Egyptian politicians describe Parliament decision to hand in Tiran and Sanafir islands to Saudi Arabia as ‘shameful and betrayal’

Some Egyptian politicians reacted on social media to the decision of the parliament members in Egypt to hand in Tiran and sanafir islands to Saudi Arabia. The majority of parliament members in Egypt agreed to hand in Tiran and sanafir islands to Saudi Arabia. This decision created a storm of anger among many Egyptians and politicians. The parliament members along with government worked together to make sure that the President Abdel-Fatah Al-Sis, who declared that the islands belong to Saudi Arabia is supported.

CNN Arabic reported the response of politicians who refused the parliament agreement to hand in Tiran and Sanafir islands to Saudi Arabia.

Khaled Ali, Lawyer and Egyptian activist, described the agreement of Egyptian parliament as the ‘agreement of shame’. Likewise, Mohamed Al-Bradei, the vice president of Egypt in 2014, said describing the agreement: “Another episode of ‘I am your God’ series; it is sad day in Egypt”.

President Abdel-Fatah Al-Sisi, and the government did not want it to know the Egyptians voice through a referendum. I guess it is because they believe that the parliament members represent Egyptians.

Activism to face more pressure on social media in Egypt

CNN recently reported that an Egyptian Parliament Member submitted a proposal to add more restriction on social media. The proposal seeks that social media users to obtain approval from the government before they can have access to social media. If the proposal is accepted, the government will have more control

Protester holds a note pointing to the importance of Social Media

on monitoring social media, and can prevent activists from having any access to social media.

I believe that proposal will be accepted by the Egyptian parliament, since social media users keep criticizing the government and often the main news creators especially the hardline of censorship the government of Egypt currently applies. Quite similar to some of Mubarak’s regime days, you are putting yourself in jeopardy if you criticize the president.

Reports stated that the Egyptian government disrupted calls over social media apps last month, particularly the ones are popular in Egypt, like Viber. But the government, through the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority denied the incidents, saying it “there is not truth to the rumours circulating.”

It has become obvious and the government is keen to silence not only activism, but any kind of harsh criticism. The main idea behind kind of view, in my perspective, that the president and the government are building Egypt, and they want all people support, so if you do not agree with what they do, or point to the contradiction what is usually said and the measurements taken against activists and freedom of expression, it is better to ‘shut-up’. So activists are the one to blame if they want to test the government on this.

 

“TuK Tuk” driver’s YouTube video removed from Alhayat TV website after going viral

The Egyptian Alhayat TV removed a video of an anonymous Tuk Tuk driver in 6 October city in Egypt few hours after posting it. The Tuk Tuk driver severely criticized the economic and political situation in Egypt, pointing to corruption and social injustice.

According to Masrway website, three million viewers watched the video in few hours, and more than 400,000 shared its link on the Facebook. The ‘Tuk Tuk Graduate’ is now of one of Tiwtter trends in Egypt.

The driver was speaking to Alhayah TV host Amer Al-Laithey, who was reporting on the problems Egyptian face in their daily life. Alhayat TV did not explain their reasons to remove the video from their websites.

Boston Consulting Group Vs. Chatr Mobile: Examples of Success , Fear of social media

Using social media is not only important for Business to Customers (B2C), but Business to Business as well. Among the successful organizations that Fortune and Forbes named as one of the most successful organization in using social media for B2B is Boston Consulting Group, which was founded in 1963. Boston Consulting Group is a Global management consulting company that helps other corporations and organizations to accomplish ‘suitable competitive advantage’.

Fortune ranked Boston Consulting Group or BCG as the 3^rd among the best companies using social media. BCG employs social media to communicate with employees, recruits, and distribute content to them. According to Fortune, BCG focused on Twitter and LinkedIn, while there was a shift toward using Facebook.

