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Media consumption & habits of MENA Internet users

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Scroll down the page for survey download links

The figures in our new Media Consumption & Habits of MENA Internet Users Survey simply confirm what everyone involved in the Middle East’s growing digital marketing industry has already been talking about for the past year or two: Internet connectivity has become pervasive amongst many of our key target audiences and is now a significant part of their daily lives. The new research survey conducted by Effective Measure in conjunction with Spot On PR, underscores that the Internet opportunity is not just something that exists in the USA or Europe, its right here in the MENA region too. It’s not just a rich thing. It’s not just a youth thing. (And its not just a Facebook thing either). The Internet’s reach is now much broader than that and its influence in the Middle East and North Africa is now truly rivalling its traditional media counterparts and providing marketers with real (and highly measureable) alternatives.

Here are some of the survey’s key findings:

- MENA Internet users now spend more time browsing the Internet than they do watching TV.

MENA Internet users daily access of Internet exceeds TV

- 88% of those surveyed stated that they access the Internet daily

- 71% of those surveyed stated that they watched television daily.

- Most traditional media have peaks and troughs in attention. Radio and newspapers achieve peak share of audience in the morning. Television audiences peak in the evening. However, the Internet holds audience attention fairly consistently throughout the day and well into the night.

- 28% more respondents watched TV during peak viewing hours than when viewership is at its lowest, at 7%),

- 20% of respondents stated that they use the Internet at any time-period surveyed, peaking at 33% in the evening (just 13% higher than the lowest period).

- Predictably, 73% of the survey’s respondents cited email as the activity they most often carried out online, ranking abover all other online activities.

- Social networking and search activities followed as the next highest ranking online activities for MENA Internet users, all coming it at about 40%.

- 54% of Internet users surveyed used mobile applications daily.

- 79% of Internet users surveyed spent up to three hours per day updating their social networks. 20% spent more than three hours updating their social networks.

- Internet users were more positive to companies and brands using “Internet marketing” than they were towards companies and brands using “social media marketing”.

- Most responses to our survey showed little variance between male and female respondents. However, there were a number of notable differences between the genders in their stated experiences with social media.

Survey Downloads

Download the full survey report (PDF)

Download the press release (English, Word doc)

Download the press release (Arabic, Word doc)

- – – -

Creative Commons

Media consumption & habits of MENA Internet users by Effective Measure and Spot On Public Relations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post MENA Internet users, you might like our other Internet demographics and habits surveys:

15 Million MENA Facebook Users – Report (May 2010)

Twitter & Customer Service Survey (March 2010)

Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (2009)

Sign-up for more reports

If you would like to receive reports like this by email click here to join Spot On PR’s mailing list.

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Posted in Applications, Facebook, General, Internet, Internet research, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Mobile, Newspapers, Online marketing, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, research, social media | 9 Comments »

When social media programs grow up…

Thursday, July 15th, 2010
The company's pet social media program isn't going to stay a puppy for ever!

Remember: a social media programme isn't just for Christmas!

I’ve been doing quite a lot of speaking at ‘online’ conference events and workshops recently (this will surprise nobody who knows me) and consequently meeting a lot of people who are experimenting with social media within their organisations. It’s something of a growing trend – typically, one person within an organisation has been using Facebook or Twitter, even blogging, and has come to realise that there is very real value to the organisation in ‘being there’. A lot of these people come from the communications department, although by no means all. At a recent event where I spoke to an audience of event managers, I found quite a lot of people who had responsibility for companies’ events were the drivers behind introducing social media to their organisations.

Something of a pattern has started to emerge. The enthusiast is given permission to open up a social media account because it seems harmless enough – the company’s management doesn’t ‘get’ social media and so doesn’t see any danger in letting the enthusiast play with it. The enthusiast starts out and quickly finds a ready audience of people responding, interacting and demanding information, access and insight. It all becomes hard to handle precisely because it has been successful – one person can’t keep up with the volume but has gained enough experience to see the potential for this new medium.

So they go back to their management and point out that the experiment has been a great success, customers are now talking to the company over this new medium and appreciating the new degrees of access it brings. Can we expand the programme now?

And many I talk to are right in the middle of that conversation, mired in ‘not just yet, there’s a recession on you know’ and ‘What’s the ROI?’ reactions from the management team that has allowed this thing to develop so far precisely because it has ascribed it no importance.

