Egypt bans short movie celebrating 25 of January revolution with social media silence

Despite the recent statement of the Egyptian President, Abdel-Fatah Al-Sisi, on the ‘unprecedented freedom of expression” in Egypt, Egyptian authorities have just banned a short movie celebrating the 25 of January revolution. Entitled “18 Days, the short movie is a collection of other movies,  directed by 10 filmmakers, and made by group of famous actors and actresses. Social media platforms have been silent since the decision. Banning the movie is shocking for those who honor the 25 of January Revolution. (Watch the 18 Days trailer)

(Watch 2.47 minutes  of the banned movie with English subtitles: Facebook and Twitter during torture)

According to el.cinema.com, the movie was supposed to be shown on Saturday in GOETHE Institute, the German teaching language institute as part of the sessions of Shnit International Shortfilmfestival, but the movie show was delayed until today to get a permission, and then the show was cancelled as ‘Censorship Administration’ decided to ban it.

It is still unclear why the Censorship Administration banned the movie, but Tarek El-Shenawy, an art critic, believes that censorship decision was inevitable. Al-Shenawi was quoted on several newspapers in Egypt in Jan 2015, saying that “showing the movie requires a sovereign decision”, and questioning “whether the audience is still in the same state of mind as of the time of the 25 January revolution”.  El-Shenawy added that the movie showed the Tahrir Square, where revolution took place “through the perspectives of the people who went to the square during the 18 days, and people now have different sources of information”.

Egypt has been suffering of censorship in several media platforms, despite the statement of the President Abdel-Fatah Al-Sisi , who told CNN on Monday 28 of Sept that “we have unprecedented freedom of expression”. According to Al-Tahrir Online newspaper, the Censorship Administration stopped the distribution of Al-Watan newspaper (The Home) and destroyed thousands of copies on Monday 11 of May 2015 for printing a feature story on its front page indicating “7 Powers stronger than Al-Sisi”. Al-Watan newspaper had to change the feature story main headline to “7 Power challenge reforms”. Al-Watan newspaper was also censored in March 2011, when it had to remove the main feature story that listed the Egyptian Presidency among the state departments that do not pay its employers taxes.  Ironically, Al-Watan newspaper is well-known in Egypt as supportive of the Egyptian president, and was a task force in the 30 of June Revolution. Likewise, Bassem Youssef, who was named by the TIME magazine as one of the most Arab World’s most important political humourist, decided to wind up his popular show, El Bernameg (The Program) because of the constrains on the freedom of expression.

As the Middle East Monitor reported that watchdog and rights groups were outraged by Al-Sisi praise of freedom of expression, banning the “18 Days’ movie may give a reason for their outrage. The Middle East Monitor quoted human rights activist Gamal Eid saying that “ “nearly 62 journalists were detained in Egypt until 25 June, 2015; most of them suffered lengthy pre-trials, detention periods and unfair trials”.

Government and social media summit 2015 in Dubai

Dubai recently hosted the 2015 of the Gulf Corporation Council social media summit. The summit continued for two days, 16-17 September. The summit discusses the relationships between social media and foreign affairs, defence, healthcare, tourism, education, and financial service. One of the summit’s report, entitled ‘From Tweets to Impact’ discusses the new ways for available for governments for social media. According to the report, it was easy for governments to keep track of their social media activities, and to reach their people with few Twitter and Facebook accounts, but the use of social media by the governments should shift to have an impact on their users. This requires that each government has to change the way of handling social media and have more effective ways in allocating responsibilities, and structuring teams.

The summit raised doubts about manipulating information on social media.  Although the summit claims that GCC governments’ use of social media has increasingly gown over year, the interview with Dr. Abdulaziz Al-Mulhem, the Deputy Minister of International Cultural Relations, said that “There is nothing so unique about Saudi Arabia’s government agencies in using social media channels”. If the minister added that Saudi Arabia is like any other country, officials using social media encourage people to engage and interact”. The minister said a fact that, there is nothing unique about the use of social media by the government. It is the same for all Arab governments, social media is not for governments; it is for people. According to Dr. Abdulaziz 50% of the Saudi population is using social media.

The statement of the Saudi minister tells how important social media is now for people. There seems to be a paradigm shift in the use of social media, and the Internet in general. Studies in 2013 reported that television was the leading technology among Arabs, followed by the Internet . The Northwestern University in Qatar conducted a survey in 2013 that showed that respondents to the survey indicated that television is leading technology in Saudi Arabia (92%), Lebanon (89%), Egypt (84%), Jordon (96%), UAE (97%), and Tunisia (77%). Only respondents from Qatar (72%) and Bahrain (84%)  indicated that their use of the Internet goes beyond their use of television.

