If you are a regular on the Nigerian Twitter, ten to one, you have seen that handle on your TL, @SeeMeSeeNigeria, bearing vintage pictures with a monochrome filter from the “way back when” of Nigeria.
And sometimes, it’s just a quote, a cheeky proverb, a chart or a line diagram. Only whatever it is, tells a story; a side of Nigeria “we rarely and barely know,” the handle’s bio says.
Perez Tigidam – who is not a Spaniard – is the creator of @SeeMeSeeNigeria. In this interview, he tells TechCabal about his “split personality”, how the @SeeMeSeeNigeria handle came to be, and we finish up with 11 finest moments in the handle’s history so far.
Out interview;
TechCabal: Hi, glad, you could join us, Perez
Perez Tigidam: Thanks
It IS Perez, isn’t it?
Yes
Not that it’s relevant to the discussion, but I’m a bit curious about where you are from. Actually, maybe introduce yourself and company?
Hahaha, laughing here. This question always starts every conversation. I’m actually from Rivers State but the name is from the Jacob story in Genesis, so I’m not Spanish or Brazilian like I’m always asked. I’m actually a brand consultant and creative director at Arden and Newton but with deeper love for digital than traditional advertising. I had some formal training in digital marketing and social media in 2010 way before digital became a big deal among brands and advertisers and ever since, I’d say I’ve become a split personality, giving 40% to original/traditional scope of work and 60% to digital.
I had some experience consulting for a state government on destination branding about same time and that informed the nature of most of the digital platforms that I design and build as a side project or maybe I’d say for the fun of it and to prove a point to clients what real online engagement is about and should be.
I see, that makes things considerably clearer, I guess. But what we really want to talk about is your fascinating Twitter handle, @SeeMeSeeNigeria. Am I right to say it’s yours?
Yes, it is
Great. It is not only one of Nigeria’s Twitter’s most interesting Twitter accounts, it is also rather informative. What made you do it? What were you hoping to achieve?
In October 2014, I did an analysis of content on Nigerian twittersphere and saw a huge gap that I felt needed to be filled. I consume a lot of content on social media and at that point I felt Nigerian Twitter was becoming too much of gossip and politics so I called my team together for brainstorming and after almost one month of tinkering with ideas back and forth, the most challenging one on the list being SeeMeSeeNigeria seemed a lot more like what the audience would want to consume.
We have certain internal branding frameworks we use to test a product’s name and product idea. We tried in on the Twitter handle and the result we got in the first twenty-four hours was mind blowing. The handle without any kind of paid promotion trended in the first twenty-four.
Basically, I wanted to give people an option of informative content to consume on social media. To showcase that social media can be a veritable tool for country branding. Information that goes online remains, and when the amount of positive information exceeds the negative, it has a way of boosting a brand’s image.
Right, I remember seeing the first tweets and thinking how brilliant it was. So there is a “team” behind this? What does team look like?
A team of almost four people who read round the clock and are constantly scouting archives online and offline. For instance, if we hear that a certain family stayed in Nigeria 30 years ago, we try and locate them. Sometimes, we send the families email, and they respond to us giving us information, documents and old pictures from their archives, which we publish with attribution. It is very rigorous work, I must confess, more tasking than any of the numerous platforms we run.
I can imagine. I was just going to ask how you procure your images in fact, because these are pretty old and nostalgic images. But we (Nigerians) are not great at preserving stuff, so I wouldn’t have the first clue about where to find them.
Yes. We are even going steps further now. We plan to travel villages across the country searching every home for history and information. Plans are on paper, and once we get the funding we need, we hit the road running
You are raising money then?
Well, not publicly, Arden and Newton basically funds our ideas, till we can raise publicly
Interesting. You ran a promo recently. Can’t remember the name exactly, but it was something about merging local culture with contemporary style.
Yes. #LocalPlusCool
Right. Made me wonder what the endgame is for the whole enterprise. People have been known to create very interesting online personas and channels to drive certain agendas, causes, business and other things that are not fully apparent in the beginning. Remember horse_ebooks? So what is this? A business? A cause? Or just a team hobby? Although, the promo suggests that it might be a little more than that.
The platform is about only one cause; promoting Nigeria. If commercial brands decide to come in, fine, if not, we still won’t be deterred as we designed it to survive without commercialization.
We felt we needed to create a bespoke online engagement strategy that serves as a bit of a relief from the regular history, we decided to try an idea that fuses fashion, technology and local culture into one.
Nigeria is becoming a lot more contemporary but we must not forget that our roots and culture still define us to a large extent. We were surprised when Nigerians in the diaspora saw the [#LocalPlusCool] campaign and entered using their Nigerian attires all the way from Emirates Stadium. The entries were engaging, fun and mind blowing. I’d love to send you the pictures later. We are currently working on a new project for the platform which is a country wide tour, this is where we hope that brands will come in.
What tweet/image/quote is your most popular?
One of our most popular tweets has been that of Baby Sanusi with his grandfather. That was the photo that got us trending.
Yeah, I loved that one. Too cute. Thanks a lot
Thanks a whole lot.
Now, a list of 11 most popular @SeeMeSeeNigeria tweets
1.
https://twitter.com/SeeMeSeeNigeria/status/565525329402671104/photo/1
2.
https://twitter.com/SeeMeSeeNigeria/status/560135217206132736/photo/1
3.
https://twitter.com/SeeMeSeeNigeria/status/557078626039246849/photo/1
4.
https://twitter.com/SeeMeSeeNigeria/status/591889499879149568/photo/1
5.
March 1982, ₦0.67 = US$1
— SeeMeSeeNigeria (@SeeMeSeeNigeria) May 20, 2015
6.
https://twitter.com/SeeMeSeeNigeria/status/591536530231005184/photo/1
7.
https://twitter.com/SeeMeSeeNigeria/status/560406572468535297/photo/1
8.
Emir of Kano,Sanusi Lamido Sanusi as a kid arriving Kano from London around 1963 with his grandfather the then king. pic.twitter.com/pGhvxBwnyf
— SeeMeSeeNigeria (@SeeMeSeeNigeria) November 16, 2014
9.
In 1803,75 Igbo slaves in the US,rose up in rebellion taking control of the ship & drowning their captors.Event referred to as Igbo Landing
— SeeMeSeeNigeria (@SeeMeSeeNigeria) April 6, 2015
10.
https://twitter.com/SeeMeSeeNigeria/status/541898009819484160/photo/1
Bankole Oluwafemi contributed to this post.
