SMEs urged to adopt digital marketing to boost revenue

By Bankole Orimisan

VCONNECT, Nigeria’s largest local search engine and leading information service provider, recently converged Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) owners in Lagos for a business forum on Digital Marketing.

The business forum with the theme “The Power of Digital Marketing” which was held in Lagos recently, was organised to help business owners achieve a paradigm shift from traditional marketing methodologies to digital marketing, which is more efficient and cost effective.

Speaking at the forum, the facilitator and Territory Sales Manager,

VConnect Global Services Limited, Mr. Wale Onibudo disclosed that digital marketing has great edge over traditional marketing in that it is focus targeting, cost effective and measureable in terms of Returns on Investment (ROI).

“Traditional marketing is costly, fragmented and difficult to measure.

It’s a fact that a small and medium business owner will not able to afford high investment driven marketing channels such as TV or radio. However, in the hyper competitive world, if one must survive, marketing has become a need and not a comfort,” he said.

He stressed further that with Internet becoming an integral parts of our lives, various new forms of advertising using Internet (e-mail, websites) and mobile phones (SMS) have emerged and are now dominating the traditional means.

Onibudo also explained that VConnect is positioned to cater for the digital marketing needs of businesses in Nigeria by making SMEs widely visible through an online presence by listing them on www.vconnect.com, leads forwarding, where prospective customers are referred to businesses, targeted SMS (help to send promotional messages to targeted audience (based on LGA, age, profession etc) as well as website designing at very affordable cost.

He declared that VConnect has already trained more than 1,000 business owners till date in the Business Forum series, which will continue weekly for 10 months. He then urged any business owners who want to get a free invitation for the next training session to visit http://vconnect.com.

Some of the participants who spoke at the end of the forum described it as an informative and fresh insight on how to market their business in a more efficient and cost effective way.

Reacting shortly after the session, Mr. Dennis, Business Development Manager, Excellence Awards International (dealers in medals and awards), Lagos, lauded the initiative of VConnect for exposing business owners to the magic of digital marketing.

Also, Mrs. Sade Soderu of SonShade Meadows, a branding and printing company, commended VConnect for organising the forum, which she said will give more leverage to SMEs at less cost and help grow their businesses.

Babcock varsity to produce digital students, says VC

Prof. Ademola Tayo is the new Vice-Chancellor of Babcock University. While unveiling his vision to transform the university into total digital classrooms and campus to meet the learning challenges of the 21st Century, Tayo, in this interview with Bankole Orimisan, said that he was committed to producing digital students for tomorrow’s workforce.
Excerpt:

Vision for Babcock University

The vision of this present administration is to consolidate on the gains of the previous one, particularly on the area of Information Technology to drive e-learning in the 21st-century education.

Although Babcock University has been leveraging on IT, this new administration will push it further.

That is why we are collaborating with the WiniGroup/IVETEC to implement a Total Classroom and Campus Digital Revolution (TCCDR), the first of its kind Nigeria. It is designed to reposition our model of delivery to ensure better assimilation and creativity from students and make lecturers more productive.

The TCCDR project is an end-to-end, first-of-its-kind- robust collaborative e-learning designed to enable the students, lecturers and parents and the school administrators collaborate in a new integrated way that will further enhance academic excellence and boost our university’s global ranking as a foremost technology-driven university in the same league with the very best in the world.

We will use cutting edge technologies to deliver lectures to students. There will be a software application whereby parents will be able to monitor the progress of their children’s academic work. With the project, the era of chalk has gone. All our classrooms are installed with projectors, inverters, interactive technologies, in-motion-biometrics, and best-in-class-software that will make learning more creative.

The new administration is very passionate about using technology to deliver lectures to the students. With the project, all our lecturers have gone through intensive training on TCCDR technologies and about 500 new HP laptops are being distributed to the lecturers as we speak.

The TCCDR project will make our students relevant academically locally and internationally. At the end of the day, we will be producing digital students for 21st-century challenges.

Addressing power challenge

To address the power challenge and achieve virtual classroom, we have signed a Memorandum of Understanding for an Independent Power Project (IPP), which will totally crash down the amount we spend on power.

This is to ensure regular power supply at reasonable cost.

What we are trying to do is to block leakages, particularly now that we have many private universities that are coming up. We are very sensitive to that and as a not- for-profit institution; we want to be sure that we do not push the parents beyond their means.
We will do our best to ensure that what is reasonable is what we give to our students and their parents but at the same time we do not want to compromise when it comes to quality.

