Archive for September, 2009

The uninvited guest at the party

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Office_Party_Noise_Maker_BAs more and more Middle East brands register themselves on Twitter and plan to include the platform in their communications, it is worth remembering that marketing is still the uninvited guest at the party. Twitter wasn’t conceived as a marketing tool and so has not been developed for marketers, it’s been developed for, and by, its users. Despite marketing efforts on Twitter and Twitter’s own plans to monetise the platform, the site’s runaway success has been due to its success with individual users and the fact that it can make communicating easy, friendly and productive.

As at a real life house party some people at the party will give ‘marketing’ the benefit of the doubt, some people will walk over and try to engage the newcomer in conversation, some will wait to see how marketing goes down with the others before making any approach of their own and some will object to marketing being at the party at all. It’s clearly marketing’s task to prove that he’s not such a bad chap after all and can even be fun to have around!

The party analogy is a good one for communications and marketing teams joining Twitter to bear in mind, since the key to success is seeking common ground with your audiences and listening carefully so that you can tune in to the vibe of the room. Those that don’t bother to listen to other conversations and insist on talking about their favourite brand without stopping to see whose actually listening, risk building negative feeling around their brand rather than anything positive. Those that take the time out to listen and ‘work the room’ to take in as much information as possible on what interests their audience, will ultimately have the best chance of engaging contacts effectively.

How popular is your brand?

Here are some signs that you may not be the most popular guy at the party:

- You’re following hundreds of Twitter users but few follow you back

- You’re Tweets are never or seldom retweeted

- You receive few if any questions from other Twitter users

- Your Twitter account is rarely recommended by other Twitter users, for instance on ‘#FollowFridays’

- You post links but few people ever click on them

Here are some indications that you may be fitting in rather well:

- Twitter users relevant to your brand follow you

- Twitter users often follow you back

- You’re Tweets are more replies than announcements

- You’re Tweets are often retweeted

- You often receive questions from other Twitter users

- Your Twitter account is recommended more and more by other users

Finally, as with any group of people at a party, you’ll hit it off with some of them immediately, some will take time to get to know and some won’t be easy to win over. Remember: it’s not your party, so you don’t choose the guests, rather it’s up to the guests to decide if they like having you around.

Is your brand stuck in the ‘not so popular’ group? Feel free to contact us if you think you need help on making your brand more ’social’.

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Posted in Middle East marketing, Twitter, brand marketing, social media | 1 Comment »

Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

Scroll down the page for survey download links

Summary

2009 has been a big year for Twitter with the micro-blogging platform’s rate of growth rocketing up to more than 20% per month and now showing annual growth of 1,460 percent (June 2008 to June 2009) according to Comscore. Although it’s still early days for Twitter in the Middle East and North Africa, Twitter is now growing fast and the numbers of Twitter users in the Middle East and North Africa is now increasing at a rate of 17% per month. The MENA Twitter community overall has increased ten times over the first seven months of 2009.

MENA Twitter Users By LocationSpot On Public Relations has been active on Twitter since August 2008,  has been tracking Twitter usage in the MENA region  and, in the absence of any data on the region’s Twitter growth or demographics, has been conducting its own research. This report is the result of the region’s first extensive Twitter usage survey which focuses on the demographics, Twitter habits and experiences of a sample of 216 registered Twitter users across the Middle East and North Africa.

Here are some of the MENA Twitter Survey’s key findings:

— 54% of respondents are following 100 – 499 other Twitter users

— 53% of users surveyed have 100 – 499 followers

— 35% of Twitter users tweet 2-5 times per day

— 64% typically tweet every day of the week

— Contrary to global trends, twice as many men in our Middle East and North Africa survey use Twitter than women (other surveys show a similar male bias on Facebook in MENA)

— 99% of those surveyed tweet in English, 26% tweet in Arabic

— Only 50% of Arabic speakers tweet in Arabic

— 39% tweet mainly with other Twitter users in the Middle East

— 61% of MENA Twitter users surveyed say that Twitter has affected their perceptions of a brand

— 70% of MENA Twitter users say they have formed a more positive perception of a brand due to Twitter and 52% say that they have formed a more negative perception of a brand due to Twitter

— 48% of users surveyed say that they have often been alerted to a major story via Twitter, 54% say that Twitter has lead them to a blog or website and 21% say that they have tuned into a TV program as a result of Twitter

— 32% of users say that they have bought a product or service as a result of recommendations on Twitter

— 96% of users expect to continue to use Twitter as much as they do today or even more in the future

Survey Downloads

Middle East & North Africa Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (PDF)

MENA Twitter Survey Press Release (English, Word doc)

MENA Twitter Survey Press Release (Arabic)

Bookmark this page to keep updated with new downloads on the survey

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Creative Commons License
Middle East & North Africa Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey by Spot On Public Relations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.spotonpr.com/menatwittersurvey/.

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Posted in General, Twitter, social media | 3 Comments »

Jokes

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

When was the last time someone told you a joke? I mean told, not emailed or Tweeted, texted or linked. It struck me the other day – it’s been ages. And it struck me because someone did tell me a joke – prefacing the gag with “Hey, I got this on email the other day, did you hear about…”

It’s not that we’ve all lost our narrative skills so much as we have adapted them to new media. Few of us actually invent the jokes we tell (in fact, I remember one interesting science fiction story that postulated jokes were made up by aliens because nobody actually knows someone who has made up a joke), we just pass them on. We might, if we fancy ourselves as a raconteur, embellish the gag and ‘make it our own’, but we are just passing on something that amuses us and that we think will amuse others, thereby making us more popular.

These days we do the same online. We send silly LOLcat pictures to our friends (or enemies, depending where you stand on the Great LOLcat Debate), videos of people falling off skateboards or links to brilliant online phenomena such as www.sadtrombone.com. When popstars die, the jokes fly around from mobile to mobile – perhaps interesting to anthropologists, Twitter didn’t reverberate with sick Michael Jackson jokes, they remained a private gag shared by text: a guilty pleasure, then.

In fact, we’ve become adept at using a number of platforms to share different types of content with each other – Twitter for links, Facebook for socialising, Youtube for video and so on. We’re sharing items of cultural information – Memes, if you want to be formal – in different ways, but for essentially the same reasons. We seek popularity and approval, attention and a role in our defined communities by sharing things of interest and amusement with each other.

Our motivations and our fundamental behaviours are the same. It’s just that we’re finding new mediums of expression. And while I am excited by that, I have to be honest and say that I do miss actually having jokes told to me.

Posted in General | No Comments »