The trouble is that social media is a difficult habit to break. Having started engagement with customers, partners and other stakeholders online, you have set an expectation of accessibility that can only grow. These early steps are important and help to build experience and learning – but it can’t stop there. The very fact that these programmes now need additional resources and expansion shows that they’re doing something right. It’s odd, in fact, that management presented with something new that is actually working would balk at it.

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Posted in Facebook, Internet, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, Twitter, social media | No Comments »

10 social media myths exposed

Monday, May 31st, 2010
You don't need a magic lamp either

You don't need a magic lamp either

To our delight, more and more Middle East brands are looking seriously at using social media in their communications and making efforts to plan, structure and invest in strategic activities. It’s no secret that Spot On PR is a big fan of social media and actively recommends that all organisations pay attention to the irreversible changes that social media are bringing to business communications. However, no two companies are the same and we have no ready-made proposals for what social media tactics organisations should use and we would caution company’s against trying to copycat as an alternative to proper planning, particularly if your organisation is a large one. Learning from others social media efforts can be extremely valuable, but not as a replacement for having your own strategy. Equally, beware of one-size-fits-all social media campaign solutions. Here are some common social media myths that are worth being aware of.

1. Social media is cheap.

It certainly can be, but as with many things in life and business, you get out of social media what you put into it. Low budget, low effort social media campaigns have their place, but success usually means more audience engagement and more engagement means that more management and resources are required. Scale is obviously a key factor in influencing costs if you already have a large audience online, don’t expect an intern with a new Twitter profile to be the best way of managing conversations, enquiries and complaints: you’re going to need to have a system in place.

2.You have to be on Facebook!

There are lots of good reasons why it might make perfect sense for your organisation to have a Facebook fan page. However, bear in mind that Facebook is littered with the inactive pages of companies that started a Facebook page because everyone else did. If you can’t think of a good reason why your customers would sign-up for your Facebook page, or what you could post on it beyond company press releases then your brand may be better off without one.

3.You have to be on ‘X’ (where X is a social media platform).

Social media platforms will come and go. Whether they make sense for your business will depend on whether your brand can engage effectively with relevant audiences on them or not. Finding out where your key audiences spend time online is a good first step for any campaign.

4. More connections = more success.

This is obviously partly true, but there are limited returns in investing in indiscriminately increasing the number of social media connections that your brand has. There are many ways of enticing social media users to connect or sign-up for pages, but real engagement is about how audiences interact with you, not passively remain connected to a page or profile they never visit. Focus on making the connections that matter.

5. You have to be ‘cool’.

Of course, everyone likes a cool brand. However, if you’re providing a business-to-business product or service, don’t expect teenage SMS-style messages to resonate with your target audiences. Communicate with your brand’s stakeholders in the way that they expected to be communicated with. Don’t translate all your communications into SMS, MSN or Twitterese!

6.You can automate everything.

Beware of “experts” telling you how to automate your whole social media campaign. Plans are good. Social media tools are good. Any tools to help with content management are good. Frameworks and policy documents are good. And you will find some time-saving practices. However, at the end of the day, people respond best when communicated with personally. If your customers, partners and other important audiences expect to communicate with a real person, don’t give them an RSS feed that SPAMs them thirty times a day instead. If you’re not continuously in dialogue (versus simply broadcasting your messages), then you’ve sort of missed the whole point of social media.

7.You have to have a blog.

A blog is a communications tool like any other. Blogs can be very useful and a provide a cost effective way of publishing information and getting feedback. However, not every business has the content or writing skills to maintain a blog to quality, and many businesses still need to cater for less Internet-savvy audiences that are more reliant on the press, broadcast media and email for their information. Invest your social media efforts where you’re going to be able to drive the best results. If a blog makes the most sense from a content, audience and a resource point of view, then blog away!

8. Social media campaigns replace advertising.

For sure, the open access to information, viral nature and sharing capabilities of social media are forcing significant changes on the world of advertising. Advertising is having to shift its focus from broadcasting brand messages to creating platforms for dialogue with consumers. However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here! Don’t mistake resistance to advertising for resistance to irrelevant advertising. Social media hasn’t replaced email marketing either, but you’re only going to get an increasing tide of negativity if you insist on spamming your audience over and over in an effort to increase your email response rates.

