The Spot On Blog
Life without Twitter?
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 […]
Social media measurement
Spot On’s Alexander McNabb is taking part in a panel session on PR measurement in social media at News Group’s PR Measurement Summit in Dubai today. So, as the region’s public relations practitioners meet to discuss the region’s demand for monitoring, research and measurement methodologies, it’s probably as good a time as any take a […]
Social media isn’t socialist media
The idea that social media is a new way of running marketing communications on the cheap is a beguiling one and, sadly, totally incorrect. It is also a piece of thinking that is increasingly common. In fact, using social media for marketing is time consuming, expensive and dangerous. The Internet is filled with examples of […]
Disintermediation and the media
Phil 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 […]
Alexander nominated for Communicator of the Year!
The MEPRA Awards shortlisted nominations and submissions are out today, which include 10 best practice categories and two individual awards categories, being Young Professional of the Year and Communicator of the Year. Having decided as an agency not to enter into the MEPRA Awards best practice categories this year, we had no expectation of seeing […]
Market monopolies
I have always been terribly fond of the image of a small urchin throwing a stone to knock the top-hat off the fat, pompous businessman. I’ve even run campaigns based around the concept in the past, where we’ve been working against an incumbent telco on behalf of the challenger. Taking the role of the urchin, […]
Social media takes time
Social media takes time. Didn’t we mention that? You may have heard detractors say that evangelising social media is fine, but it can suck down huge amounts of valuable company time and get in the way of ‘real work’. And they’re not wrong. A recent survey of 1,460 office workers in the UK claimed that […]
N reasons social media campaigns fail
There are lots of great blog posts around these days on reasons for companies failing with social media programs. Usefully, these are often titled something like: “The N Reasons Companies Fail at Social Media”, where N is a number between 3 and ten (I’ve listed some nice ones at the end of this post). Well, […]
Keeping up with ‘search’
There are a series of interesting battles unfolding in the world’s technology markets and they’re going to define a great deal of what we all get up to in the years to come, mark my words. Let us for a moment assume that search is the future of commercial transactions and, increasingly, consumer interaction with […]
The uninvited guest at the party
As more and more Middle East brands register themselves on Twitter and plan to include the platform in their communications, it is worth remembering that marketing is still the uninvited guest at the party. Twitter wasn’t conceived as a marketing tool and so has not been developed for marketers, it’s been developed for, and by, […]
