Spot On PR | Digital | Communications | Marketing | Public Relations | Media | Social Media | Middle East | Arab World | Spot On PR is a Middle East digital communications and marketing agency that helps companies in the Middle East & North Africa build brands online and offline – Communications | Digital Strategy | Marketing | Branding | Events | Issues Management | Social Media | MENA | Middle East | Dubai | UAE | Saudi Arabia | Egypt | Morocco

Posted in Content, Disintermediation, General, Internet, Middle east, Newspapers, social media, Twitter | Tagged activism, Alexander McNabb, Dubai One, Emirates, Emirates 24/7, football, Gulf Cup 21, hashtag, journalism, media, news, reporting, sentiment, social media, The National, Twitter, UAE

Google Zeitgeist 2012 Online Report

Spirit of the Arab world

Posted on 13 December 2012 by Carrington Malin

It’s that time of year when digital companies all over the world punt annual sum-up reports in an attempt to generate some nice end-of-year publicity (watch out for ours!). Google’s popular Zeitgeist online report on popular search terms has just been published and it makes interesting reading for those watching search trends and online behaviour. However, those of us that have been following the report for the past couple of years will notice that Google seems to have changed its methodology here. For example, last year ‘Dubai’ and ‘Facebook’ were announced to Middle East media as the top two search terms for the UAE and in 2011 the top two terms were ‘Youtube’ and ‘Facebook’. Results for any three of those terms dwarf the volume of local search results for Zeitgeist 2012′s top UAE trending search term ‘Gangnam Style’ (see Facebook v. Gangnam on Google Trends here). Has Google been focusing on a different set of data in its media briefings and hopes that no one will notice?

And now back to this year’s report! The word ‘Zietgeist’ is German in origin and simply means ‘the spirit of the age’ or ‘spirit of the time’. Google’s Zeitgeist report can be fascinating, since search trends help to illuminate what’s been on people’s minds most during the past year.

The Zeitgeist 2012 report

The Zeitgeist 2012 report ranks popular search terms from 56 countries including three Arab states: Egypt, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These are often the three largest consumer markets for brands in the Middle East region and so it may not be much of a surprise to marketing professionals that report’s results for each country are quite different indeed. They may also contain some important lessons for marketers.

Here’s Spot On’s quick review of how the top ten Google searches in each country differ:

The UAE searches for global news, technology and entertainment

- Eight out of the top ten Google searches from the UAE were English language search terms and only two were Arabic search terms. In comparison, all Saudi’s and Egypt’s top ten searches were Arabic language terms.

- The global phenomenan that is Gangnam Style was the most searched for term by Google users in the UAE during 2012 according to the Zeitgeist report, but not making the top ten list for either Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Another of 2012′s global social memes, ‘Kony 2012′, also made it into the UAE’s top ten list.

- Eight out of ten of the UAE’s top searches were related to global (versus Arab) news and culture, versus only two for Saudi (‘Hurricane Sandy’ and ‘Burma’) and one for Egypt (‘Burma’).

- Six out of the UAE”s ten top searches were related to media, technology and entertainment, versus two for Saudi (‘Arab Idol’ and ‘Ramadam Series 2012′) and none for Egypt.

Egypt is preoccupied with national issues

- Eight out Egypt’s top ten searches were related to national politics and the constitution, versus only one of of ten in Saudi Arabia (‘Shura Council’) and zero in the UAE.

Saudi Arabia searches for local, regional and global news

- Saudi’s top ten searches arguably reflect more diverse interests in news and culture than Egypt or the UAE, with search terms in the top ten ranking searches related to Arab entertainment, national issues, issues in the Arab world and global news.

Marketers would do well to note the rankings of global campaigns for Apple’s iPad 3, Samsung Galaxy S3, the London Olympics 2012 event, and the blockbuster movies The Avengers and Skyfall, all of which feature in the UAE’s top ten searches, but none of which make the top ten in Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Online, as much as in real life, different rules apply for different countries when it comes to consumer tastes, attitudes and habits across the Arab world.

References

Google Zeitgeist 2012 List Download (PDF)

A Year in UAE’s Search: Google’s Top Searches of 2012 (via Zawya.com)

A year in UAE search: Google’s top searches of 2011 (via Zawya.com)

A Year in UAE Search: Google’s Top Searches of 2010 (via Zawya.com)

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post, you may also like the following:

Are brands at risk from the UAE’s new cyber-crime law? (November 2012)

How ‘social’ was GITEX 2012? (October 2012)

We are all publishers (March 2012)

The Freedom Meme (September 2011)

Connect with us

Posted in General, Internet, Internet research, Middle east, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, public relations, research, SEO | Tagged Arab, Arab World, brands, Carrington Malin, Dubai, Egypt, Facebook, google, Google Search, marketing, MENA, Middle east, PR, public relations, research, Saudi, Saudi Arabia, search, seo, UAE

Are brands at risk from the UAE’s new cyber-crime law?

