Some of our Ashesi students are doing a project for which they asked me of my opinions on Social Media (SM) and business in Ghana. I thought my answers might be of interest to others as well, so here they are!
1. In your opinion, how have social media affected businesses in Ghana?
At this point, not so much. Some have SM helplines (like Vodafone), but others like ECG are not on SM. When you leave a gap, fake accounts are rife.
2. Do businesses use of social media to market their products in Ghana?
Some do, a recent campaign by Nescafe was very popular. Many businesses however lose out as they do not know their target groups are online!
My guess is that only 5% of Ghana companies are on social media. My student Anna Amegatcher last year did a thesis to investigate media companies’ use of SM that showed that even media companies underutilise SM.
3. What are the factors that regulate businesses usage of social media in Ghana?
High cost of access to Internet, frequent power cuts, know-how in social media, lack of benchmarking internationally …and maybe also sense of adventure?
4. In your opinion, is there a need for improvement on the current usage of social media in Ghana?
Well, I think Internet costs need to come down and powers supply me constant, then I think it will happen by itself.
5. Apart from advertisements, in what other ways do businesses use social media in Ghana?
Ads are not a good way of using SM, the point is it is a two-way communication, a conversation (not a megaphone or billboard). Successful campaigns ask the target group to post photos using a specific hashtag, organise competitions, ask questions, invite ideas for new designs etc.
6. Are there disadvantages of using social media for businesses? If yes, which are these disadvantages?
If you SM managers mess up, your company looks bad. For instance Vodafone answered me publicly on Twitter in a very rude way, that was not good for the Vodafone brand.
7. Which social media platform, if any has been credited with greatest promotion of businesses in Ghana?
I think FB and What’s App have both been important. Businesses that want to look good should be on Twitter and Google+ as well.
8. What is the relation between the cost of internet in the past and the present?
It isn’t! Prices have increased over the last years, maybe the only country in the world where technology advances do not lead to lower costs!
9. In your own opinion, what is the future of social media and it’s relation to businesses I Ghana?
It will for sure grow. This is the future. I see all companies joining FB and Google+ and Twitter. Maybe Instagram (growing fast in Ghana) and YouTube as well. Many more will do customer service online and hire SM managers, likely who will report to executives in the company as SM is an important window to customers.
Do you agree with me or are there other things to be said about social media and business in Ghana?
Last year, I suggested the institute should have a presence on social media and set up a Facebook account and a Twitter handle @IASUG (at the time, I could not believe my luck to get such an appropriate 5 letter handle!). I managed the accounts over the 2013 African Studies conference (keynotes also available on YouTube) and then handed it over to the institute.
Now, however you can get more than photos and 140 character snippets – Thanks to new seminar coordinator Dr. Obádélé Kambon – you can experience IAS from the comfort of any place with Internet!
I have been offline at home for two weeks and after multiple interactions with my broadband distributor, Vodafone Ghana, I feel compelled to write about my experiences. This is not a new topic for me, or for many other bloggers (last year, for instance I wrote about the upside to Ghanaian Customer Service) but I wanted to show some examples of how you can use social media for improving on customer service and faster reaching your goal.
1. Take it to social media.
The official routes of complaint (going to the office to report the issue and calling Customer Care) had little effect, so after a week my husband told me, why don’t you Tweet this? Within hours we had a response. The accounts I used were @vodafoneghana & @askvodafonegh On Facebook, I got friends to share their experiences. Yesterday, I live tweeted my call to customer service. I am now blogging about it. Hopefully, someone who is on charge of customer care at Vodafone will see this. The chance is bigger than if I just moan at home.
2. Always record the name of the customer service attendant you are in contact with.
Thus far, we have made around 12 contacts with Vodafone (plus friends at Vodafone seeing online complaints and stepping in). For the record it is good to know who promised what. I realise customer service people in Ghana are very reluctant to give out last names or direct numbers (maybe for good reasons), but insist on a first name.
3. Be persistent and claim your rights.
I believe that a pricy service must have excellent customer service. For 180 GHC ($90) per month, I expect my broadband to work every day. Two weeks interruption for what ever reason is unacceptable. I have not hesitated to remind customer service personel what I am paying for their service and what effects it not working has on my work.
4. Talk to friends
When I discuss my problem with friends on and offline it seems many have had similar experiences. It has encouraged me and I have also gotten hints on what to do. Some of my friends even work at Vodafone and have taken steps of me – talk about committed employees! (or very good friends…or both).