9. If you have budget, you don’t need to do it yourself.

Agencies can play a pivotal role in helping your brand leverage social media platforms within the scope of your brand’s communications (but then I would say that, wouldn’t I!). By their very nature agencies gain insights into how different campaigns are implemented for different clients and so can provide useful third party advice for brands planning campaigns. Your agency should be able to help you plan, focus and manage your social media activities for maximum returns, but subcontracting the running of your social media profiles, blogs and other social media tools to your agency in their entirety is a short term fix at best. Your customers think they’re connecting with you, not your agency. Even if your campaign is heavily agency-assisted, plan on being directly involved day-t0-day.

10. It’s not all about “the conversation”.

Thanks to the Cornwall SEO blog for this one. Taking your brand onto social media should take place within a pre-defined framework that allows your brand to both promote itself and take part in conversations with key audiences. Being part of “the conversation” on any social media platform, knowing how to engage other users and being, well, social is a pre-requisite. However, being part of the conversation probably isn’t your most important objective. So, while you’re tracking your followers, conversations and social media engagement metrics, try to remember your original objectives. How many people have you reached? How many sales leads have you generated? How many customers have you engaged with? How many customer service issues have you solved? How many new visits did you drive to your website? That was the whole point, right?

Useful links (external)

Social Media Myth No. 1 “It’s about the conversation” (Cornwall SEO Blog)

Debunking Five Social Media Myths (Socialmediatoday)

4 Myths About Social Media and Business (Mashable)

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post about social media campaigns, you might also like:

Are you engaging with the right fans? (May 2010)

The coolest agency in the world (February 2010)

Social media measurement (November 2009)

Social media isn’t socialist media (November 2009)

Social media takes time (November 2009)

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Posted in CRM, Content, Customer care, Customers, Facebook, General, Internet, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, SEO, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, social media, strategy | No Comments »

Are you engaging the right fans?

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010
Great response, but you'd expect that from your employees, wouldn't you?

They're all big fans (but you'd expect that from your staff, wouldn't you?)

As a communications and marketing agency that helps run a number of social media programs, we spend quite a lot of time looking at Middle East social media marketing campaigns from around the region. It’s still early days, but the number of brands experimenting with social media in the Middle East is growing and, as with many things in business, you can almost always learn something from someone else’s work. So, on finding a brand’s Middle East Facebook fan page with 25 comments and Likes on its last post, I’m ready to be impressed. However, being the suspicious character that I am, I start to Google and check Facebook profiles of those commenting, and soon discover that most of them seem to be directly related to the same brand (employees, distributors, ex-employees). Whether that’s a successful outcome or not ultimately depends on the Facebook page’s objectives, but perhaps it does help to illustrate that all kinds of online engagement are not equal.

It’s always been a challenge to accurately attribute response to the different marketing programmes. No matter how many reply devices, coupons and codes you include in your programs, you will always get leads that are not possible to attribute to any particular program and responses attributed to one promotion that you suspect were strongly influenced by another. Online marketing really is as good as it gets when it comes to tracking marketing campaign results and it offers a wealth of opportunities to build in mechanisms to track responses and enquiries. However, as with all measurement and metrics, online metrics are there to be abused! None more so than social media campaign metrics, which routinely include tracking the campaign’s following (fans, followers, members, subscribers etc.) and measuring the engagement with people that campaign drives by counting the number of interactions (conversations, comments, ‘Likes’, shares, retweets etc.). The reason that theses metrics are open to abuse is that there are many ways to increase both following and engagement, whilst ignoring your primary target audience completely.

Building a meaningful following is not just about the numbers

Businesses like numbers and big numbers in particular. And so it’s no surpise that what most marketing managers really want out of online campaigns is scale and reaching thousands or hundreds of thousands. There are usually good reasons for this, even if some of those reasons come from marketing strategies past. However, with the growth of the social web, online users have more and more choice in what content they consume, which platforms they use and how they spend their time online. Contacting people in high numbers is not the same as connecting with people in high numbers, and adding contacts as connections is not the same as engaging them with conversations and content. Send enough invites to enough people, particularly if you build or buy a half-decent database, and you’re going to be able to build a following. And the more people you contact the more people will sign-up. Overall, that’s a good thing, but these new followers are only really useful if they i) have an active interest in your brand and ii) if they are the consume your content and are open to interacting with your brand. A good question to ask yourself is: are you building a following that is important to your brand? 1,000 subscribers that are made up of your primary target audience and engages with your brand frequently are infinitely more valuable to your marketing effort than 10,000 subscribers that ignore you and your content.