BCG explained its perspective that has made successful in using social media. Apart of many companies that jumped to the social media bandwagon without getting ready or understanding what, exactly, they are trying to achieve, BCG takes the time to develop a compete marketing strategy. The most important and challenging points for BCG is t: (1) create a marketing strategy that integrates social media, and (2) measure the impact of new marketing channels on businesses.

BCG set number of guidelines for using social media most effectively:

• Understand your digital customer: It is fundamental to understand how customers use social media. Red Bull and Sara Lee are two good examples. Red Bull understands that it young audience is active into entertainment; this is why it created an entertainment portal on Facebook that allows users to play games, watch TV, and engage in other several activities. Sara Lee uses social media to encourage customers to share coupons.
• Define specific business objectives: Objectives have to be specific, such as lowering customer service costs, greater customer engagement, or achieving solid loyalty.
• Test across social media platforms.
• Define and track supporting metrics.

One of the lessons BCG learned is that the company website can be provide “richer experience and greater engagement, than Facebook that eventually attracts a lot of fans.

Weak organization

Chatr Wireless is one of the less expensive mobile providers in Ottawa. Its plans less expensive other competitive providers, but its coverage is not as strong as other mobile companies. Chatter Wireless covers parts of Alberta, Winnipeg, Ontario, British Columbia. Chatter has two social media accounts Facebook and Twitter, but its social media actual presence is quite weak. It only has 1,071 followers, and 46,586 Facebook likers. Twazzup, a twitter monitoring real-time platform, shows that ‘chatr mobile’ does not have influencers that talk about Chatr  services. The top influencer has 7 followers, and is not a Chatr advocate

Chatr Wireless posts on social media accounts consistently, but the Facebook account tells that customers do not engage. As for today, there are only tree customer comments, 32 likes, and 2 shares since the beginning of 2016.

Chatr  Wireless should adopt vigorous social media strategy to:

• Increase customer engagement and loyalty: A good example about the lack of customer engagement is the post that Chatr Mobile posted on its Facebook account on August 17, 2015. The post sought customer engagement through an image of a man having Baroque with his family. The image was accompanied with the following post: “Isn’t BBQ season the greatest season of them all? Share your best BBQ tip with us below”. The post got 4 likes, but with No comments. It is clear that the Chatr  believes that customer can get engaged when they ask customers to do so. This tells that there is no strategy to get increase customer engagement.
• Increase the number of customers using Chatr: My understanding the Chatr wanted to increase the number of its customers but approaching new comers to Canada. They offered free calls for new immigrants, or visitors to Canada. On December 1st, 2015, Chatr posted a video for new comers who used Chatr Network at one of the airports to talk to friends and family. It is great idea, but Chatr needs a real’ campaign with clear objectives.

Why did the Pepsi Arabia ‘Liter of Light’ and 7UP Arabia ‘Original Spotting’ campaigns fail?

B2Ccampaigns, or Business for Consumers campaigns, target consumers directly to buy the product from grocery, restaurants, or retail stores. B2C campaigns “develop campaigns that connect with the consumer mindset, and depend on direct advertising”. Marketers in B2C campaigns aim to covert shoppers to buyers. There are several successful B2C campaigns, such as “Think Coca-Cola, Old Spice, and Kit Kat”

Surprisingly, some of the campaigns were not as successful as their companies planned for. Of those campaigns are PepsiCo campaigns in Egypt in 2015: 7UP Arabia campaign and Pepsi campaign. The two campaigns gathered considerable attention, but no significant or even increasing revenue from the campaigns despite the PepsiCo announcement of investing U.S. $500 Million in Egypt in 2015.