5. Educate the company
On Tuesday after 13 days without my broadband, I was offered a backup system. Although a dongle is not the same as unlimited broadband, I think this was a nice gesture. However, the information was we had to drive to the Accra office to pick it up during office hours. Travelling to a different town to belatedly get some help and also sacrificing work (the round trip is about 3 hours) is unreasonable. And so I told the company. Their attitude changed and yesterday they instead asked for my address.
However, I think customers have an important role to play. We need to use social media to highlight what is not working, be persistant and educate the companies on what we expect. I understand telecommunications companies in Ghana have many challenges and I appreciate their efforts at delivering customer service, for instance I think the Vodafone Twitter account @askvodafonegh is commendable. Through out the two weeks I have been in touch with Vodafone I have seen customer service systems change before my eyes!
What do you think, is customer service in Ghana improving?
This week, my department, the Institute of African Studies at University of Ghana is organizing a major conference on the theme: “Revisiting the first international congress of Africanists in a globalised world”. The three day conference is apart of the institute’s 50th anniversary celebration and also links to the 1963 convention for Africanists opened by Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah. This conference will be opened by the current president, John Dramani Mahama!
Key note speakers are Kenyan professor and writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, professor Fatou Sow, specialist in gender studies and Dr. Carlos Lopez from the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Almost all the big names in the world of African Studies seem to be in the program, framed by exhibits, cultural performances and receptions.
I will be involved in two capacities – as a PhD candidate of the institute obviously I have to present a paper. Mine is a slight deviation from my PhD research project – concerned with migration aspirations among university students in Ghana – instead this paper is on the future of graduate school in Africa. My presentation time is just after the conference opening on Thursday afternoon (Session A, Panel 3, Computer room of the INstitute at 12.20-2.00 PM to be exact). In addition to being a presenter, I have volunteered to handle social media for the conference. So you can follow the institute account for proceedings on Facebook and Twitter or follow the hashtag #ICAS13.
I will be posting here on my blog during the conference as well.
So let’s wish all international participants welcome and while we are at it, please wish me luck!
As the horrible events at the Westgate mall in Nairobi still unfold, I want to highlight the impressive use of social media by Kenyan authorities like the police and ministry of interior. Many can learn from them!
…though there are things to learn, we must keep a critical mind. Also official accounts do best to stick to facts, details and general warnings, and avoid judging the situation as it unfolds.
Last year, I got an email from Professor John Gallagher of Boston College asking if I could meet with his students during their study trip to Ghana in May. I was excited to be asked, really it is not everyday the educational city of Boston calls! – so I said yes and after some emailing back and forth, I was asked to not just meet with John’s students, but also organize a panel with Ashesi students about social media in Ghana. Here is the long overdue blog post about this panel!
First, I decided to ask my colleague Kobina Graham to go with me as we have been coteaching Social Theory, a freshman class where we tried to integrate Twitter. Additionally, Kobby worked as the Social Media Officer for the Constitutional Review Commission a few years back. To find the best students for the panel, we held a (Twitter) competition, asking students to contribute to the Ashesifun hashtag invented by Ashesi student, Edwin. This hashtag is a way of indexing ideas on how to make the Ashesi campus and consequently college experience more vibrant. Edwin was by default shortlisted for the panel, with him came Martha (a third year student) and Makafui (a first year student).
On the evening of our panel, we met at MEST and had dinner with the visitors. We talked about our experiences with social media in Ghana, the teaching experiments we had done, how we use Internet (several of us are bloggers), but we were also interested in listening to the Boston College students and hear more about what they had discovered. A Boston College student later tweeted:
Unforgettable wisdom imparted by @kajsaha on #TechTrekGhana “every person brings knowledge to a room.” Always relevant. #thankyou
Most interesting of their observations were: the low, but growing, Internet penetration; the high energy of the Ghanaian IT sector and last, but not least; the intensive use of Twitter for professional communication (“Ghanaian professionals seem to prefer a Direct Message on Twitter to a phone call or an email!”). I checked the last by tweeting about it and got mixed feedback from (the already biased) Twitterverse. Still, getting that comparison with Boston ecosystem was enlightening. It seems many times we are maybe too pessimistic here in Ghana?
To conclude, thank you Prof. Gallagher for giving me the opportunity to interact with you, your colleagues and students. I also blame you for the surprising – and loudly cheered on – end to our panel, when two of the Ashesi students did an impromptu rap battle after having been prodded by you. Really, the panel could not have had a better ending!
