Last week a new guy came to work for WildlifeDirect (where I also work). He’s on internship and naturally – being young and all – he’s much more well versed with social networking stuff than I am. He mentioned stuff like Twitter and how to join groups on del.icio.us. By the way the guy’s name is Victor Ngeny.
Now its my business to let everyone know what’s going on at WildlifeDirect and so I should digg, twitt, stumbleupon and all that cool stuff, until millions of folk come to our site to read the blogs. Yeah, our site is all about blogs by folk who are busy saving wildlife and the environment. You must put it in the list of sites you have to visit before you die.
Anyway Victor mentioned twitter and it has being going around my head disturbing the status quo. So I had to check it out. I used some keywords to search the twitts and you wouldnt believe what I found (ok, there was a lot of stuff that Victor has been posting but that’s not what made my visit worthwhile. Some person (don’t know the gender) had posted that, famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, will speak at the UALR University Theatre at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 8 as part of the Winthrop Rockefeller Distinguished Lecture Series. It’s free and open to the public. The amusing part is that Dr Leakey sits just across from where I sit at our office in Nairobi and I have no clue that he was going to UALR. That’s in Arkansas, US. Dr Leakey is Chairman of WildlifeDirect
Anyway my friend Paula (who also happens to be my boss) went off to New York where she’ll be engaged in lots of stuff promoting their book and meeting folk. I hope she brings back good stuff from NY.
Today I also met with Joe Mucheru at Google Kenya (read about the news of his appointment at White African’s blog). He is supposed to teach me how to use Google Adwords to maximise traffic to our site. WildlifeDirect.org gets a Google Grant for advertising using Adwords, and am supposed to take care of that too.
Google offices are cool. The atmosphere is so relaxed and hip you can actually live there. Perhaps that’s the plan: for guys not to be in a hurry to leave the office so they can put in more hours on the job. They even have a snack place where you just go in pick up apples, bananas, soft drinks, muffins, sausage or whatever and much away. That was my favourite room – man I can live there! (I have friends who’d reserve a table if they had a minibar with folk like Count Pushkin, Jack Daniels and Johny Walker in the guest list)
Joe himself is one of the nicest people this side of the pond. Cool guy, unasuming, maintains eye contact and very helpful. I want to go back to Google Kenya again…for the snacks, mostly…but also for Joe to teach me the tricks that made him an icon in East Africa’s internet arena. I am told he created Wananchi Online back in ‘99.
I still dont have my business cards so I gave Joe a WildlifeDirect brochure…Hey, I should upload that brochure on our site!