The 7Up campaign, Original Spotting, or “Do in on Your Way” and “See It Your Way”, appealed to Egyptian youths showing innovative ideas that youth execute using simple stuff, unused ones, or things that you think they are for garbage (Click here or on the image to watch the video)

The campaigns mainly used YouTube. The 7UP Arabia produced four videos. The four videos gained less than 4.5 million views, and only 5.424.289 Facebook page likers. Twitter account of the 7UP Arabia only gained 17.100 followers.  Likewise, the Pepsi campaign, “Strings of Lights Unite Us”, produced two video ads to announce the beginning of Pepsi campaign along with “Maser Al-Khair charity” [Good Egypt Charity] to install hydro in poor villages in Upper Egypt.  “A Liter of Light” was the tagline to encourage Egyptians to buy Pepsi. Revenues are dedicated to installing hydro in poor villages. The videos ad that the idea of the “Strings of Light” through employing a clever video montage of that seemed to bring actors and actresses who died into alive scene celebrating the Holy month of Ramadan with current young actors.
(Watch and Enjoy Hussein Al-Jasmi voice with Ramdan Folklore ).

The Pepsi campaign helped install 800 Solar Panels in only in one village. Obviously the campaign goals were aiming to install Solar Panels to several villages in Upper Egypt, according to the news that was published at the beginning of the campaign.

The questions would be, then: why did the two campaigns fail to achieve their goals?

Pepsi campaign failed although it engaged consumers. The failure was due to the fact that the public rejected the idea of ‘liquidifying’ social responsibility.   As Pepsi campaign for social responsibility failed, Pepsi Challenge emerged in the same year.

7UP campaign -Brilliant but unreal campaign: The 7UP Arabia campaign ‘Original Spotting’ never announced the participants. It campaign looked like colourful bubble that collapsed quickly. The ‘original spotting website was removed’ and no reports were made about the campaign outcomes. The campaign should have targeted Egyptian talent with a goal to support and finance a certain number of talented youth.

Social media should have been employed to show the progress in that the campaigns achieving and should have added to them more sponsors, especially those that would not be in conflict with PepsiCo. It was strange that PepsiCo was aware of its target audience, but failed to maintain their campaigns. I believe that the company lacks the scope. PepsiCo moved to a more global scope with the Pepsi challenge campaign.

In a nutshell, the two campaigns failed for their inability to maintain the momentum they create with the videos.

 

Egyptian activist brings opinion makers and readers to social media for civil conversations

Wael Ghonaim, Parlio co-founder

The Egyptian activist, Wael Ghonaim, who was one of the symbols of the 25^th of January 2011 Revolution, has recently launched a new social media platform that leverages the value of conversations between opinion makers and ordinary readers.

Parlio, the new platform discussion, offers Internet users a new approach toward social media, drawing more attention to the content of the discussion. The new social media platform allows users to engage with writers, journalists, and thinkers from all over the globe. It values disagreements, debates, and tolerance. Among the members of Parlio from the United States are Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host, Walter Pincus, a National Security journalist for The Washington Post, and Michael McFaul, a Stanford Professor and former US Ambassador to Russia.  Parlio’s board also includes famous Middle Eastern and European scholars and writers. The social media platform also has a Q&A section, which gives the opportunity for readers to raise questions and get answers from journalists, professionals, and scholars.

Wael Ghonaim hopes that Parlio will help social media users continue to spark civil conversations and focus on the qualitative side of it, while keeping the quantitative aspects of social media that still gain great attention from users, such as number of followers, likes, and shares. So far Parlio’s writers, journalists, and readers embarked on conversations and issues that concern people North America and the Arab World, such as discussion about ‘sharing economy and social exclusion’, ‘Saudi women rights’, and ‘the importance of democracy’, and other topics that are not less important.

Ghonaim, who was working for Google Venture in 2011, resigned from Google in December 2014 to start his own social media endeavors, Business Insider reported. He was one of the main causes of the 25^th of January Revolution in 2011, when he created a Facebook page entitled “We are all Khaled Said”. The page was Ghonaim’s response to the brutality of the Egyptian police that killed Khaled Said, and Egyptian activist, in June 2010. By January 2011, Ghonaim utilized the Facebook page to mobilize Egyptians against President Hosni Mubarak, a Former President of Egypt.  The Egyptian police detained Ghonaim for 11 days.  His release was a sign for the collapse of the Egyptian regime that attempted to contain the anger that broke through on Friday, the 28^th of January 2011 and remained until 11^th of February 2011, forcing the Egyptian President to step down after 18 days of uprising.