Posted on 13 November 2012 by Carrington Malin

Taking many media watchers by surprise, the United Arab Emirates President His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan has approved a new cyber-crime law for the UAE, Federal Legal Decree No. 5, this week. The online law was duly announced by the Emirates official news agency WAM yesterday evening (you can find the contents of the law itemised here).

The cyber-crime law is bound to be the subject of much discussion and criticism internationally, since, among other things, the law appears to crack down on political dissent online. However, the law is quite wide-ranging and specifies a long list of activities that the UAE considers illegal including pornography, fraud, human trafficking, privacy, blasphemy, libel and drug dealing. Some will argue that this law, in fact, also addresses some of the online media issues that have been slated for the next version of the UAE’s media law. So, given that the cyber-crime seems to govern a wide range of Internet and social media activities, what will its impact on business be?

At first glance, the new law seems to restate many activities that are already considered illegal under existing UAE laws and merely ensures that they are specifically considered illegal if carried out online . The biggest sector that the law would seem to affect is the media. Although, a law was passed a few years ago to protect journalists from being imprisoned for doing their job, in a time where the lines between traditional journalism, citizen journalism and social media conversations are blurry ones, this week’s law is relevant to media, news and published opinion. There are no surprises here for those familiar with media in the UAE and, if the media field already had a few mines in it, then one could say that the law simply makes some of those mines a little larger.

For other online businesses and online marketers, the law does seem to remove ambiguities about the legality of communications and comment by individuals online, but this is unlikely to affect business communications. This is also a criminal law, not a civil law, requiring that the police or the courts initiate any actions against law-breakers. Furthermore, it seems likely that most breaches of this law could be handled with a simple take-down request to the content publisher concerned. Nevertheless, it might be a good time to review some company policies, such as the following:

1. Website legal policies – Do your website policies work under UAE law or are they just copy and pasted from a random US website? Federal Legal Decree No. 5 makes breaching an individual’s privacy online a criminal offence. So, if you’re collecting data via your website, better to have all the ‘paperwork’ in place to ensure you’re protected against any possible breach of privacy claims.

2. Social media & digital communications policy – Do you have a social media policy governing company and employee digital communications in place? Does this map to your HR policy and staff contracts or is it just something knocked-up quickly by PR? As a brand, it may be unlikely that your communications will ever breach UAE cyber-law, but it’s possible that employees’ online activities might.

3. Image rights and privacy – Do you have a policy in place to manage the appearance of employees, customers, partners and professional models in your images and videos? Bear in mind that an image taken by a smart-phone and uploaded to Instagram is technically online publishing. Do you have appropriate terms and conditions for your latest funny photo competition? Do you conduct any hidden-camera consumer research? What were you planning to do with that snap of those high-ranking officials on your stand at the Big Five show? Better to plan and have a policy than wait for a crisis.

These types of legal and copyright issues are all ‘no-brainers’ to many communicators and routinely planned for by advertising and marketing agencies already, but there are plenty of brands getting away with cutting corners and simply assuming that no such laws will ever be relevant to their business. Time will tell.

See also, Alexander McNabb’s take on the UAE’s new cyber-crime law on his own blog Fake Plastic Souks.

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post about digital media and regulation, you may also like the following:

We are all publishers (March 2012)

The Freedom Meme (September 2011)

Who’s Afraid Of A Regulated Web? (May 2011)

Connect with us

Posted in Blogging, Content, Disintermediation, E-commerce, Facebook, General, Internet, Middle east, Middle East marketing, Newspapers, Online marketing, Online Shopping, public relations, Publishing, social media, Twitter | Tagged Abu Dhabi, Arab World, Carrington Malin, community management, cyber law, cyber-crime, Disintermediation, Facebook, government, libel, media, media freedom, media law, privacy, Publishing, social media, social media policy, Twitter, UAE

How ‘social’ was GITEX 2012?