In collaboration with STACC, my blogging group BloggingGhana led by Daixy has this holiday arranged for blood donations. It all started with Daixy reading about the acute lack of blood at the Korle Bu Hospital blood bank (Ghana’s biggest hospital, located downtown Accra). Being the doer she is, Daixy decided to put her NGO and social media skills together and before we could all say “blood drive”, four dates were set and online we started inviting friends to participate and donate blood.
Today was the third day, and I went to donate blood for the very first time. I was a little nervous. However, failing to convince anyone to join me, I realised many people were either scared of donating (obviously more scared than me!) or misinformed about the process, so when I went I made a deliberate effort of capturing it all.
So here you go, Kajsa gives blood:
Summary: Really, it wasn’t bad at all and took just an hour out of my day and then the actual blood giving was only 10 minutes!
The Gory Details (with pictures):
1:06 PM Arrived at Noguchi Institute where blood donation personnel had set up shop for the day. Daixy greeted me and tweeted to the world, I had arrived. I also said hi to the head and PR person for STACC and weighed in.
Clockwise: Noguchi, STACC personel, scale and Daixy.
1.09 PM Greeted bloggers who had just donated. One of them had fainted after donating, likely because she did not eat well before donating. Also, she just came into the country from the cold north and the heat might have affected her. I had eaten lunch about half-an-hour before coming.
Friends, Form and Bag to fill!
1.15 PM Filled a health declaration form and giggled as I truthfully declared I had NOT undergone circumcision over the last 12 months.
1.19 PM Was pricked in my thumb to check the HB or blood sugar level of my blood. If its under 12, one cannot donate. This pain was I think the worse, but alas, I have done it many times as they test your blood sugar repeatedly when you are pregnant.
Testing HB value.
1.25 PM My blood pressure was checked and it was OK.
Having my blood pressure checked.
1.27 PM I laid down on a bed and nurse put a needle in my arm. Yes, it did hurt a little, but for like 1 second. I promise! After that it feels uncomfortable, but not even close to any pain. The needle was first led to some small tubes, for testing my blood, and then to the bag as shown above. Relaxing on a bed was nice!
I was asked to open and close my hand to “pump” blood out. After a few minutes my hand got cold and then a lil’bit numb.
After about 10 minutes the blood did not flow too much and the nurse decided it was enough. I recon I had donated about 400 ml.
The intense bit. That wasn’t even very intense.
1.38 PM The nurse pulled the needle out and put a ball of cotton on the sand grain sized wound and folded my arm over it. This did not hurt at all. She put a plaster on and I sat up and after a minute walked out the door.
1.45 PM I was given some Milo and crackers and sat there chatting to Daixy about the continuation of this quickly thrown together project.
1.50 PM I walked out, feeling just fine. Went to the bank and drove home. Left from the blood donation is only a plaster on my arm that I now take off – ouch – and these pictures I shared with you!
Milo, Relaxing, Friends and All in all, THUMBS UP!
We are now thinking of how to get many more of you excited about donating blood! Next up is a Valentine’s Day Blood Drive and then maybe one in June on Blood Donor Day – but we want to make it like a party or a fun day out with fresh juice, socialising and many more donors!
Let’s fill the blood banks in Ghana. It is a job for you and me, people who cares and who thinks none should have to die because blood banks are empty.
Some facts:
Don’t drink alcohol 24 h before and after donating blood.
A healthy woman can donate blood 3 times per year, a man 4 times.
25% of maternal deaths in Africa are attributed to a lack of blood for transfusion.
Wednesday and Thursday, West Africa Civil Society Institute, WACSI, had invited me and some of my fellow blogging colleagues to an international conference on the opportunities of social media.
Present were among others Nigerian online campaigners like Enough Is Enough, Ivorian sister organization to BloggingGhana, CIVBLOG, Buddy Media/Marketing Cloud a Ghanaian (branch of a?) company managing social media and especially Facebook pages around the world and Source Fabric, an interesting social media software organization, as well. Some prominent Tweeps like @spectraspeaks (Nigeria/US), @ZawadiN (Kenya), @mashanubian (Gambia/Senegal) @MacJordaN were also attending and of course GhanaDecides.
Out of the two days of conferencing, I could only attend one due to other obligations, but still walked away with plenty of inspiration and a few insights that I would like to share with you:
The simplest way of starting a movement and getting people to connect is starting a hashtag – some relevant examples: for African feminists, #Afrifem, possibly #Afriblog for African bloggers and for Tema folk wanting to promote our city in the center of the world #Tema00. This method requires zero overhead, no funding and can have great impact.
