An update on Eskom’s Online Marketing

A quick update on my previous post about Eskom’s Meatball Sundae… It seems that the beleaguered power utility has been paying a bit more attention to its online reputation management and marketing (perhaps someone read my post and approached them ).

First, a Google link search on Powering South Africa now returns 116 results; whereas, before, it only had two inward links over and above one or two internal links.

Second, whereas a search on ‘Eskom’ returned a lot of highly ranked negative results a month ago, Eskom’s own sites (main and subsidiary) dominate the first page of the search results; and the first truly negative link is only halfway down page 2.

It may be partly explained by the fact that there was much less load shedding in March, and that they haven’t been getting flamed as much lately, but they definitely seem to have been doing some work on their online presence too.

What do you want to see on a political party’s website?

We’re reviewing the DA’s main website at the moment. It was built in 2003, and it’s long overdue for a revamp.

We’ve got what I think are some pretty cool ideas to make it fresh, interesting and entertaining – for example, we’ve picked up a few ideas from Barack Obama (although he probably spends more on his website and online presence than the DA’s entire annual operational budget) and the LibDems in the UK, among others.

But I’d love to get some input from users, web designers and online marketers about what they think would make an excellent party website. So I’ll keep our specific ideas to myself for the moment. I don’t want to influence or limit any innovative ideas that may be out there.

DoshDosh my new favourite blog to follow

DoshDosh has definitely become my favourite blog to follow. It’s full of useful tips and interesting information – especially for the rookie blogger or online marketer.

Its author, Maki, tends to favour longer, more detailed posts, which means it takes a bit more effort to follow, but I think it’s worth it.

A particularly worthwhile recent article was “16 effective strategies to expand your blog’s reach in 2008.“

Another interesting post was “47 Social News Websites You Can Use.” I had no idea there were so many social news sites out there, and the list is apparently by no means comprehensive.

The latest post also has a bit of a political angle: it’s on the Art of Propaganda. See if you can identify a South African political example of each of the seven common tactics mentioned.