Posts Tagged ‘media’

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 »

5 reasons Spot On PR uses Twitter

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Using Twitter for business@SMEXbeirut asked recently if we’d written an article on why Spot On PR uses Twitter and what we get out of it, so now is probably as good a time as any. Those that have been following our social media efforts will know that we embraced Twitter almost as soon as it was unblocked in the UAE mid-2008. We already knew that Twitter could be a great connector of people and that it was another key piece of the social media puzzle. One and a half years on, and even with Twitter’s growth flat-lining (see Mashable story from 11 January), we still believe it offers great value to communicators.

As a communications, PR and marketing agency Spot On is committed to Twitter for 5 key reasons.

1. Twitter helps MENA’s web community join up the dots.

The Middle East and North Africa is becoming increasingly web-friendly with online ventures, web developers, application developers, bloggers and social media power-users growing in numbers across the region. However, despite the Internet’s ability to make location irrelevant, a great deal of talent and knowledge is local and focused on national opportunities and knowledge sharing and collaboration across borders has lagged a bit. Twitter allows web-friendly people across the region stay in touch daily and brings them closer together. Using Twitter, Spot On is able to swap notes and follow the news from these audiences across the region, on a daily basis and at no charge.

2. Content producers, aggregators and distributors love Twitter.

In last year’s Spot On MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey we found that 65% of those surveyed were bloggers. Furthermore, nearly 80% of those surveyed interacted frequently with bloggers via Twitter. The Middle East and North Africa Twitter community remains a relatively small one, but it’s an influencial crowd and this is because many of those using Twitter in the region are involved in the creation, distribution or sharing of content as bloggers, social-media power users, journalists or communications professionals (some 35% of those in our survey worked in public relations, media or marketing). Twitter helps us keep up-to-date with new blog posts, breaking media stories and content recommendations.

3. Twitter provides a useful media relations tool.

Spot On follows more than 150 journalists from across the Middle East and North Africa and has added them to its private Twitter Lists in order to have the ability to browse all their tweets in one screen. Like most PR agencies, we deal with hundreds of journalists and we simply don’t have the time to talk to many of them as often as we would like and listen to what’s on their minds. Twitter helps us keep up-to-date with journalists news and latest stories. We also quite often receive client-related enquiries from journalists via Twitter.

4. Twitter helps you discover the unexpected.
Twitter is great discovery tool. It can introduce you to new information, news stories and people every day. However, we often find that people we wouldn’t normally think of, or deal with very much, share some of our interests and we have rather more to talk about than we expected. Discovering unexpected interests and synergies is a huge Twitter benefit and its helped us strike up conversations with some very interesting people and organisations. It’s also, of course, introduced us to new blogs, bloggers, journalists, communications and marketing professionals and other interesting Tweeple.

5. Twitter can be a window allowing others to see more of your company.

I suppose that business development is what pays for our time to do all the other good stuff on Twitter and other social media. Twitter gives us another platform to share information on Spot On, what we’re doing, what we’re thinking and what we’re interested in, which is a great way for potential clients to get to know us a bit better before getting in direct contact. It’s like opening a little window that lets people see more of what’s inside the company and tune in a little bit better to what we’re thinking. It’s also a useful platform to promote our blog and other social media activities. Twitter has introduced us to a number of new clients and new potential clients, that we probably wouldn’t be talking to if we weren’t on Twitter.

If you’re not already following us, you can follow Spot On Public Relations on Twitter here: @spotonpr

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Disintermediation and the media

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Professional PrintingPhil used to typeset my work. I’d send him my copy, marked up by hand and he’d send me back galleys, long strips of single columns of type which the graphic artist would then ‘lay out’ onto boards, creating pages of book and magazine out of strips of type glued down with ‘SprayMount’, a highly egregious sprayable glue. We’d size pictures manually, then attach them to the artwork (a box was drawn to give the printers a ‘keyline’ to place the image in) ready for sending to film.

Then along came Digital Research’s GUI, or graphical user interface, GEM and with it Ventura Publisher, a black and white piece of software that let you ‘lay out’ pages onscreen. I had a chat to Phil about the new software and how he needed to invest in it so that he could run my pages.

‘Rubbish! That’ll never take off! You can’t match the quality of compositors’ work, proper typesetting, with that amateur junk!’ said Phil.

Within the year Phil had gone bust because his customers were all running out their pages from packages such as Ventura as one single layout, all ready for the printers. I didn’t need a graphic artist anymore, either – I did my own layouts onscreen. They might not have followed Caxton’s rules of typography, but then we were redefining what you could do with type anyway – for a few halcyon years, drop caps and huge lettering ruled magazine layouts all over the UK.