Posted on 21 October 2012 by Carrington Malin

The Middle East’s largest technology trade show, GITEX, took place at Dubai World Trade Centre last week, bringing an estimated 3,500 exhibitors from around the world together with more than 100,000 businessmen and IT professionals (estimates vary). That’s equivalent to about 20,000 visitors per day, plus more than 10,000 company representatives on stands each of the five days of the exhibition, and we can assume nearly all were carrying some kind of smart connected device. So, with all that connectivity, one might expect GITEX to have dominated social media conversations.

Apparently not. Twitter activity using the #GITEX hashtag averaged less than 1,000 tweets per day, a little more than 100 GITEX videos have been uploaded to Youtube since the start of last week’s event and Facebook brand pages posting GITEX content seem to have generally elicited a poor response. By way of comparison, the amusing #Emarati_Comebacks Twitter hashtag that appeared spontaneously the weekend before GITEX drove over 2,500 tweets over 48 hours.

This seems all the stranger given how eager many GITEX exhibitors were to tell you all about how well their products worked with social media. IT professionals seemed to be falling over themselves to assert how important and integral social media was to connecting with customers these days. However, the ICT brands that did run some kind of social media campaign for GITEX, by and large, seem to have done so ‘on the cheap’. Mixed messages?

Note: there were, of course, other Twitter hashtags in use during GITEX, including #Gitex2012, #GITEXTechWeek and others, but the #GITEX hash was by far the most popular, so we’ve used that for a quick assessment of Twitter buzz.

Sign-up for reports & updates

If you would like to receive reports and updates from time-to-time by email click here to join Spot On PR’s mailing list.

Connect with us

Posted in brand marketing, Customers, Facebook, Internet, Middle east, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, public relations, social media, Twitter | Tagged Carrington Malin, Facebook, GITEX, GITEX 2012, Internet, social media, Twitter, YouTube

* Go straight to GITEX 2012 Social Buzz dashboard *

GITEX 2012 Social Buzz

Posted on 8 October 2012 by Carrington Malin

It’s nearly that time again! GITEX, the Middle East’s largest technology trade show, starts on Sunday, bringing the region’s IT industry together with attendees from all over the world. More than 100,000 people are expected to converge the Dubai World Trade Centre halls from October 14th to 18th armed with smartphones, tablets, iPads, cameras and other digital devices.

You might expect a technology show to be gathering of early social media adoptors. However, the region’s IT crowd has been releatively slow to use social networks at it’s events. Traditional IT companies have been among the last to begin experimenting with social media in the Middle East and many IT professionals have been cautious to participate social sharing. Three years ago, social updates from GITEX were still very limited and video uploads from the show only really began to gain popularity last year.

The #GITEX twitter hashtag got it’s first outing of the season over last week’s GITEX Computer Shopper, but tweets averaged no more than a few hundred per day. At a show that the organisers estimate attendance at over 175,000, that’s not a big number. On the other hand, video seems to be continuing to gain popularity, with nearly 200 GITEX tagged videos appeared on Youtube so far.

Can we expect GITEX 2012 to monopolise next week’s social media buzz? We’re guessing, yes, but it will be interesting to watch. As usual, we’ve created a dashboard of social media updates using Netvibes. Our GITEX 2012 Social Buzz dashboard aggregates user generated content from Flickr, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube and other sources that has been posted with the tag GITEX. Check it out here: http://www.netvibes.com/gitex#Live_updates

In the meantime, may we wish all GITEX marketers the best of luck!

Sign-up for reports & updates

If you would like to receive reports and updates from time-to-time by email click here to join Spot On PR’s mailing list.

Connect with us

Posted in General, Measurement, Middle east, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, social media, Twitter | Tagged buzz, Carrington Malin, GITEX, social buzz, social media, trends, Twitter, YouTube

Follow Spot On PR on LinkedIn

Welcome to MENA, LinkedIn!

Posted on 1 October 2012 by Carrington Malin

As big fans of LinkedIn, we’re pleased to see Mountain View’s LinkedIn Corp. finally set up a Middle East and North Africa office. I am a keen business networker and I’m very happy with LinkedIn’s business focus and conservative approach to enabling business networking, even if it’s meant having to wait quite a long time for the current LinkedIn timeline, mobile apps and contact management tools that it boasts today. Joining LinkedIn’s network in 2004 and I’ve watched it grow, unaided by the Arab Spring, slowly, but surely in the region. However, the combination of the network adding new value-added social media features and the MENA region’s new-found enthusiasm for social networks has seen LinkedIn’s membership growth in the region gain real traction.