All online engagement is not equal

If you’ve done a good job of branding and populating your blog or social media page with content, you stand a good chance of getting the benefit of the doubt from first time visitors to your page. However, it’s now very much down to how compelling your content and promotions are to what level of engagement you drive. You’ll need to be aware that different people respond in different ways to content they like. Some will comment on your page, some will share with their contacts, some will bookmark, some will import your RSS feed into their feed reader, some will send you an email, and some will recommend your brand or content to others. Therefore you’ll usually need to track more than one or two metrics. As with building an online following, online engagement is not always as simple as driving higher numbers either. For example, it’s nice to get endorsements from audiences like job seekers, employees, distributors and business partners, but if your budget has been allocated to drive customer engagement, success rather depends on how many of your interactions and endorsements are actually from your customer audiences. Getting your employees talking about your new product is one thing, getting your customers talking about it, quite another.

Being able to take a critical look at your social media results, what’s working, what’s not working and most importantly who is engaging with your campaign is key to both continuing to drive your campaign moving forwards and assessing your campaign’s ROI. Social media offers some great tools to run low cost programmes and so your expectations for a low-volume, low commitment social media programme can afford to be quite modest. However, if you’re running a more extensive, more integrated programme that demands more time, advertising spend and vendor costs, the pressure is on to deliver bigger numbers. So, it is worth taking a step back and making sure your effort is focused on driving the right numbers. It’s great to have an enthusiastic employees behind your social media programme, but if most of the response to your campaign is internal you’re probably not helping them sell much product.

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Posted in CRM, Content, Customers, Facebook, Internet, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, Twitter, social media | 1 Comment »

Introducing social media in the Arab world

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

ODwyer Magazine - April 2010The April issue of O’Dwyer’s PR Magazine has just come out in the USA and it features a report I wrote on social media in the Middle East and North Africa. It’s a very top-level view of social media and Internet trends in the region and primarily intended as an introduction to the Arab world for social media marketers outside the region.

It’s only when starting to write a summary like this that one realises just how much there is to tell and how much Internet and media habits are changing across the region. O’Dwyer’s generously allowed my 1,400 words to write my report, but it really was a challenge trying to cram it all in!

You can read the digital edition of April’s O’Dwyer’s Magazine here:
O’Dwyer’s Magazine – April 2010

Thanks to Ben Lorica Senior Analyst at O’Reilly Research for allowing me to use their Facebook charts to illustrate my report.

Disclosure: Spot On PR also advertised in the April issue of O’Dwyer’s Magazine . We dealt with O’Dwyer’s advertising team on the advertisement and separately with O’Dwyer’s editor regarding covering the Arab world in this issue. However, as pointed out by @rupertbu on Twitter, I can’t tell you with certainty what, if any, influence our advertising had on the treatment of my editorial submission. We previewed Spot On PR’s advertisement in O’Dwyer’s to our Twitter and Facebook followers last week, but I see now that I should have mentioned our advertisement in this blogpost also. Thanks to Rupert Bumfrey for pointing this out!

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Posted in Content, Facebook, Internet, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Newspapers, Online marketing, Publishing, Twitter, public relations, social media | No Comments »

A tweet in time saves nine

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Erroneous, misguided or otherwise badly put together marketing communications are sent out by organisations every day. Sometimes it’s a genuine mistake, sometime it’s sloppy work, sometimes it’s a bad judgement call and sometimes it’s pure human error that has the potential to make the whole organisation look bad. Most of the time communications like these simply fail to resonate, are passed over, ignored or deleted, mobile text messages in particular. A mobile marketing SMS sent out yesterday resonated with many UAE residents for all the wrong reasons.

It all began with this SMS message, apparently from Le Meridien Mina Seyahi’s Barasti Bar, confirming to their contacts that the Vanilla Ice concert planned for Wednesday March 31st night was indeed going ahead:

“NORMAL OPERATION. WE ARE NOT DRY! NICE, NICE BABY! 5PM-3AM C U ON THE SAND”

As many people have already commented on, this made the organisers and venue seem, at the very least, insensitive to the fact that a 3 day period of mourning had just started for Sheikh Ahmed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, formerly head of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, who died this week in a flying accident in Morocco. UAE columnist and social commentator Mishaal Al Gergawi (@algergawi on Twitter) tweeted “let’s get #barasti trending for the one reason they’d never want to trend today!” Nearly 600 tweets followed over the next 8 hours mentioning the #barasti hashtag. Some three hours after the Twitter rampage began Le Meridien Mina Seyahi announced that the Vanilla Ice concert was cancelled “due to the death of Sheikh Ahmed bin Zayed Al Nahyan”.