Ever since then, I have heard people talking about quality as the reason why technology, the Internet in particular, won’t disintermediate them. But the amazing fact is that we don’t actually care about quality. Some of the most popular videos on YouTube are some of the crappiest pieces of filming. I play my music in my car, ripped from my ultra-high quality CDs and converted to lo-fi MP3s, using an iTrip radio transmitter thingy. The quality of what I am listening to is probably less than that of a chrome cassette.

When technology improves access, quality becomes secondary. And quality is the last refuge of the about-to-be-disintermediated.

This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.

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Social media predictions

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Here are some ‘social media’ predictions for 2009, just for fun. Why social media? Well, my first prediction is that we’re going to see a lot more fuss about ‘social media’ here in the Middle East in 2009. And the trick there will be sorting the wheat from the chaff – because you’re about to see a load of ‘experts’ talking with great authority on the subject. And, as usual, the expertise on offer will all too frequently be scant. I recently had an advertising agency offer to ‘infiltrate the forums’ on behalf of a client, for instance. That to me is a signal of quite how bad it’s going to get before we settle down and work out who are the practitioners delivering new and insightful programmes using the social media tools that are revolutionising communications practice elsewhere in the world.

So I think we’re probably going to see one or two high profile social media gaffes in our region, quite a lot of weighty pronouncements and agencies rushing to show how they can package their ‘unique insight’ into the social media paradigm for clients. This is what my very good friend Gianni Catalfamo, the uber-geek and European Web 2.0 guru, calls 2.0Wash. Like Greenwash that preceded it, 2.0Wash is when every programme contains a blog, just because, well, they should all contain a blog these days…

In the meantime, I think we’ll see an increasing pressure on regional telcos to stop blocking these social media networks – orkut, flikr and other important components of the ‘Web 2.0’ mix remain blocked. These blocks continue to contribute to retarding our region’s use of some of the most powerful communication tools to emerge since Thomas Caxton started thinking about Ps and Qs.

My final social media prediction for 2009 is that we’ll start to realise quite how powerful the grassroots movement towards using these tools can be. It’s already happened in other world markets and it’s late arriving here precisely because of the blocks. But more people in the Middle East are using FaceBook than read any single newspaper. More people in the UAE are using FaceBook than read any single newspaper. And FaceBook is only one of many, many social media platforms…

This piece originally appeared as one of the chucklesomely named ‘A Moment with McNabb’ columns in Campaign Middle East magazine.

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Is the newspaper dead?

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Is the newspaper dead? And if not, when is it going to do the decent thing?

The question is being posed with a frequency which reminds me of the assertion that we could look forward to a ‘paperless office’ back in the 1980s. It’s this year’s big prediction, but it’s also being accompanied by some amazing ‘nose dive’ statistics about falls in circulation, advertising revenue and even job cuts, with the UK’s The Independent slashing some 90 editorial jobs recently.

Now we’re mightily behind this particular curve here in the Middle East, without a doubt. I don’t think journalists will be looking over their shoulders quite yet. And the insane block on sites like Flikr remains, too, slowing adoption of the technologies that are supplanting newspapers in other markets. For instance, many people online followed the recent violence in Mumbai, mixing ‘traditional’ media sources online with extensive on the spot photojournalism from Joe Public in Mumbai (on Flikr, so you couldn’t see it in the UAE) with a wave of Twitter tweets, blogs and Facebook conversations. Wikipedia’s entry on the violence was up, being debated and updated, as the incident was ongoing. There was little to be known that wasn’t known on the spot – the next day’s newspaper has a hard job staying relevant in a multimedia news environment like that.

Even Rupert Murdoch has said the future of newspapers isn’t ‘printing on dead trees’ and, following the US’ ‘digital election’, the online presence of key media such as the UK’s Guardian and the US’ Christian Science Monitor is growing faster than their paper presence is declining.
Having said that we’re behind the curve, there are some interesting online plays in the region. From AME Info through Zawya, Bawaba and Maktoob through to ITP’s arabianbusiness.com, the region’s websites are a growing presence in people’s reading habits. Newspapers are jostling with websites to get the story ‘up’ first: websites that have far bigger regional reach and immediacy than any newspaper could possibly hope to compete with.

Does that mean that we should all ignore newspapers? No! Of course not!

Not yet, anyway…

This feature orginally appeared in Campaign Middle East magazine.

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