Enjoy your visit to South Africa!

WOMF is useless for a newspaper, and ideal for a lifestyle blog.

There is no option for adding pictures, no edit function, no update function. for instance, if the community diary is posted, each time the week rolls over, a new post has to be created, which is ridiculous. there is no brand identity, who wants their newspaper identified as a firstly as a blog before the newspaper?

but now.

there are websites coming for each of the papers, which will then have links to womf. but here’s whats going to happen. people will click on the links to comment on the story which will direct them to womf, where they will have to go through the whole registering process. rather look at the times website, where registration is minimal compared to other sites, or even the news24 site, where although a little more tedious, is still highly functional. the comments still have brand identity, which is lost if we redirect our clients from the webpage to another site. it’s lumpy and unattractive and inefficient. admit there’s been a mistake made, buy decent servers and control it all from inhouse. losing brand identity at any stage is incredibly self defeating.

look at whats out there and improve it, don’t make it worse. the sms line is a good product and readers enjoy it.

Thought that I need mention that the concept behind WOMF is not just a forum, Its a customer satisfaction and business performance tool, as well as potentially an excellent small business marketing platform. I have no idea how the base concept has been implemented by Caxton in your area,

WOMF has been running in Bloem for a few years – with Radio O FM as their media partner, and around the world mostly with local Radio partners.

Declarations: I have met Bruce Sturgeon once, I have not been retained by Caxton. I recently did a series of seminars on word of mouth for OFM. I have met Roy Hawker of WOMF international.