There has been debate, discussion, media reporting and statements from the venue itself on the question of whether the #Barasti Twitter campaign was responsible for the cancellation of the concert and so we’re not going to debate this further. However, there are some important take-aways for business communicators from the announcements made yesterday by Le Meridien and the reaction to them by the public. So, here’s our 50 fils worth:

1. The SMS text was not thought through and shouldn’t have been sent. That’s pretty obvious, but the broader picture is that with today’s communications and Internet services, you never really know who’s receiving your messages. You can no longer develop messages for one audience and assume that other audiences won’t see them.

2. Twitter was not prioritised by the venue or organisers and instead left to debate and protest the SMS. The announcement by Le Meridien (via @minaseyahi) that the concert was still taking place as planned was made at 10.13am UAE time. The announcement by the hotel that the event was cancelled was made at 4pm UAE Time (about an hour after this was announced to media). For the six hours in between @minaseyahi was silent.
This was a mistake.

BarastiTweets

Twitter updates tagged #barasti from 1300-2100 UAE time

As often pointed out by social media marketers critics and user alike, Twitter is not the whole game, there’s a whole world out there. However, Twitter is one of the most visible, most easily monitored indicators of audience interest and sentiment there is and the activity on Twitter should have been recognised early on as a call to action. By our calculations, 218 Twitter users were engaged in the #barasti conversation on Wednesday. If you had 218 people in your hotel lobby you’d talk to them. If you had 218 people calling you by telephone you’d have to say something to them. Those 218 Twitter users also have a combined following of 126,995 Twitter users. Many of these users were obviously at work in their offices at the time, so its reasonable to assume that many non-Twitter users became part of this extended conversation (we’d tend to estimate those in the hundreds too, at the least).

3. Facebook and Twitter are different. Le Meridien posted an apology on the Barasti Beach Facebook page at 3.20pm UAE time. It would be unwise to assume that the hundreds of Twitter users following this story would have seen this, but no such apology was made on Twitter. In fact, there was no statement of any kind on Twitter until 4pm. It was, and is, worthwhile posting an apology.

Proportion of Twitter users that stated an opinion on the SMS or the event (according to Spot On PR analysis)

Proportion of Twitter users that stated an opinion on the SMS or the event (according to Spot On PR analysis)

4. ‘Information’ expands to fill a vacuum. Despite the obvious attention and strength of feeling regarding the SMS sent and the holding of the concert during a period of mourning, only 19% (according to our analysis) of Twitter users taking part in the #Barasti conversation voiced a clear opinion against the communication and the event. That leaves 81% of those users having either not formed a strong opinion or not willing to voice it. In other words, to a large extent, the only information and comment being provided to those 81% over Twitter was by those protesting against the SMS and concert. No explanation, apology or statement of any kind from the brand being criticised.

Note: Don’t read too much into our percentages here. The 19% of Twitter users voicing a clear opinion ranges from mild disapproval through to “I’m not renewing my membership card”. The sentiment of the 81% without an opinion on the SMS or event ranges from “What is #Barasti?” to Twitter users that felt that the energy injected into the Twitter campaign was a waste of time and effort.

5. The communications medium doesn’t matter anymore. Prioritising audiences based on the media they use (and we can’t honestly say that we know this is what happened) isn’t particularly useful anymore. Yesterday an SMS was re-posted on Twitter. Facebook messages can be reported on and appear in print. Telephone conversations can be noted down and blogged. Today’s communicators need to bear in mind that any communication, anywhere, to anyone is potentially today’s news.

