You don’t have consumer protection laws? It’s OK, Social Media Will do!
social-media power In a country that doesn’t have consumer protection laws, Saudi’s are not complaining, they have found their way with the help of new media. We have heard many stories of violating the Saudi customer rights. Today the story involves a big name. AL Shaya is a Giant retailer, actually the biggest in the GCC. Owning the franchise of more than 55 brands across the Middle East, this holding group is dominating a huge... Read More
Carrefour Saudi and the Social Conspiracy Theory!
Another failure, another brand, this time on a new level, which is good because it proves that having mere presence on social networks is not enough! It indicates again that some brands still have shallow understanding of social media. Carrefour Saudi is known to be one of the preferred hypermarkets there, it has a good market share, enjoys a reputation for high quality & low prices. I guess this is not true anymore, at least for... Read More
G+ the only invite only Social Network Site
Google Plus (G+) is just a few weeks old Social Network Site (SNS) from Google and already exceeded 20 million users, despite the fact the new Social Media channel is still in Beta (invite only). It took Facebook good few years to reach 20 million users, so it is fair to say the new SNS is more dynamic. G+ however doesn’t currently compete head to head with Facebook but instead G+ tends to position as another SNS; therefore not an immediate panic... Read More
Reem’s Digital Experiment: Creating an awesome Youtube Channel
Note: This is the first entry in a series that I have decided to call “Reem’s Digital Experiment”. I am going to attempt to create a “successful Youtube Channel by a blogger in the Middle East”. Many of my clients have asked how to do this effectively and while I often reference “success stories”, they aren’t my own. So I’m going to consolidate all my “YOUTUBE SUCCESS” research and... Read More
Social Media is about back to basic
We’ve always had one form of technology in our life, from fishing in 3,000 years ago to satellite technology today. This is all about our power of creativity and willingness to develop the past inventions to make life easier. We’ve always looked for ways to change things, especially making our everyday communications smoother and more effective. Mobile phones, text messages and emails all played a great role in that but, in the past couple... Read More
Latest Facebook Statistics in the #MENA (Q1 2011)
We have been talking a lot lately about the second release of the Arab Social Media Report developed by the Dubai School of Government and even though they had some information and numbers released on the site now the entire report is available for download. Below we are going to highlight some of the main points and graphs revealed in the report from Facebook and we will follow up with another post focusing only on Twitter in order to keep it... Read More
The Arab Social Media Report: A Report from the Dubai School of Government.
This week, I was at the Marcus Evans Middle East Social Media and Marketing Event as part of team InteractiveMe.com. The event was enjoyable, the speakers were well-informed and the attendees were wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Stay tuned to the site, as we’ll be posting highlights, video and commentary on the use of Social Media as a tool for Brand Awareness and marketing. As a Digital Consultant, one of my jobs is to provide... Read More
1 on 1 with Mishaal AlGergawi UAE’s Social Media Expert (Part 2 of 2):
This article is a continuation of the discussion held here in part 1 With Mishaal AlGergawi, and is sponsored by the Government Social Media Conference (@govsmc) taking place in Dubai on June 7th – 8th. After discussing how Mishaal felt about his personal experiences with Twitter we then moved on to discuss the state of Social Media in the region and especially in the government sector. I asked him whether if he thought social media was on the... Read More
Meet the Geek: Osama Romoh
We’ve had the pleasure of meeting Osama Romoh (@osamaromoh), who is a prominent Jordanian Blogger at osamaa.com with over 1,800+ Followers on twitter and with more than 13,900K likes on his facebook page. Osama now works in Dubai with Dubizzle where he is the Digital Marketing manager, we thought we’d share his wisdom with the world when it comes to Digital marketing so we sent him a couple of questions and he gracefully replied. Below... Read More
1 on 1 with Mishaal AlGergawi UAE’s Social Media Expert (Part 1 of 2):
This article is sponsored by the Government Social Media Conference (@govsmc) taking place in Dubai on June 7th – 8th. I had the pleasure of speaking with Mishaal AlGergawi for those who don’t Know Mishaal he’s twitter and social media advocate that goes by the handle @Algergawi if you’re in the UAE or follow news from the UAE on Twitter you most probably read one of his tweets or even follow him. Mishaal didn’t always like Twitter... Read More