As mentioned in the official LinkedIn MENA launch press release, the biggest LinkedIn communities in the region are Pakistan, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. However, in common with many other digital portal office launches over the last few years, official figures seem to be in short supply.

LinkedIn has introduced country options for advertisers in the region, to allow companies to target specific MENA markets, phase-by-phase. Two or three years ago the targeting options for the region were pretty basic and you couldn’t target many MENA country markets at all. Today you can target GCC states, Jordan and Lebanon, plus Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia in North Africa, or about 5 million targetable registered Linkedin users (6 million if you include Pakistan).

According to LinkedIn’s advertiser statistics the Pakistan leads the region in terms of numbers with 1.4 million registered users, the UAE is second with 1.1 million and Saudi Arabia is third with 0.775 million. We’ve been monitoring LinkedIn growth for some time and, as you might guess, growth really took off in 2011. The fastest growing LinkedIn community in the region is actually Saudi Arabia, which saw 140% growth from January 2011 to-date, while Pakistan saw 133% and the UAE, 99%. Jordan and Egypt are growing fast too, showing 132% and 127% increases on Jan 2011 membership figures respectively.

Overall, although strictly accurate calculations are not possible, membership in the Arab world has grown by about 140% since January 2011. That doesn’t quite match Facebook’s success in the Middle East, but it’s a lot more interesting to many of us interested in quality business-to-business networking.

Want to connect? You can find me on LinkedIn here.

Connect with us

Find Spot On PR on Pinterest

Sign-up for reports & updates

If you would like to receive reports and updates from time-to-time by email click here to join Spot On PR’s mailing list.

Posted in Customers, General, Internet, Internet research, Linkedin, Middle east, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, research, social media | Tagged advertising, B2B, Carrington Malin, LinkedIn, MENA, Middle east, North Africa, online advertising, social networking

Honest statistics

Posted on 27 September 2012 by Carrington Malin

As any politician, publicist or PR person knows, one can prove absolutely anything with statistics! And in a region, such as ours, where reliable statistics for many things are so hard to come by, people certainly try! As veteran journalist and long-term UAE resident Peter Hellyer rightly says in Tuesday’s National newspaper, scarcely a week goes by without a new survey statistic hitting the headlines and often with highly questionable conclusions.

Spot On’s love of statistics is well-known and one of the motivators for the agency investing in research about the region’s digital habits has been the lack of useful research available in the public domain. It may seem like more facts and figures are coming to light, but the problem isn’t really going away. The Internet services that now make it so easy for anyone to carry out and publish surveys are helping to fuel a glut of ill-thought-through research that misinforms and misleads. In fact, the amount of poor research and analysis in the market has gone up by 300%! (sorry, couldn’t resist!)

I wish that we could say that these statistics were all simply the work of young marketers on a learning curve or small businesses trying to do the best they can. However, the reality is that many large corporations, influential media groups and well established agencies are just as guilty, and news media are often complicit for the sake of a good headline.

Key for marketers is understanding audience demographics and habits. “50% of UAE women buy cosmetics online” (statistic made up) might make a nice headline, but surveys, save for the national census, never get to ask each person in the country the question. Marketing inspired surveys draw on company databases, third party mailing lists, event registrations, publication subscriptions, website visits and many other sources. Naturally, a survey using a sample of a business-to-business marketing database is likely to yeild different data compared to a consumer database. These days different mailing lists and online media may also target different types of Internet users, with different characteristics (so, does the survey reflect the opinions of social media power-users, digital natives or those who mainly use one or two apps?).

Issues of demographics can be compounded when surveys aim to cover multiple countries. A survey of Internet users in the UAE, with 70% of the country online, can mean different things to a survey in Saudi Arabia, where Internet penetration is below 50% (for example, what does “40% of respondents shop online” mean in context of each country;’s population?). Add language, age, gender and other national differences and it’s easy to get wrong-footed with Middle East survey headlines.

Unfortunately, it’s merely a hop, skip and a jump from someone’s hastily put together piece of research, to a misleading news headline. And, if you’re not careful, straight into your marketing plan.

Connect with us

Find Spot On PR on Pinterest

Posted in Disintermediation, General, Internet, Internet research, Middle east, Middle East marketing, Newspapers, Online marketing, public relations, research | Tagged Carrington Malin, marketing, media, news, planning, research, statistics

The future is important

Posted on 11 September 2012 by Alexander McNabb

There are few things more depressing than sitting in one of the Middle Eastern digital conferences listening to the Ministerial Keynote. The Internet, we are invariably told, is important. Now you count two seconds, one Mississippi two Mississippi as The Great Man scans the room, his arms held stiff and his hands grip the lectern. And young people are important. The future, he beams sagely at a thousand people tweeting Get this fool off the stage, is broadband.