Crowd funding is the future. With webapplications connected to local banks, people can make donations using the Internet directly to organizations. EIENigeria uses 234give for instance and encourage people to pledge to contribute monthly to their activities.
We are not alone. Sometimes, Ghana feels like an island, but with Internet (and a IRL conference once in a while), clearly it is not. Great things are happening in our neighbor countries – and in Ghana! – and we just need to learn from eachother, adapt solutions to our environment and the inspire them right back! I have a feeling that especially EIE Nigeria and CIVBLOG will be great partners for BloggingGhana!
Thanks to the organizers for putting this fruitful meeting together. Next time, Adventurers in the Diaspora and Accra Dot Alt should also be invited – Ghanaian social movements using social media!
Blog Action Day 2012, or #BAD12 for short, is a day where bloggers all over the world together write on one topic. Over the last years, I have participated on themes such as “poverty” and “climate change”. This year a slightly more poetic theme has been chosen: “the power of we”. I thought of providing examples of this “power of we” from three organizations I am involved with here in Ghana. The way I see it, the power of we is about both building a community internally and working for a greater good, together. There are definite overlaps in all three examples:
1. Ashesi University College
Pillars: Leadership, Scholarship, Citizenship.
Mission: to educate a new generation of ethical, entrepreneurial leaders in Africa; to cultivate within our students the critical thinking skills, the concern for others and the courage it will take to transform a continent.
The power of we at Ashesi: Except for stating in our mission statement we are interested in fostering concern for others and change in our community, we locally on campus cultivate an “Ashesi community” by
having campus wide events where everybody from the security man to the students and lecturers to the President Patrick Awuah are expected to attend,
having a shared emailing list,
celebrating eachother’s success and also
including graduates or workers who leave as part of the community.
Personally, I value this community as a treasured part of my remuneration for the work I do and try to give back by inviting the community to events I organize like and helping to build capacity, especially in social media.
Mission and Objectives: to bring the Ghanaian blog community together in real life!
Serving as a forum for bloggers in Ghana to network and exchange ideas
Building capacity among bloggers in Ghana
Accessing new audiences for our blogs through a mutual website (aggregator) and other activities
Promoting citizen journalism in Ghana
Educating the general public in Ghana on the opportunities of social media
The power of we in BloggingGhana: For this organization, the power of we became glaringly apparent when we last year decided to upgrade ourselves from a group of friends who had met every month since 2008 to discuss society and social media to a registered non-profit organization. We were hesitant of taking that step, I guess worried that it would take the fun out of the group. Eventually we dared to take the step! Registering as an official entity has allowed us to partner with other organizations and look for funding, and only 1,5 years after receiving our documents, we have come a long way in promoting and improving social media use in Ghana. And we are still having fun!
The power of we in Nubuke Foundation: This art foundation located in Accra does excellent programs and bring together people from the whole artistic spectrum in Ghana. They have the NuFriend program for people who want to promote and help the organization, but that was never enough for me. I have been volunteer since the first time I set fot on their premises, and not just me, the place has many volunteers and almost every month a new face can be seen helping out! Why is this? I believe the directors of Nubuke, the Ghanian artist Kofi Setordji and the art collector and curator Odile Tevie are excellent leaders who really see the people around them and recognize how we can help. Still today when I have less time to volunteer (the few hours a month have gone down next to 0 since I had my child), they always greet me with a smile, tease me about something and call to check in. They know, I am a volunteer for life and treat me as such!
So all these three Ghanian groups have a strong culture where individuals feeling a part of the family is key to the success of the organization. But even more important is that they all have missions that guide us to do something bigger, something better, something that resonates with the longing for the “we” in the human individual. Or as Margaret Mead puts it in one of my favorite quotes ever:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Over the last week or so, the music video of “Uncle Obama” with Sister Deborah has been moving round the social media sites like wildfire here in Ghana. Already from the title of the song, we can hear that it’s beckons attention and after just a few seconds of watching, we realize what kind of attention that is…( if you haven’t seen it, and hence do not know what I am getting at, the next line goes “I like the size of your banana”…).
Everybody has an opinion about this song, some say it is cheeky or catchy, others say it is controversial or that Sister Deborah should act instead of sing! I have also heard comments along the line of that artists with resources should have a message instead of just joking around.
Regardless of what you think of the song, I believe there are several things we can learn from this video.