Links to media reports & blog posts

Proud: UAE Tweethearts & Mishaal AlGergawi (Emiratweet blog)

Barasti bar scraps concert after Twitter outrage (Arabianbusiness.com)

Twitter irrelevant as Vanilla is put on ice (Maktoob.com)

The Inevitable Blog Post (Fakeplasticsouks blog)

Barasti apologises for insensitive concert texts (Arabianbusiness.com)

Posted in Customers, General, Internet, Marketing, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Mobile, Online marketing, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, social media | 4 Comments »

Twitter & Customer Service Survey

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Scroll down the page for survey download links

Summary

It’s now well publicised that the rapid growth Twitter experienced during 2008 and the first months of 2009 slowed dramatically towards the end of 2009, although ending the year with 75 million user accounts. Twitter activity, on the other hand, grew from 5,000 tweets per day in 2007 to 300,000 by 2008 and 2.5 million tweets per day in 2009. Figures released by Twitter in February 2010 registered 50 million tweets per day (or an average of 600 tweets per second). No such figures are available for the Middle East & North Africa, but activity on Twitter has visibly increased over the past year and overall user numbers have also grown. Spot On estimates that there are currently 35,000-40,000 registered Twitter users in the region compared with a mere 3,000 users in March 2009.

Corporate activity in the MENA Twittersphere has grown too, with an estimated 400 brands represented on Twitter in the region including companies, government departments, NGOs and non-profit organizations (more than 300 can be tracked via Spot On’s Middle East Brands Twitter List). Spot On Public Relations conducted the first major MENA Twitter habits and demographics survey in August 2009. In light of the growing commercial interest in Twitter and social media in the MENA region, Spot On carried out a customer service and Twitter survey in February 2010. About 1,000 active Twitter users across the region were invited to take part in the survey and 174 users completed the survey in its entirety.

Key Findings

Brand engagement— 95% of respondents welcomed brand engagement via Twitter

— 87% of those surveyed said that Twitter had affected their perception of a brand or company (up from 61% in our August 2009 survey)

— 50% of those surveyed had received customer service via Twitter

Buying Via Twitter

— 50% of the survey had purchased a product or service as a result of Twitter

— 65% of respondents were interested in receiving special offers & coupons from brands on Twitter

— 82% admitted a preference for brands that they knew via Twitter that affected their purchasing

— 88% of those surveyed said that they would recommend a brand based on their experience on Twitter

All respondents were also asked to give one piece of advice to brands using Twitter. 101 Twitter users out of 174 contributed advice from their experience on Twitter. We highly recommend any brand that is using Twitter or considering using Twitter to read their advice in the survey report.

You can follow Spot On PR on Twitter via @spotonpr

Survey Downloads

The report: 101 things brands should know about Twitter (PDF)

Twitter and customer service survey press release (English, Word doc)

Twitter and customer service survey press release (Arabic, Word doc)

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Creative Commons

101 things brands should know about Twitter by Spot On Public Relations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post about Twitter, you might also like:

Tweets like grains of wheat

5 reasons Spot On PR uses Twitter

The uninvited guest at the party

Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (2009)

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Posted in CRM, Customer care, Customers, General, Internet, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, Twitter, brand marketing, social media | 1 Comment »

#DubaiToday twalk radio

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
#DubaiToday 'trending' on UAETweets.com

#DubaiToday 'trending' on UAETweets.com (3/Mar/10)

Perhaps it was the rainy weather, perhaps it was the fact that four well known local Twitter users appeared live on the show, or perhaps it was just the conversations, but Dubai Eye 103.8FM’s Dubai Today show really got the UAE’s Twitter community buzzing on Tuesday.

On hearing about local social media folk heroes Wild Peeta’s presentation at the Corporate Communications Conference on Monday, Dubai Today presenter Jessica Swann (a.k.a. @JessicaSwann on Twitter) was keen to have the speakers on the show. Tiring of more traditional conference presentations, Wild Peeta had turned to their fans and, somewhat bravely, had asked four of their social media followers to talk about Wild Peeta’s social media campaign and business on its behalf: on 24 hours notice, unvetted and unrehearsed. So, Spot On’s Alexander McNabb (a.k.a. @AlexanderMcnabb), Mohamed Younes Parham Al Awadhi  (@wildpeeta), Paul Castle (@DaddyBird) and Uzma Atcha (@Lhjunkie) were cordially invited to appear on Dubai Today (as was @yahya101 who sadly couldn’t make it to the studio at short notice).

Spot On PR notified its social media followers in advance, as it usually does about Alexander’s public appearances, as did Wild Peeta, together with Twitter reminders just before the show. However, the reaction to Tuesday’s show took us all a bit by surprise! Whilst not strictly accurate, as one tweep put it, everyone on Twitter was listening to Dubai Today!