The Time Magazine selected Ghonaim as “one of the 100 most influential people of 2011 because of his role in sparking the Egyptian revolution”. Ghonaim who often criticizes the current regime of President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi had to leave Egypt amid the Egyptian police crackdown of Muslim Brotherhood and secular activists in 2014, saying that “Egypt no longer welcomes those who are like me”.

 

Monitoring tools I use, what about you?

There are plenty of monitoring tools but most of them are not free. The article entitled, ‘Marketing: Top 15 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools’ points to several tools , but few of them are totally free such as Socialmention, Twazzup, Google Tends. Others often offer free trials, but they are not free, such as Hootsuite, TweetReach, Klout, Addictomatic, HowSociable, IceRocket, TweetDeck, Mention, Topsy, Followerwonk, SumAll, Simply and Measured.

I prefer to use Google trend, Soci
almention, and Twazzup as they allow me to use keywords. In measuring and monitoring course, for example, I was using those tools to monitor Neslte social media. Google trend allows me to know topics related to my keywords, and provides geographic map, which relate the search outcomes to the city,

and a timeline for the keywords or related ones, but it does not tell what people say. Socialmention is a cool monitoring real time search, as it gives idea about the strengths: The number of time your brand is mentioned divided by the total mentions; sentiment: ration of positive mentions to the negative ones; passion: the likelihood of individuals to talk about the brand repeatedly;  and reach: The range of influencers.

I believe that Twitter is the better for monitoring and can be easily listened too. Tawazzup, for example, tells what people say about a product, and update the influencers in real time.. Twitter counter also provides free-of-charge statistics on the number of tweets over certain time, thereby allowing measuring consistency of tweeting.  I have not found a tool that monitor YouTube.

As for news sources, I used Feedly.com and Google alerts. Both are good for news update. Feedly.com provides information, such as the number of articles, number of readers, and number of press releases. The basic service of Feedly.com allows unlimited news feeding. The advantage of Feedly.com is that news feed looks like an inbox of email interface, but news is not pushed your email address. Google Alerts push news to email address, which I found it more convenient. I started using Hootsuite, which has an integrated dashboard that allows the integration of several social media accounts.

I am a currently working with a team group for social responsibility campaigns that will take place in March, and a PR conference, entitled THE CAUSE: Generosity, Community, Humanity. I started using Hootsuite.

It will be great if we can share information on monitoring tools. It will be useful for all of us, so I appreciate if you provide brief answers to the following questions:

• What are the monitoring or listening tools you find quantitatively simple and easy to analyze?

• What are the tools you think cool and easy to use?

• What are the tools that provide best qualitative analysis?

• What are the tools you find useful for YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram?

 

ISIS most searched from Ethiopia, Indonesia, Sir Lanka, and Italy!

Europe has been a nest for ISIS. Terrorist attacks in Paris and the search to chase members in Belgium tell. Latest Google News alerts also indicated that Austria has been a place to recruit youths. Social media has already become unstoppable tool for terrorism.

But what is annoying is to find other countries on Google Trends list where search for the term ISIS has been conducted.  When you look up the term ISIS, Ethiopia appears first as the country where the term ISIS was intensively searched from (100%), followed by Indonesia 24%, and then Sir Lanka and Italy (18%). When looking at the related search terms, the ISIS news comes on the top, but who knows why 18% of people who was searching for ISIS news of came from Italy, and why 24% of the searches about ISIS came from Indonesia. People from the countries I just mentioned could be looking for ISIS news, just because they wanted to get more information on what they did. Perhaps security and analysts from those countries are looking more at this terrorist group. Those countries, however, could be places to recruit people.