It does not matter if the content is silly, if the video is of high quality, people will watch. Today the video has more than 235 000 views on YouTube!
We all love cameos. In this video, Wanlov, M3nsa and Mutombo (and some employees of a well known multinational, I have heard thru the grapevine) add to the flair.
If you are a skilled social media user, you can create a hype in days.
All of this could come together to create and promote many more Ghanaian music videos that actually gets watched world wide with very little effort. Another example of the same “silly song” phenomenon is the Korean Gagnam Style music video that I also cannot get out of my head… Again a premium production of a very silly song… The other day, a friend was saying how the local Ghanaian Azonto craze never really caught on in other parts of the world,but what if someone would do a high quality video, throw in some cameos and start hitting the social media sites. I have seen on Twitter that all messages mentioning the “Uncle Obama” song are retweeted or responded to, for instance. That goes a long way for creating a hype.
Finally, we can learn that people like silly dances they can copy, but maybe Sister Deborah went just too far there. I am yet to see someone copying her “size of your banana”-move. Or have I just been spending too much time in the office?
Here is a guest post from my BloggingGhana colleague Nana Darkoa from the trip she took to Zanzibar on behalf of the group.
Three flights, two transfers and a 1-hour bus journey later, I arrived at Melia Hotel on the island of Zanzibar. My first view of Zanzibar was an aerial view from Precision Air. It was like looking at a picture of all those idyllic places I have only ever seen on postcards and what I imagined places like the Maldives, Tobago and yes, Zanzibar to look like.
The bus waiting to take us to the hotel was trotro-like but the hotel was like no destination any trotro would go to. Melia hotel sprawls across at least a 100 acres of fertile land, and is covered in lush vegetation, hibiscus flowers and various species of trees. This was the destination for a ‘Tech Camp’ for finalists of the African News Innovation Challenge (ANIC). I was there with Nehemiah Attigah to represent Blogging Ghana, a network of over 200 bloggers based in Ghana, of Ghanaian heritage or blogging about Ghana.
The very first night we arrived at Tech Camp, there was a networking event on a jetty, which overlooked the Indian Ocean. After downing 2 glasses of red wine, and indulging in canapés I participated in a speed networking event where I had to explain Blogging Ghana’s project to groups of up to 8 people. Then I had to repeat details of the project to the next group. I must have done this repetition to about 8 different groups. Justin Arenstein, ANIC’s Manager happened to be standing next to me the first couple of times I explained Blogging Ghana’s project, and I think it was in my second go round that I mentioned that Blogging Ghana had 200 members. “Ah, you should remember to mention that” he said, and so I did…throughout the Tech Camp, and this was a detail that seemed to impress people.
Training at the Tech Camp lasted for 3 days…the day of the speed networking on the agenda had been described as ‘day zero’ so depending on how you like to count, the tech camp was 3 or 4 days. Highlights for me included:
Learning about data visualisation – Blogging Ghana’s big idea is to build a data website which would provide data sourced from civil society organisations on one easy platform. It is our hope that this will become the go to site for members of the media wishing to write original content. This way, our journalism is driven by facts and figures sourced from Ghana (and, perhaps, in time the rest of the continent).
Learning about all the different technological innovations out there – mapping projects, innovative examples of citizen journalism and the various ways in which mobile applications are meeting multimedia platforms. For someone who loves technology yet is not a geek, it was wonderful to share the same learning space with geeks from all over the world.
Meeting developers and innovators from my home country Ghana. There were 4 project finalists from Ghana – ACT Now, Code for Ghana, Truth Gauge and Blogging Ghana. It felt good to know that innovation and entrepreneurship is alive amongst a sector of the youth in Ghana (*ahem* not counting myself amongst the youth in Ghana). The largest delegation came from South Africa, which perhaps was only to be expected. However, I was surprised that there was only 1 black South African amongst the South African tech finalists.
Tech Camp is over now and I’m writing this on a bumpy Fly540 flight from Zanzibar to Nairobi. From there I have a 7 and a half hour layover, before getting on a flight to Addis Ababa. My mind boggles at catching a flight to Addis before connecting to Accra but I know the organisers of Tech Camp had to fly about 80 people to Zanzibar on a budget. Once this trial of a journey is over, I am looking forward to submitting a final proposal to ANIC and hoping that Blogging Ghana gets the jump start it needs to encourage data-driven journalism in Ghana.
Thanks, Nana for your report and hope to have you safely back in Ghana soon!
This week, my department, the 
Last year, I got an email from 
My blogging friend Kobbie has started 
