past decade, from murky waters and whirlpools to leaky ships and sea monsters. And our weapons in those times were the same ones on which the industry was built: moveable feasts with names such as circulation, distribution, readership and cost per thousand. Are they still valid? Sure, empirical data is always valuable – the ‘what’ and ‘how much’ of what we do. But if there’s one thing that new media has taught us, it’s that there’s as much, if not more, value in knowing ‘how’ people consume our media. And that’s where the gecko’s fingers and toes come into play.

Digital sales: where's the tipping point?

The launch of various tablets has opened up another delivery mechanism for the distribution of magazine content. To take advantage of this opportunity, over the past 12 months we have appointed a global digital newsstand agent, partnered with a local digital agency (people previously seen as the ‘enemy’) and developed our own digital magazine platform. So far, this has allowed us to present our magazines in a digital page-turning (yawn) format, for consumption on iPad, Android and web-browsing formats. So far, so good.