Jacob Zuma, the ANC, the ANC Youth League and anyone else suggesting that the President's most recent 'love child' with the daughter of one of his peers, is a private matter and should be respected as such, is lacking a fundamental understanding of a key component regarding the shifting value system of today's young people. Namely 'respect'.

'Respect' is a value that is viewed significantly differently by today's younger people, when you hold their view against that of their parents.

Older generations viewed respect from a 'positional' perspective. Big position, fancy title, significant role in society... and respect was automatically given. Title was used to measure the level of respect you were started on. Doctor, Minister, Bank Manager, Mother, Judge, President, King.  To older generations, these, and other such titles, not only placed you structurally, but they came attached with various elements that denoted respect. You wouldn't dare wear anything but your best clothes when meeting some of these 'titles'. There are specific types of greetings attached as well. And, of course, there are privileges that some of these positions have that are not afforded to everyone. ‘He is the President of South Africa, who he has a child with is his prerogative, so respect him accordingly’ is no longer wrapped with the gravitas it used to be.

And, right there sits the lack of understanding. My mom and dad get this. Jacob Zuma's peers get this. Today’s young people suspect he’s on a different planet.

Today’s young people have adjusted the criteria on which respect is given, based on their experience of growing up in a world where people in authority, with high positions, and fancy titles, in every sector, have repeatedly not lived up to the expectations of ‘office’. Anecdotally in your own mind think through the numerous scandals you know of in: education, politics, business, sport, religion, medicine, media, entertainment, etc, etc. The list of sectors is as long as it all encompassing. It is not sufficient, any longer, to give someone respect based on title or position alone. This method has proven, over and over again, to be wanting in the experience of today’s young people.

Their new criteria has developed a fresh approach to respect. It’s relational and not positional. When they meet you, your title and / or position is simply insufficient. They want to get to know you. They want to measure the person against the title in far more concrete ways. Are you who you say you are? If so, prove it? The onus shifts. Increasingly, they will not take your word (title) for it. You have to prove it.

Back to President Zuma. Critics accuse him of behaviour that flies in the face of responsible behaviour in a country with an HIV/Aids crisis. LoveLife, if not the biggest, certainly one of the biggest voices to young people aimed at driving positive and healthy behaviour, describe their ‘loveLifestyle’ as:

• Attitude – hip, happening, motivated, future-focused
• Lifestyle – fit and healthy, able to deal with pressures and talk about it
• Safer sexual behaviour – waiting till you’re older to have sex, having one partner and always using a condom

Wrap this all together and you clearly see why those using the President’s position and title as grounds for ‘respect’ will lose the attention of the majority of South African’s. Today’s young people will not ignore President Zuma’s behaviour. They will not over-look it. It is, in fact, a central event and behaviour that will significantly influence how they construct their respect towards him.

Perhaps if the mouth-pieces out there protecting him had some of this insight they would have taken a vastly different approach in dealing with the issue. What is needed is not a blockade around the issue to be built, but rather an honest and authentic voice from the President helping South Africa’s young people understand his behaviour in order to give them the handles they will need to have a more positive view of him.

That of course is if he wants to enjoy their support. The current strategy will certainly bring a very different result. Perhaps not now, but certainly somewhere down the line.

There are literally thousands of articles and opinions out there spelling out the 'laws' of how to use Twitter. If the authors of those articles were honest, they'd admit that those 'so-called laws' are really just opinions. Their opinions. How on earth can anyone claim, at this early stage in Twitter's life, to have a list of irrefutable laws'?

This post falls into the opinion category then. An irrefutable opinion according to me : )

I'm on Twitter everyday. Several times a day. It's become the biggest influence in my world when it comes to learning. I've come to trust the voices and thoughts of a group of people, many of whom I have never met, to share their insights in a variety of fields that interest me. Even some that don't.

I follow aprox 400 people, and as I scroll through my Twitter feed on my iPhone (I use 4 different Twitter Apps) my most relied upon method of finding those people I really enjoy is through their Twitter Profile Pic. I imagine I should be using their usernames for this, but I don't. I'm a picture person. I possibly should be using 'Twitter Lists'? I don't, I'm a picture person.

And so when someone updates their image I lose them in the noise of my stream. It sometimes can take me weeks to re-orientate myself to their new image.

