A newly born social brand: iTechia!
Finally, a brand that reacted well and joined the social web, a brand that has shown enormous understanding for the new rules of the web and transformed successfully: iTechia! iTechia is tech store in Saudi Arabia, has branches across main cities, known for being the first to bring the latest tech items to the Saudi market, especially Apple products. Itechia had a great challenge when one of the staff had asked a visiting mom and her disabled... Read More
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
Comprehensive Curation: Tweets, Images, and Videos You Can’t Miss on #Women2Drive
You might need to read this article we published earlier today before you judge us Writing on #Women2Drive. [View the story "Tweets You Can't Miss on #Women2Drive" on Storify] 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
Dont forget the Middle East Social Media Marketing Conference on May 29
It’s almost here the Middle East Social Media Marketing Conference organized by marcusevans will be held next Sunday 29 – 30 May at the Hyatt Regency Dubai Hotel, Dubai, UAE. We have already talked to two of the experts that will be present at the conference, but there will be many more who will share their knowledge and provide a local insight. Take a look at the list below: Ibrahim Elbadawi, Strategic Planning Specialist – Emirates... 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
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 Domino’s effect (Part 1): Social media use the MENA region can learn from
We are all fascinated with social media even though recent reports and surveys from the MENA region have stated that most marketeers in the region are facing difficulties with it especially dealing with negative feedback from consumers and creating value for their brands from it. So I did some research about social media case studies that have occurred recently and one that kept popping up is how Domino’s Pizza dealt with a crisis that... 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
Dubizzle bigger than Twitter in the UAE!
I read a tweet today that was quite interesting, according to alexa Dubizzle ranks higher than Twitter in the UAE. Dubizzle which is a classifieds website that was launched from Dubai quickly gained popularity in the past years and has now expanded all over the MENA region. So if this could be done within 5-6 years, I think with the right marketing strategies they can obtain the same level of success across the region. Check it out: 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
And you say social media doesn’t do any good!
We, people in the MENA region, know how powerful social media is, just ask the ousted leaders and they’ll give you a better idea. Not just pulling down governments can happen like magic through social networks, finding missing people is just another social service it can provide. Well, 2 days ago a 16-year-old youngster by the name of Faisal went missing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and it was the time to rescue. But guess who came to the rescue,... Read More
BRKG: A New Guide to Venture Capital in the MENA Region
Just few minutes ago, our colleague Habib Haddad, founder of Yamli, shared a link on twitter about new fresh informative document that is much needed in the MENA region. This document was named: “A Guide to Venture Capital in the MENA Region” which could answer a lot of questions and turn down a lot of controversial wisdom. This report is a collaborative effort between the MENA Private Equity Association, the VC Task-force Team (team members... Read More
