Jambo from Nairobi Kenya!

I'm so energized. I've been in East Africa for the past three days visiting tech entrepreneurs and tech investors. While I spend about 95% of my working energy focusing on building iContact into a high-growth, purpose-driven business, I like to take a couple weeks each year to travel and explore what's going on with tech companies in other parts of the world. This week I'm in Uganda and Kenya to find investment opportunities for the Humanity Fund, a personal investment fund I have for investing in African and American tech companies.

Why Invest in Africa?

There is so much economic opportunity in Africa, support for IT investment, and entrepreneurial energy. There's an opportunity to make a lot of money investing in great companies while creating lots of jobs and doing a lot of good at the same time.

Africa is the least developed continent in the world. There are 1.03 billion people in Africa. Of this 1 billion (source) 65% of Africans live on under $2 per day (source) and 59% of African households do not have electricity (source), and the number increases to 69% if you only look at Sub-Saharan Africa.

I often hear from clients, newsletter subscribers and those in my network that they are amazed at the amount of content I put out. A common question I get is, "How are you in so many places at once?"" The answer is simple: automation. You can increase your visibility on your social networks by tying the sites together, taking time to plan and finding the right tools to help make it possible.

Few people have the time to separately manage and maintain Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts, send out relevant updates, and connect with clients, friends, potential clients and social networks while working in and on a business. As a matter of fact, the amount of time it takes to maintain social media has created a relatively new job title - a "Social Media Manager."

What can you do if you cannot afford a full-time Social Media Manager? Automate your social media marketing.

You can link your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts so that your tweets post to your LinkedIn status updates as well as your Facebook Fan Page (and personal Facebook page if you want it to). This puts you on three social networking sites at one time with a single action.

Have you ever had the experience of speaking to someone and, in return, getting either a blank stare or a complete non sequitur? The easiest explanations are often, "they didn't hear me", "they didn't want to communicate with me", or "they don't speak my language." But in reality, this type of communication disconnect occurs most often between people who have no common perceptual ground in their relationships.

The Perceptual Style Theory (PST) describes a system in which the six Perceptual Styles form a circle. Each Style has two neighboring Styles, one opposite Style, and two "one-off" Styles. The order of the Perceptual Styles clockwise from Methods is: Methods, Adjustments, Flow, Activity, Vision, and Goals.

Methods, for example, has Adjustments and Goals as neighbors, Activity as it's opposite, and Flow and Vision for its one-offs. PST describes the communication challenges we tend to face when we interact with neighboring, opposite, and one-off Styles. When we describe communication with one-offs we often tell our clients, "it's like talking to a person in a foreign language", "they don't understand what you say and vice-versa".