And that's my irrefutable opinion then. It's also a plea to those interesting people I rely on everyday. Don't change who you are. You don't need to update your 'image'. I've come to like and appreciate you just the way you are : )

P.S. While writing this I found a mildly amusing post on 10 types of Twitter Profile Avatars. Click here to see for yourself.

I found this post from my colleague Graeme Codrington this evening on Twitter.  It's from the blog, 'Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom'. They're 5 predictions she was asked to put together. I agree with all of them. Her last point might as well have been a global stat, as Gen Y / Millenials are a large force to be reckoned with demographically no matter what country you're speaking about.

As the economy recovers, people will flock to employment opportunities that allow them to do work that's personally meaningful to them:  Once the job market stabilizes, all of the people who have been biding their time in unsatisfying jobs will look for ways to leave them, and employees will once again have the upper hand. 

The workplace model of "same time, same place" will continue to disappear:  Now that we can be connected regardless of our physical location, work activities will be distributed across central offices, remote locations, and community locations.  The typical eight-hour workday will be spread across a 14 plus hour window to allow us to attend to needs at home and work with colleagues abroad. 

Active Baby Boomers will force a new definition of retirement:  Although the majority of Boomers are reaching official retirement age, many have no intention of leaving the workforce, opting instead for non-traditional careers that allow them to give back to society.  

The hot button HR issue will be employees' use of social media:  Executives will struggle with how to moderate it, and what rules and regulations should be put on the books to ensure that organizational resources and property aren't compromised and that reputations aren't risked.  

A large influx of graduating college students (Generation Ys/Millennials) will put intergenerational dynamics on everyone's radar:  1988-1990 are the biggest birth years in American history.  Up to now, studying and improving how the four generations communicate with one another has been reserved for a small number of elite organizations. In 2010, if you aren't paying attention, you're losing your competitive edge.

Martin Geissler is an interesting human being. I think he's interesting anyway, but the job he's had for the past 4 years adds to his curiosity quotient. He's the Africa Correspondant for ITN (A British TV company)

I've spent the past three and a half years living in Johannesburg, South Africa with my wife Teresa and our 2 wonderful kids, Daisy and Douglas.
We're due to move on from here in August 2010, which will be tough. We've had the time of our lives in SA - I work as a journalist (Africa Correspondent for ITN - British TV news), so the stories this patch has provided have been truly unforgettable. 

From time to time his stories are used by CNN as part of their coverage I suppose. I was sent a link the other day, that's essentially the search results on CNN of his footage.

As you'd imagine, he's seen things first hand that we read about, avoid, and pray at night that we'll never be a part of.

If you're interested in the footage of these stories, follow this link.

I'm curious. Curious about business' lack of engagement with Twitter  / FaceBook / Tumblr / Google and everything else Web 2.0. I would have thought that any communication channel getting the sort of traction, focus, attention and subscription that these channels are getting, would have business engaging like a love struck teenager who'd just discovered their perfect partner?

But it's not so. So not so. So far, the majority of my experience and observation is that business has been an extremely poor performer in these spaces. Take a look at these points from Jeffbulla's Blog:

1. 73 percent of Fortune 100 companies registered a total of 540 Twitter accounts.
2. About three-quarters (76 percent) of those accounts did not post tweets very often.
3. More than half (52 percent) were not actively engaged (This was measured by engagement metrics such as numbers of links, hashtags, references and retweets.)
4. 50 percent of the Fortune 100 accounts had fewer than 500 followers, a small number in relation to the size and reach of a major corporation.
5. 15 percent were inactive; of those,11 percent were merely placeholder accounts — unused accounts to protect corporate names against so-called brand-jacking on Twitter — and 4 percent were abandoned after being used for a specific event.
6. 26 percent of their Twitter accounts were primarily used as a one-way flow of information (either by RSSnews feeds or manual tweets) that offered no engagement with followers.
7. Tweets did not provide opinions or encourage discussions.This contradicts the value of Twitter as a two-way dialogue to build relationships with customers and advocates.
8. A sizeable 24 percent of the Twitter accounts were primarily used for brand awareness.
9. Many appeared to be on Twitter simply to have an online presence.
10. They did not use the platform to reach out to the community and demonstrate that their brand is a trusted source of valuable information, a business that not only talks but also listens to customers.
11. Surprisingly, only 16 percent of the Fortune 100 accounts were used mainly as sales vehicles for company products and services.Other companies did not appear to understand that sales growth can be achieved by posting special Twitter offers, coupons, limited bargains and sales prices, or by searching for customers who mention a company product and reaching out to them to build a relationship.
12. Customer service was the focus of only 9 percent of the accounts; it is highly likely that these companies are worried about corporate reputation — posts that might be damaging to a brand.In addition, success requires a commitment to respond “quickly to customer queries, suggestions or complaints. Note: According to Twitter’s own best practices, “your reply should come within a day, if not within hours”.
13.  “Thought leadership appeared to be the least prominent Twitter strategy by Fortune 100 companies, with only 8 percent focused on it. Corporate reputation and authority can be extended onto Twitter, but are most effective only after thought leadership is demonstrated in newspapers, trade publications or recognized by analysts and bloggers. This I think demonstrates the blog and website as your  “home base” and Twitter as your one of your “Outposts”
14.  Finally, another 14 percent of accounts were used for other reasons such as recruitment or employee-specific information, or their accounts were locked and not visible.These companies were unable to build relationships with interested communities.

A little e-mail back and forth and we've agreed to use Google Wave to continue the conversation. For a number of reasons:

* We could learn about Google Wave, by using it
* We could add others we met along the way that would like to play with us
* We'd have a record of the conversation, both in content and in time line

So we've begun. Slow start from my side. Mostly because I need to get Google Wave integrated into my world. Need to visit it regularly and play with it thoroughly. I'm grateful for the opportunity with Terrence. Here's to a long and perfectly forming wave : )

Apparently there's some confusion in the Twitterverse whether to use 'RT' or '(via)' when re-posting a Tweet you'd like to share with your world?

For me the debate is fairly simple.... I think RT is messy and it puts me off reading a tweet when I see it at the beginning of a tweet. Sometimes you can even get a few RT's before the 'meat of the tweet'. However, (via) is often at the back of the tweet and therefore doesn't make it messy.

But my thinking never made any of the reasoning of Ryan Moore, who got a couple of RT's yesterday with his post on which to use and when.

There will be some asking whether this is really important? But, like with all things, it will settle down and a standard practice will emerge. Let's see how it all happens?

P.S. I just re-read this and am impacted by the fact that there are some people out there who can't read this. It'll be in code to them. My gosh, Twitter has given us a neat little exclusive language to feel connected around. Very clever. Very weird.

This has been a frustrating journey for me. Trying to find a way to optimise any of our sites for mobile use. It's such a no-brainer. Isn't it? The world is going mobile. In the developing world we'll be skipping laptops and probably beat the rest of the world to a mostly mobile universe (MMU). So getting mobile needs to happen sooner than later.

The early adopters have already arrived. In fact the next layer after early adopters is probably on the charge as I write. So frustrating them with a lack of mobile-ness is not smart, especially with the nature of social media and what happens when people get frustrated. Getting a Twitter-Smack isn't fun for anyone.

Even just a few years ago, thinking about designing or optimizing your website for mobile devices was a risky proposition. So many different types of devices and mobile web browsers exist that picking and choosing what to optimize for could take up lots of resources for very little payoff. However, now that mobile devices are becoming more and more ubiquitous, it’s time to consider optimizing your business’s site for mobile visitors.

Thanks Christina Warren for her post - 'Optimizing your business website for mobile visitors'

Go here for her full article

I'm a PodCast junkie in my immeadiate world, amongst those I know. A PodCast early adopter, and a fanatical supporter. An evangelist of sorts. So many great inputs, in 20 min chunks to keep me learning in places and spaces I'm not able to read, but where I can listen. Mostly while travelling.

For the longest time I've been toying with creating a feed of what I like. Not just what I listen to, but what strikes me as useful and interesting.

I've done that. Started today and will continue to update once or twice a week, to build a resource chanel worth listening to. A filter through the ears and mind of me, if you like.

So for anyone who'd like to join me you can subscribe on iTunes here - itpc://www.barriebramley.com/bpp/listen.xml, or pick up the rss feed here: http://www.barriebramley.com/bpp/listen.xml