It's just a few hours away from the start of our social media day event at the Crowne Plaza Johannesburg hotel. A part of me still hasn't digested that Derek Martin and myself go a video from Mashable to play at the event because we are official hosts. Another part of me really can't believe that the event has grown so large and we are a little nervous that there's going to be an interesting excess of anticipated guests.
Not that we are complaining, but I do have stand up as the co-organiser of the event and say a speech. We know me by now, I hate preparing speeches. I've spent the day resting my body and going of the concept that I want to speak about in my head. It's a concept that is very dear to my heart and one that I have worked at for so long.
I know that we, as South Africans, lag behind in so many areas of social media. I can't begin to string the list along because I really do have to get dressed soon ... but it can be a joke a times. So my how speech is based on how we do have the ability to catch up with the rest of the world ... well ...
Today was Rica deadline in South Africa. What does that mean? It means that yet again, we have to identify ourselves as the owner of something because there is a huge amount of mistrust in the country. Yes, the concept might be clever and we might have had like 5 years to rica our sim cards with our service providers ... but on crunch day our biggest cellular networks fall over. I've been in too much of my own bubble to find out if this is the reason why everything from Twitter to Blackberry to Vodacom and MTN calls are all screaming messages of non connection and failures.
Don't you just love Murphy???
Well, I'm off to get ready for the biggest night of my social media career. My first major step as a social influencer. Lifeology's largest hosted event to date ... and the most number of people I have ever spoken in front of ... all with the fear that SA's technology is going to fall over and disconnect us from the rest of the world on the most crucial day!
Proudly South African
Well done on a great achievement. You will blow them away.
Thank you so much for the message. It was a great success!
See you later! Oh, and the Vodacom network fail wasn't a RICA issue. Luckily we weren't affected by it. It does appear that quite a few people were inconvenienced by it though.
How's Vodacom's timing ... lol!
So happy to have seen you last night and good to see you are on the mend!!