Cape Town Tourism's Facebook campaign, Send Your Facebook Profile to Cape Town, has won a Cannes Lions Gold Award for Cape Town Tourism's advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather. The prize was awarded in the Branded Content Category (Best Use or Integration of Digital or Social Media) making them one of only two 2013 Gold Award winners from South Africa.

An even more important lesson to learn from marketing, concerns the intricate fragility of Brand South Africa. Much as militant unionists might abhor the notion of globalisation and the principle of capitalism, a stark, non-debatable fact of life is that South Africa cannot survive in isolation.

In the near future, Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban may have their own top level domain names on the internet, which could spark innovative ways of promoting business and tourism in South Africa's main centres.

Big Brother – and millions of television viewers - will be watching every move of a group of outgoing, yet house-bound South Africans again in January 2014. M-Net announced that its proudly local brand, Mzansi Magic, will produce another South African edition of Big Brother, and this time the show will aptly be called Big Brother Mzansi.

The idea is to stimulate young entrepreneurs in both Africa and India and to build connections between them across the Indian Ocean. “We are trying to enter people’s minds and give them a better understanding of other cultures,” he elucidates.

Botswana is positioning itself to be the next big economic powerhouse in Africa. This was the sentiment expressed at the launch of the Botswana Investment and Trade Centre’s brand strategy at the Michelangelo Hotel in Johannesburg on Tuesday, 21 May.

US President Barack Obama will visit Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania in June, the White House has said. Mr Obama is expected to meet lawmakers as well as business and civil society leaders and youth on his trip.

The government is considering posting dedicated cultural attaches at South Africa's missions abroad, Arts and Culture Minister Paul Mashatile said on Thursday. “Culture has now become the soft power of nations,” Mashatile said in his budget vote speech in the National Assembly, before detailing cultural exchanges with France and Britain.