Mired in an analogue mindset and born of vested interest and opacity, many of the key players in our region’s governments don’t seem to appreciate the vastness of the economic opportunity the Internet represents – or the dire threat it poses to the unwary.

The urgent need of the hour is for governments to drive to integrate their work with the needs of the digital age. From education through finance, labour law and customs practises, there are huge obstacles regional start-ups, particularly in e-commerce, face. That a number of pioneers are finding ways around these needless barriers is nothing short of amazing, but it mustn’t mask the central fact – most of the Middle East remains desperately behind the curve, despite the real and fast-growing repository of talent in the region. Startups are increasing despite governments and our financial sector, not because of them.

Middle East ecommerce, the greatest growth market opportunity this century, is on the cusp of explosive growth. Whether the region becomes a contributor to the wave of innovation and shapes its own destiny or becomes a marginalised minor consumer market for the global players could be in the hands of those very ministers.

Connect with us

Find Spot On PR on Pinterest

Posted in E-commerce, Internet, Middle east | Tagged Alexander McNabb, broadband, ecommerce, economics, government, telecom

#StopTimeOutDubai rings alarm bells

Posted on 25 July 2012 by Carrington Malin

It’s today’s marketer’s nightmare. You’re alerted to an outburst of negative sentiment towards your brand on social networks. Worse, it has some legitimacy. You don’t know how big it’s going to get, you don’t know how long it’s going to continue and it’s impossible to forecast the impact on your business.

Yesterday’s UAE Twitter campaign targeting Time Out Dubai for a momentary lapse of editorial judgement, should be ringing alarm bells for Middle East marketers. Every business makes mistakes sooner or later and, if you’re unfortunate enough for any of these made visible to the public, then your brand is at immediate risk from online activism and negative consumer sentiment. The always-on nature of today’s Internet and 24/7 access to social networks means that activism campaigns can appear in an instant, at any time of the day and achieve great scale in a very short period of time. Today’s activists require no planning meetings, no graphic design, no placards and, in fact, they don’t even have to leave their desks to make their voices heard.

A few Twitter users began using a #StopTimeOutDubai hashtag early evening on Monday July 23rd to express outrage at Time Out Dubai’s online picture story “5 to try: Bars in Ramadan” (story now removed from the website by the publisher). By the end of Monday night the hashtag had garnered under 50 mentions, however, as awareness spread, the hashtag was tweeted more than 1,000 times by 7pm on Tuesday. 90% of those tweets occurred between 12 noon and 7pm on Tuesday, even though Time Out Dubai issued an apology via it’s Twitter account @TimeOutDubai at 12.55pm.

: Above: Apology tweeted from Time Out Dubai’s official Twitter account.

Whilst it was clear to all, why the “Bars in Ramadan” story had caused offense, the UAE’s Twitter community saw heated debate continuing through Tuesday with some users calling for government fines and the publisher to fire the editorial staff responsible, some calling for forgiveness and some defending the publisher.

: Twitter mentions of the hashtag #StopTimeOutDubai monitored by Spot On PR between 0900 hrs and 1900 hrs on Tuesday July 24th.

Overall, 43% of the tweets monitored using the hashtag #StopTimeOutDubai supported the campaign, while 31% of tweets were critical or dismissive of the campaign. 7% of tweets monitored using the #StopTimeOutDubai hashtag were in favour of accepting the publishers apology and / or the publishers removal of the online article. 19% of tweets were neutral comments about the #StopTimeOutDubai campaign.

How closely are you watching your brand’s mentions on social media? Do you have an early warning system? If you’re a consumer brand or otherwise well known business, monitoring for Twitter and other social media is now a must have.

Notes
- Statistics quoted have been drawn only from those tweets quoting the hashtag, whilst many others not mentioning the hashtag were part of the wider conversation.
- It’s not always possible to monitor 100% of social media posts, due to user privacy settings, access to latest platform APIs and limitations of search tools.

Sign-up for reports & updates

If you would like to receive reports and updates from time-to-time by email click here to join Spot On PR’s mailing list.

Connect with us

Posted in brand marketing, Internet, Internet research, Middle East marketing, Online marketing, Publishing, research, social media, Twitter | Tagged activism, Carrington Malin, Middle East Public Relations, public relations, research, social media, Time Out Dubai, Twitter