#DubaiToday tweets per hour

#DubaiToday tweets per hour (2/Mar/10)

Encouraged to use the Dubai Today Twitter hashtag #DubaiToday, within a couple of hours listeners had not only made the tag ‘trend’ locally (as tracked by UAETweets.com), but had made #DubaiToday trend globally (appear on Twitter list of top tags in use). By mid-show (Dubai Today runs between 9am and 12 noon) #DubaiToday tweets were peaking at more than 200 tweets per hour and over the course of four hours, more than 500 tweets were exchanged continuing discussions on Dubai Today, including contributions to the show that were read live on air. By the end of the day, 118 Twitter users had taken part in conversations with and about the Dubai Today show by using the #DubaiToday tag and had tweeted some 700 times between 8am and 8pm Tuesday.

No cash prizes, no crisis, no scoop

It’s worth noting that the reaction on Twitter was in response to a fairly intellectual discussion about the merits of social media marketing. There was no competition for expensive air tickets or cash prizes, nor any significant breaking news. This was simply mid-morning talk radio where the conversation seemed to strike a chord with the online community.

During the same time-frame Spot On saw between 250 and 350 click-throughs on its links inviting social media users to listen live to Dubai Eye (sorry, this is as accurate as we can be with this statistic), which it had posted across a range of social networking sites on Monday evening and Tuesday morning, including Twitter.

Clicks per hour on Spot On's short URL to Dubai Eye website

Clicks per hour on Spot On's short URL to Dubai Eye website (3/Mar/10)

Meanwhile many elements of online conversations surrounding the Dubai Today show did not use the Dubai Today show hashtag at all, and so the number of tweets inspired by and about Dubai Today discussion topics on Tuesday was far in excess of 700, perhaps double.

In terms of engagement, this is really quite impressive. For sure, the Dubai Today show has never been able to engage 118 telephone callers on a single show, and yet 118 people had their say (obviously in addition to those that sent emails, SMS messages or called-in to the show). Many brands are delighted to generate a few comments on their product or service per day. Dubai Today got hundreds of comments on Tuesday, more than 80% of them during a four hour period over the show. It’s also worth noting that we’re not talking about views, visits to online content or passive radio listeners: this was 118 people that were engaged and responded in some way to the radio shows content.

And how many people did Dubai Today reach on Tuesday via Twitter? We will never know exactly. However, what we can tell you is that the 118 Twitter users who tweeted using the #DubaiToday hashtag had combined aggregate following of 71,500 Twitter users. Also that the likelihood is that as many as 200 were involved in related conversations, if we were to count those that didn’t specifically use the #DubaiToday hashtag. And that many (if not most) of the Twitter users involved probably had offline conversations of some kind about Dubai Today. That’s a lot of conversations.

The power of twalk radio!

Update 4 March 2010

You can now listen to some of the discussions aired on Tuesday’s Dubai Today program via Dubai Eye’s podcast page.

Posted in Customers, Facebook, General, Internet, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, social media, strategy | 4 Comments »

Tweets like grains of wheat

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
If Archimedes Used twitter

"By Zeus, I was sure that old grain of wheat gag was one of mine!"

The story appears to be apocryphal – I’d always thought it was Archimedes but apparently there’s also the inventor of the chessboard (an Indian bloke, according to certain online sources that can’t be used in scholastic research) and a Roman geezer. Everyone has done the old ‘one grain of wheat on the first square, two grains on the second and so on doubling with each square’ trick.

The exponential growth of figures through the 64 squares of a chessboard results, of course, in more wheat than could be grown in the kingdom – 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, to be precise. I do like the version of the story that has the ruler agreeing to the impossible bargain, but insisting the mathematician count each grain of wheat individually to be sure the ruler wasn’t cheating him.

The same mathematics potentially applies to the humble retweet, of course. It’s one reason why news can travel so astonishingly quickly over Twitter. If I find something interesting and share it with my followers on Twitter, they can in turn share it with their followers. If we assume for the sake of simplicity that each of my followers has 100 followers of their own, then if five followers RT my Tweet, we’ve just reached the eyeballs of 500 people, as well as the original audience of followers.

If five of their followers RT the Tweet, we’re looking at 2,500 people. And if we play that scenario again, 12,500 people. One last time gives us 62,500.