Research in the University

Yes, three mandates for any university are: teaching, research and community development. I believe that you should not go into something that you will not do well. For instance, we decided to outsource the power project to an IPP because we believe we should focus on our area of competence and not just try to do everything by ourselves. We have handed over a land to them to begin.

It is not going to be financed by the university but they will finance it and sell to us and the agreements show that light will not blink for even one minute. If it blinks, the collateral damage will be for them such that we are expecting that there will be 24 hours of uninterrupted power supply of electricity.

You know power is so important for educational institutions because if you want to do information technology, you have to have regular power supply.

Nigerian Cyber Security System in Place

By Bankole Orimisan

Information security management firm, Digital Encode, has introduced a monitoring solution that will remotely monitor the cyberspace of organisations and report or stop unauthorised access to database in Nigeria.

According to Digital Encode, the monitoring solution is expected to monitor vulnerable ports, servers, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, cyber threat maps, which shows the line of attacks and the sectors being attacked.

As Information Systems are becoming more complex and frequently changing, maintaining the global security level of a company has become critical. The CSOC provides real time attack detection and threat visibility to protect the cyber space of small, medium and large scale companies. It conducts behavioural monitoring, threat detection and security intelligence. The main aim and objective of the CSOC is to assist organisations in the areas of:

The Chief Technical Officer of Digital Encode, Oluseyi Akindeinde, said, “the solution, which was developed by the Centre for Information Security Intelligence (CISI), an arm of Digital Encode, was necessitated by the growing rate of cyber attacks and cyber espionage leading to loss of data and money.”

Akindeinde, added that the solution was capable of monitoring banks’ networks with its threat management system solution. “The solution comes with installed sensors that give alerts if there is observed intrusion. Our solution can easily detect attacks and blacklist the IP address from where the attack emanated from, and thereafter blacklist and block all illegal transactions from the IP address,” he noted.

The Centre for Information Security Intelligence (CISI) is a centralised arm of Digital Encode devoted entirely to cyber defence, combining a Security Operations Centre (CSOC) with an analysis capability of new and emerging threats and vulnerabilities.

The Chief Operating Officer of Digital Encode, Wale Obadare, said that the monitoring solution was affordable for big and small organisations and it is expected to monitor cyberspace of organisations in order to investigate fraud related issues.

According to him,electronic surveillance and dynamic monitoring of IT infrastructures and applications (intrusion monitoring)

Poor Electricity Constitutes 70% Of Operators' Challenges, Says Atcon

Bankole Orimisan

THE Association of Telecommunication Companies of Nigeria has attributed 70 per cent of the challenges facing operators in the country’s telecommunications sector to unreliable public electricity.

  Delivering a keynote address at the association’s broadband investment summit in Lagos yesterday, the President of ATCON, Mr. Titi Omo-Ettu, said power problem has been responsible for high cost of running businesses, which, according to him, has kicked some operators in the sector out of businesses and with little only big operators being able to survive the tides.

  The investment forum was the major outing of the implementation of ATCON’s roadmap to sustaining the gains of the last decade and preparing for the next during which the industry is expected to provide access to large population using broadband as toll.

   Omo-Ettu, who stated that, getting the current government policies targeted at boosting power generation is critical to the attainment of ubiquitous broadband deployment to galvanise the nation’s economic development, maintained that, although operators face other challenges such as technical issues, poor access to financing, among others, power presents the greatest challenge to the broadband growth.

  Industry experts have said that out of over 40 million Nigerians already connected to the Internet; only about 12 million representing around 3 per cent are connected to broadband internet access.

  According to Omo-Ettu, “When we weighed the problems which confront our industry as a component of the Nigerian economy, all the issues of low technical skills, poor access to financing, barrier to investment, and all of that, all constitute 30 per cent. It is in finding solution to this 30 per cent that we are gathered to brainstorm and cart a path.

  “The over 70 per cent, which is constituted by a poor access to reliable public electricity that refuses to go away can only be left for government to work at sorting out.”

  Speaking on the theme of the two-day investment summit: “Broadband as enabler to connecting the next 50 million Telecom users in Nigeria”, Omo-Ettu stated that, having achieved tremendous growth in subscriber base in the last 10 years, broadband should be used to connect the next 50 million subscribers in the next 10 years.

  “We have already said we are now done with number of connected lines as index of our industry development. We want to shift emphasis to using number of our citizens who have access to telecommunications index of planning and developing our market.