Be surprised? More like Be Confused! #Fail
Last week at the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, there was a mysterious looking stand in the main atrium with a giant block of mud and two people in lab coats kept padding it down and scrapping away at it. I was kind of curious as to what it was so I went and asked them what this big block of mud was doing in the middle of the Mall. They were very secretive saying they are working on molding a vehicle but they wouldn’t say who the manufacturer... Read More
Middle Eastern countries growth on Facebook last month
A new article released on Inside Facebook today gives an interesting look about the traffic on Facebook from the Middle Eastern countries. And although there were upto 7 countries which have gained 100,000 users in the past month there is a bit of surprising and unexpected loss of users in a couple of the major countries of the region. Below is the chart prepared by Inside Facebook, as you can see Egypt is leading the pack with 500K users as previously... Read More
Facebook and the MENA region
I haven’t written about facebook for a while now so I think an article is overdue. There were some very interesting news about facebook and the MENA region last week mainly the biggest gaining countries on facebook for the month of April. According to Inside Facebook Egypt is the 7th biggest gainer on Facebook in April gaining about 0.5 M users which translates into a rise of 8.3% which comes as part of a 3-month growth rate of 38%. Which actually... Read More
The Domino’s effect (Part 2): Social media use the MENA region can learn from
Earlier this week I wrote an article about Domino’s Pizza success with using social media to handle and manage a crisis that threatened to damage their brand. In this continuation we will see how they managed to turn around the brand and use customer’s negative feedback to their advantage leveraging the power of social media. After dealing with the video of the employees preparing the tainted sandwiches, Domino’s had to now bring... Read More
The rise of the social customer in the MENA region!!
Social media has changed the way customers interact with brands, forever! Customers have evolved with the growth of social media, one-way-messages through traditional media channels and the interruptive method is at its lowest point in history. Customers now are engaging with different social platforms every day that are constantly influencing their behaviors and decisions, people are not putting their trust neither conviction on the so glamorous... Read More
Egypt is the 22nd biggest country on Facebook
A report released by Inside Facebook analyzes the growth of Facebook globally in 12 months from April 1st 2010 – April 1st 2011. According to the report Facebook has reached 661+ Million users worldwide a 54.8% increase from April 2010 that is just incredible for a network of that size, its a different story when a smaller portal to double or even quadruple their traffic but when your in the hundred’s of millions and still manage... Read More
Twitter vs. Facebook traffic
I was taking a look earlier today at our Google Analytics report to see how we’re doing in terms of visitors and traffic sources and I think it is safe to say that if you’re running a blog focus on Facebook rather than twitter. Our referrals from Facebook are more than double the referrals from Twitter even though we have over 1,400 followers on twitter and only 137 fans on our Facebook page. Now here are some reasons as to why (in my... Read More
Fast Lebanon or Furious Battle
In support of the Lebanese campaign towards a country with fast internet and part of the responsibility to disseminate the demands or needs of the crowd, we unanimously decided to join, help in demonstrations, and promote better policy reform for this issue. Lebanon has two internet service providers of little competitiveness and unbelievable prices. It’s even said that both ISPs have agreed “under the table” on joint price list... Read More
ictQatar: Taking the lead on online engagement in Qatar
ictQatar, the supreme council of Information and Communication Technology and the most active government body responsible for setting ICT policy and regulation in the region, has released a comprehensive case study on their social media efforts. This paper showcase ictQatar brand engagement with various online stakeholders since 2008. The paper unveils ictQatar thought leadership among Qatar corporations and government bodies. There is a case study... Read More
Q&A with Aranim Media Factory
Not too long ago I published a post about social gaming in the MENA region and mentioned how Aranim Media Factory among other companies who are working on providing the region with relevant social games mostly on Facebook. So I decided to get in touch with the Aranim team and get a little more information about them and the story behind the name. Unfortunately as you can see from the answers below, they didn’t tell us what the name meant, however... Read More