Did I go very far by thinking that the countries I just mentioned (Ethiopia, Indonesia, Sir Lanka, and Italy) could be places to recruit young Muslims? I believe the answer is: No, it is hypothetical but it is still possible, especially if you knew that Google Trend is not a social platform. It is a platform that gives the user an idea on Search Trends on Google. Some of those who are looking at ISIS news might be looking to read about them, or even looking for them on social media.

Another evidence is that ISIS is intensifying their work in a non-Arabic speaking countries is the fact that their digital magazine “Dabiq” that The New Yorker reported about is issued in English language. Dabiq is the platform ISIS uses to as a propaganda tool. The latest issue came in more than of 60 pages that is full of hatred and images of terror in areas they occupied. History will tell that DABIQ is one of the most destructive propaganda tools for humanity. According to DABIQ, all people, including ordinary Muslims, are apostates.  Recruiting youths from North America and Europe shows other how ISIS is globally penetrating. A recent news on the Austrian girl that travel to join ISIS, got married upon arrival, and was beaten to death when she tried to escape requires more anthropological, and sociological studies to examine reasons of  youths to join a terrorist group.

Social media as unstoppable tool for terrorism: It is not the context; it is some of text and/or its interpretations

Back in 1980s and 1990s, terrorists and Jihadists groups were opposing technology. Back then they considered like television is part of the Western invasion to brain wash Muslims, but Al-Qaida moved to television when Bin Laden appeared repeatedly on Aljazeera TV, as it was the most influencing Arabic network.

Social media has become a strong tool to recruit young Muslims to ISIS. Less than a year ago, ‘abc’ reported that ISIS recruits US terrorists on social media. The report pointed to some of the Muslims efforts to challenges those who misrepresent Islam, but the scale of recruitment seems bigger as the abc reports indicated that led to 160,000 persons linked to 11 known terrorist organizations.

The question seems to be, then, is it a social media problem? Social media is not more than a spotter, so those organizations look for people who have the same line of thought. They often, I believe, do not recruit; it may happen that some young Muslims look for those organizations to join them. Social media just made easier for the terrorists organizations find each other.

The reality that some governments in the Islamic World do not want to face or even come close to the following facts: (1) Some of young Muslims join those organizations in their attempt to face authoritarian and dictator regimes, such as the case of Syria. So the more Assad stays as the president of Syria, the more terrorists Syria will get. (2) The fact that those terrorist organizations base their ideology statement they falsely claim that it is for the prophet, even though if it contradicts the Quran. (3) Terrorist organizations also base their malicious, violent, and horrible actions based on what texts (fatwas) of old Muslim scholars, such as Ibn Taymyah, who allows killing Muslims who do not pray.

United Arab Emirates social media Apps the ‘most active’ in the Arab World in 2015

Exaggeration over the risks of using social media in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been refuted by a recent report of Social Media in the Arab World, which indicated that citizens, residents, and visitors of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), are the most active users on Instagram App, Twitter App  in the Arab World in 2015, and are leading Facebook App usages in the countries of the Gulf Corporation Council (GCC).

The Arab Social Media report, issued by Arab Social Media Influences Summit, indicated that UAE continues to lead social media usages in the Arab World. Of all the Arab World users, UAE social media users scored the highest rate for daily Instagram (53%) and Twitter (45%) access via their smartphones and tablets.  UAE Facebook App users are most active users in the GCC countries, scoring 87% of the total users who visit Facebook App through smartphone and tablets.

The 2015 report indicators are consistent with the rates that the study of 2014 UAE Social Media Outlook, conducted by Mohamed Bin Rashid School of Government in Dubai. The study showed UAE Facebook users as one of the highest penetrating rates (60.4%) and indicated “persistent growth” of Facebook usage. UAE also was considered the most influential Arab country for LinkedIn users, scoring 25.2%.

Fear of using social media in the UAE was exaggerated by a single report in The Sydney Morning Healed, suggesting that UAE is a dangerous place for social media use. The report was based on an Australian expat, who violated the Cyber Crime Law.