That’s pretty impressive – and it doesn’t begin to take into account the potential for average growth of a Tweet – which would be more likely based on a percentage than an absolute five number. The percentage would, of course, be based on the broad appeal of the Tweet or the link it contains. In other words, a Tweet can quickly reach large audiences of tens of thousands of people – millions, if it’s big news.

A more realistic everyday example would look at the thousands mark – and Tweets can easily reach audiences of thousands – and generate significant traffic to links, too. As the Internet’s current ‘go to’ darling, Twitter is great at allowing people to ‘discover’ stuff and share it with followers – I recently Tweeted a link with ‘This is funny’ and saw over 250 people hit the link within minutes.

It’s actually hard to track Twitter traffic in absolutes because people will tend to use their own link shorteners and so on, but you’d have to agree that any tool that can generate 250 views on a Website within minutes – in return for an investment of three words – is pretty powerful.

An analysis of random Tweets by a team at Microsoft found that 11% of Retweets contained a Retweet. At 11%, by the way, my ‘test tweet’ above (which would have to be, obviously, pretty sensational!) would in four steps reach over 2 million people. Which is slightly scary, isn’t it?

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Posted in Content, Internet, Online marketing, Twitter, public relations, social media | 1 Comment »

Is social media making the Middle East more ’social’?

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Middle East Social MediaI’ve been a big fan of LinkedIn since I signed up just after it launched in 2004. I immediately found lots of my technology industry friends and colleagues were doing the same and were more than happy to introduce me to their contacts. I spent hours browsing LinkedIn user records looking for useful contacts, business prospects and old friends and over the years LinkedIn’s introduced me to new clients, new staff and other useful new business contacts. However, LinkedIn is a very business-focused social network and, for me, using LinkedIn has always been about business. Moreover, it’s a way of keeping in touch with lots of people, without actually meeting them very often.

For many of us in the Middle East, we started using Twitter this way too. Twitter has been great for following what people are up to and, for the most part, those that we have a business interest in finding out about, learning from or keeping in contact with. In early 2009, when Twitter had just 1,000-2,000 users across the whole region it was the business social network users that were there first (and excited about the prospect of discovering more business contacts!). Well, one year on, things have got a great deal more ’social’. With some 30,000-40,000 Twitter users across the Middle East and North Africa (Spot On’s estimate), there seem to be many more people these days that use Twitter day-to-day for their social lives (read Eman Hussein’s ‘Life without Twitter?’). Tweetups and other offline gatherings have been springing up all over the region, bringing together people with shared interests, introducing new connections and putting faces to Twitter handles.

2010 has already seen tweetups held all over MENA including Jordan, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, plus GeekFestBeirut in Lebanon. These meetups happen for many different reasons at different types of venue, both as public open invite events and private gatherings. GeekFest Beirut, held on Friday February 5th at the Art Lounge in Beirut (see Alexander McNabb’s report on FakePlasticSouks ) drew about 120 people to socialise, talk geek and listen to geek speakers. On the same day in the Sultanate of Oman, 45 tweeps gathered at Muscat’s Indian Embassy to meet visiting Indian Minister of State for External Affairs Dr. Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor on Twitter, read Digital Oman for a full report), who now seems to have penciled in a Dubai tweetup for sometime in the near future. On Saturday January 30th a group of more than 30 Jordanian Twitter users met at Wild Jordan in Jabal Amman to meet ‘the faces behind the tweeps’ (see full report on Under My Olive Tree) and there have been at least two more Amman tweetups since! Meanwhile, more than twenty tweeps met at the Riyadh Tweetup on February 2nd. Organisers are now looking at bigger venues to hold a Riyadh Tweetup on the first Monday of every month.

As one of the volunteer organisers for the first Twestival Dubai held in February 2009 (by the way the next Twestival Dubai takes place on March 25th), which followed a month after the first ‘big’ tweetup in Dubai organised by @rida, I remember the air of mystery that used to surround organising a tweetup. Many were unsure of the etiquette (or twettiquette!) involved in hosting a tweetup. Many, also, were used to keeping ‘online friends’ and ‘real friends’ compartmentalised, never mixing the two, and never meeting the former! Now is seems Twitter has helped bring the walls down and people are more comfortable inviting people to an event over Twitter than they are over the telephone. People are inviting other people that they would normally have considered to be ’strangers’ to meet and socialise all over the region, making new contacts and yes, even friends.

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Posted in Internet, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Twitter, social media | No Comments »

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