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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)

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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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

The coolest agency in the world

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Social Media Plans

Campaign planning is the easy part!

The coolest agency in the world can’t execute brilliant social media campaigns if the client doesn’t want to invest in the idea – not just of using social media as a megaphone like an advertising replacement, but of actually changing things around to make open social communications a long term investment. That investment necessarily takes a number of forms, too.

It’s not just about assigning a budget, by any means. The investment in time and effort required from the client in executing sound social media campaigns is nearly always greater than that required by advertising campaigns. Engaging with customers over social media platforms can mean some pretty big changes at the client’s side. They don’t all have to happen at once, but it’s important to map out some of the expected change points and commit to them in order that a long term programme of value is created, not just a tactical ‘quick hit’ with potentially negative consequences.

Is your management ready?
You have to ask if your company is structurally ready to undertake social media engagements – a process that involves some difficult questions. Do the management and reporting structures you have in place map to social media? Can you escalate issues quickly and effectively to all your different departments? Can you guarantee to respond quickly? How do your current HR policies map to social media? Who is responsible for that unhappy customer on Twitter – marketing or customer service? And how are you going to resource manning your social media engagements? (because if you think the agency is going to take the full 100% of the load and handle it, you’ve got another thing coming! If your agency says that you don’t have to be involved day-to-day, get another agency fast. Really.)

The next investment comes before you ever tweet a tweet or book a face. It’s in defining your social media guidelines, working with HR to make sure that these are embedded as a core element in the company’s process. Next up it’s making sure that staff are aware of what those guidelines are and, ideally, have the chance to question them or clear up any areas which appear difficult to understand or apply to a given person’s situation.

Now there’s a process of defining roles and responsibilities – who owns what platform and what are the internal processes and ownerships?

Once the job of deciding the niceties is out of the way, things like the naming conventions you’re going to use, building the graphical elements of your ‘social identity’ and deciding on the tools you’re going to use, you’ll need to work together with your agency on selecting platforms based on your target audiences, planning the use of those platforms and their rollout. Part of that process would include working out which platforms your key audiences frequent and what you can contribute to the communities you’re joining – what their informational preferences are and how you can help to improve things for them.

In fact, the key challenge that social media poses for companies, particularly those that consider themselves to be ‘customer centric’ is that they have to re-think their processes in order to be truly customer-centric via social media.

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

Life without Twitter?

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

Over the weekend, I was lost in the dark rainy Al Quoz area trying to get to a gallery where 8 short plays were being staged by Dubai Drama Group in celebration of its 25th anniversary. While driving in circles looking for a lit up sign that says The JamJar, my mind wandered to a different place away from the big warehouses and big machinery and I thought: how would my weekend have been without Twitter?

On Thursday night, I got a tweet from @shelo9 and @mich1mich saying they’re heading to @wildpeeta (of course!) – amazing shawarma, hunger, and the need to be around smart and interesting people drove me there. And that was my Thursday night; all about good conversations, good tweets and definitely a nice shawarma for dinner!

On Friday morning, I was trying to set up a router for my wireless network. Of course, the last thing you expect a Luddite like me to do on her Friday. I was tweeting to people via my mobile (those who were awake then) to help out and it was a step-by-step process, or rather a tweet-by-tweet process, until I got my wireless in place and my thanks went back to all who were helping from my new wireless network! Hurray!

Saturday was the most interesting of all, I finally made it to The JamJar gallery and managed to catch the last 10 minutes of the play written by @Hajer13, sadly missing @PurpleNano’s part. However, I was happy to watch the next play where @Hajer13 was the leading actress (and she rocked by the way!). After that, I headed to MOE where DIFF is taking place. I would never have had the chance to watch the long anticipated movie Amreeka if @mich1mich hadn’t mentioned that she had an extra ticket. So, Saturday night ended with a great movie with great tweeps that I met (to name few: @nagham, @esperanca, @tomgara and @mita56 – shame she couldn’t make it in!)

So, if I had to rewrite the above taking out the Twitter factor I’d be left with ermm… probably nothing! This blog post also reminds me that I have to admit to @PKGulati that he was right and I was wrong! We had a conversation about the objective of Twitter a few months ago at the Irish Village. As he said, the aim of Twitter is not to have virtual acquaintances but to build connections on a professional, and why not, on a personal level too!

My life without Twitter? I wouldn’t even dare to imagine! In a town like Dubai, formerly known as one of the loneliest places in the world to be single, people are meeting like minded people, talking in new ways and opening up dialogue that otherwise would never have happened. And yes, I’m a Twitter addict and you all know it.

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