Why Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Stopped Using Social Media?

Haven’t you noticed that High Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Ruler of Dubai and Prime Minister of UAE, has stopped using social media?

HH Shiekh Mohammed has around 450,000 fans on facebook and around 380,000 on twitter and suddenly, boom, both pages stopped updating fans and it has been since January 20th, 2011. Previously the accounts were very active and used to share updates, news articles, and photos of the meetings, so what happened?

According to the Protocol, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid is like many Prime Ministers, Presidents, Kings, or Emirs where a news media pool is embedded with his core/advisers team to take care of all communications- and media-related work. Each country or office has it’s own name and we believe HH Sheikh Mohammad calls it “The Media Office”. This news media pool always follow HH Shiekh Mohammed into meetings that are public and private which require media coverage or not; that’s because publicity is not always good publicity, it could be bad one and needs to be controlled.

Then, I was thinking if there is an answer for that: did he get busy with all the social media tools? but he wasn’t updating it personally anyways. Did his media team got busy with all the social media tools? but it’s their job anyways. Does anyone doubt anymore about the power of social media? Well, not anymore.

So I ended up with no answer and would like to know what’s your answer on that would be.

Let us know your comments

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Tarek is the founder and chief researcher at Youngberry, a youth research and marketing firm dedicated to the region. Tarek founded interactiveME.com and previously worked as Manager at Flip Media (Interactive Agency), Bayt.com (Job Site) and Consulting House Qatar (Consulting firm). He is researcher and writer on internet & disruptive innovation, entrepreneurship, and youth culture.

2 Comments

  1. Thank you for reading our post.

    Regarding your opinion, if this news was obvious to you it is definitely not obvious to me others and on top of that none of us (you, me and others) have the answer and that's what this article is trying to do – generate a conversation of why such a public figure has stopped using social media.

    If your point that this topic was obvious already, please show me where it was mentioned and here is an example of why it could be obvious and still newsworthy: in light with the uprising in the region, all newspapers are writing about the demands of young people but journalists don't have the answer or action top everything, do you think they'd write on the first day about the uprising and the next day they write about football matches because it's now obvious to people what young people aspirations are?

    If your point was that the title of the article wasn't answered in the main article, well that would be only one type of journalism writing traditional techniques – to write a question in the title and put the answer in the body. But that's not the only way of writing and probably that was your expectations.

    Kind regards,

    Tarek Kassar

  2. this was a waste of my time. great job stating the obvious and not giving any answers or insight.

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