  In the same vein, the Chief Executive Officer of Main One cable Company, Ms. Funke Opeke, who also recognised power problem as one of the greatest challenges to broadband penetration, however, noted that, cost of broadband has dropped by up to 75 per cent in the last one years of international submarine cables landing a year ago.

  She added that, “By granting the right of ways to telecom investors at reduced cost, operators would be able to deploy more broadband at reduced cost to Nigerian both at wholesale and at retail levels.”

Fuel subsidy protests and power of social media

By Bankole Orimisan

As the storm against the removal of fuel subsidy assailed business activities in the country recently, BANKOLE ORIMISAN, examines the role of the social media network in the agitation.

  STEVE CHEN, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim founded youtube in February 2005 to enable Americans share videos among loved ones. Today, it has become the new face of modern cinema where videos of the famous Arab Spring and Occupy Movement are disseminated. Twitter was founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey. The faintest thought that it could be used to organise mass movements against autocratic governments in the Middle East was out of the equation.

  The most popular website, Facebook, founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, was privately developed so that he could communicate with his folks in the campus. He didn’t realise that the Otueke-born zoologist would be named a ‘Facebook President’ by CNN during his presidential campaigns in 2010/2011. Research In Motion (manufacturers of Blackberries) was incorporated in 1984 by Mike Lazarridis. He didn’t foresee the new perspectives it would introduce to global discourses and businesses.

  These four tools enumerated above have revolutionised global events. From the popular Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement in the United States, election campaigns, to social discourses, these tools have redefined everything about modern day living.

Social media gave a voice to the Occupy Movement and mass protests in the Middle East. It ended the careers of many high profile politicians, damaged celebrity images and gave people platforms to express their views on global issues.

  The Occupy Movement in the United States was born on Twitter when people became fed up with the government and started organising mass protests. According to Twitter statistics released in October 2011, over 100,000 different hash tags were used to discuss the Occupy Movement in the United States. Through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, people in Egypt and Libya were able to come together and topple dictators.

  Like the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement in the United States, what role can the social media network play in the new Occupy Nigeria mass protests against government’s unpopular decision on fuel subsidy removal? Can the Arab Spring example be replicated here and government policies influenced through these social media network?

In the days leading to the mass protests and nationwide strike, Nigerians had raised alarm over government’s plans to shut down Blackberry services wary of the gathering storm of public resentment against fuel subsidy removal.

  Alarmed by this rumour, Blackberry users in Nigeria, numbering over 300, 000 started posting messages on the Internet and through their Blackberry Messenger. In a swift response, management of the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), MTN, Gloacom and Etisalat rebuffed the claims.

   In recent days, activists, opposition leaders and ordinary Nigerians have used the social media network to disseminate information on venues for protests. Gaffes by supporters of fuel subsidy removal have also been tweeted, facebooked and broadcast through Blackberries. Gory images and videos depicting President Goodluck Jonathan as the villain of the Nigerian people have been exchanged through these media.

   Reports of violence, killings and police brutality towards protesters are first transmitted through the social media network. Media houses in Nigeria have also seized the window of opportunity presented by the social media network to reach out to the young Nigerian audience.

President Jonathan also acknowledged the power of the social media network when he lamented in Abuja recently, during the launch of the public mass transit buses: “There are a lot of mischief makers going around to misinform Nigerians, especially through social networks like the Twitter, Blackberry, Facebook and others – to communicate very wrong things to Nigerians.”

   Popular entertainers have also been using the social media network to criticise President Jonathan’s fuel subsidy removal.

   Eldee, the multi-talented entertainer wrote the following on his twitter page: “Why should President Jonathan budget a billion naira for his generators and diesel when he is urging us to believe in his power sector reform? Why does our president need nine private jets and then have the audacity to come on TV and claim to “feel the pain” of Nigerians? Why should we believe the government when it says the subsidy gain will be properly reinvested? A government should lead by example…by example you must not own generators, travel abroad for health care or send your kids abroad to school.”

    Musicians and comedian, Sound Sultan have also been mobilising for mass protests through his Twitter page. He tweeted the following: “The only place in the world where you have to provide your own light, water, security and tar the road is Nigeria. In Nigeria, new regimes are always worse than the former and we are going to occupy the streets until government listens to us.”

    One of Nigeria’s finest music producers, Don Jazzy, posted the following on his Twitter page about the fuel subsidy removal: “I hardly ever regret decisions I make. That my one vote added to put the current government in power is one decision I regret with all my heart.”