Telkom Social Media – uhm that’s ironic :-)

Telkom Media – Riding The New Wave – Tyler Reed
Telkom Media said that Online Communities is a key element of their planned online service offering. This includes social networking, news, photos and video communities.

I would really love to see how they get this right. Maybe I am being too critical but…
same here, me thinks TR is right. Telkom has all the bits and pieces, somehow though they just never get put together properly.

Take the recently re-designed online accounts service’s interface. At a glance it looks ver sleek – but, with Telkom there’s always a ‘but’ somewhere :-)…

1. Its sloooow
2. You login, then for some reason they send you through a redirect tha doesn’t redirect half the time.
3. then you get a friendly-not message like this:

4. how about an email notification a week or so in advance?
   To Telkom’s web dev guys credit when I clicked on continue i could at least see my most recent invoice amounts on my accounts.

Who knows, maybe the maintenance has to do with the other user interface issues I was planning to mention – so I’ll hold back on those for now.

I have mixed feelings about Telkom. Yea it’s easy to always paint them as the big baddy (perhaps because that is is what they are in the lack of any opposing evidence) – but the real problem isn’t the organization it self. The real problems lie in the realm of national politics, vested interests and cultural apathy. At least I do have a relatively reliable lifeline to the net for which I am gratefull.

But the Social Media issue is an interesting angle, and me thinks one to keep an eye on.

At least social media is an arena that stimulates resistance to that cultural apathy, but we’ll have to take the essence of social media beyond the digital divide. We have to take a culture of involvement, awareness and collaboration beyond the 6% or so of conventional internet penetration we have in this country and we’ll have to ‘maak ‘n plan’.

Otherwise, before you know it ‘Social Media’ will be owned, regulated and dictated by large faceless indifferent parasites, I mean para-statals, soulless multinational market-dumping corporate sausage factories.