‘Facebook’ leads Social Media in the Arabian Gulf countries and ‘What’s App’ in Saudi Arabia

Social media penetration is something everyone wants to know about, because social media is not just important for business and marketing, it actually lives with us. We are not talking now about social media as one entity, but as applications. Marketers have become more interested in knowing how popular applications are as much as people have become more excited with new social media applications. A report conducted by Kuwait Financial Center of the use of social media in 2014, showed that Facebook is the most popular social media application, enjoying over 16 million users as for April 2014. According to the report that was published in Kuwait Times, Twitter and LinkedIn came second and third with approximately 3 million users using each of them. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates scored more users than others.

YouTube does is no longer as popular as before in the Arabian Gulf countries, despite the success Saudi online entertainment has achieved in using the platform. While this seems controversial, particularly because Saudi Arabia is quite conservative countries, most popular entertainment media in the Arab World are owned by Saudi businessmen. ‘What’s App’ seems to have a strong turn according to a recent report on Statista (A Statistics Portal). What’s App’ penetrated the Saudi market and took a turn for the top social media application in the fourth quarter of 2014 with 22% penetration rate, leaving Facebook in the second rank with 21% penetration rate.

The popularity of the Facebook has been reaffirmed by Go-Gulf that published a study indicating that Facebook enjoys 58 million Middle Eastern users. According to Go-Gulf, 94% of social media Middle Eastern users use the Facebook. Although it comes third in the Arabian Gulf countries, Twitter, with 52%, is the second platform that social media users in the Middle East use.

Canadian businessmen have to consider the above numbers, if they want to open a new business in one of the Arabian Gulf countries. Statistics about social media penetration rates of are not so different from those scored in Canada. A recent survey conducted by Forum Search, and published on Social Times, indicated that 59% of Canadians have a Facebook account, while 30% of them use LinkedIn, and 25% of them have a Twitter.

Do you think that Facebook is popular than ‘What’s App’ in Canada?

Social media as a ‘voicemail’: The Facebook of “Ama’er Construction Community” as a negative example

Social media platforms could hurt your business if you turn it to be a nervous customer service, or a call center agent who does not respond to what you say, and if she/he does, her/his answers are short, not efficient and even disappointing. This happens when you fall into three mistakes: You use social media for hard sales, you mislead your community, and you turn the social media platform into a voicemail and often a telephone operator that even fails to listen. Those three mistakes are killers, and they apparently are about to harm the reputation of one of the well-known construction companies that build and market condos.

Ama’er Construction has a Facebook account, whose title is Ama’er Construction Community can be seen as a negative example of social media use. The company has many images for one project, there is no rational behind the selection of their project photos. They repeat many photos for no reason. Instead of showing one image of the building and visualizing the differences between each condo unit, they put photos of the exterior of the same building adjacent to each other.  Their time line is even more problematic, customers complain that the company is misleading them, as the total price posted for units does not match what the company says; customers left comments on the  Facebook account saying that the company responds poorly, and others urging, even begging the Facebook sales person to respond. The company, however, keeps repeating one post that says:

Now in Naser City, your apartment/condo that you are dreaming of, it will be your own with a 19,000 EGP ($2,500), a signing contact payment of 30,000 EGP ($4,800), and a monthly payment of 1,700 EGP ($2,400).  We are waiting for your call on the following numbers.

he company did list the names of the two sales person, and the phone numbers. But the sales person who runs the Facebook account only provides short welcoming answer. Customers complain about the unreasonable prices, and that the prices the company posted does not match the price they get over the phone when they phone in. A customer posted a comment saying that you cannot get the key of your apartment unless you pay 65% of the total price, but nobody responds to her/his claim, because the company turned the Facebook account into something like a voicemail message that keeps repeating the numbers that you have to call, and promises you that someone from the sales team will ‘call you back, Sir’. This is because the sales team does not recognize that it is a Facebook account not hotline or call center.

Selling condos is not easy, it is kind of hard sales, Ama’er Construction, however, does not care so much about what their Facebook users say, because they have other sales platforms. They mistakenly though, because they do not know that they can lose potential customers, if some of them decide to look online at the company projects. I am sure all of them will run away then.

Companies in Egypt use social media to live with people

Egypt summer is usually hot and dry. Many companies working in Egypt utilized this fact on social media to communicate with customers. Many companies, such as Nescafe’, Lactel Yoghurt, KitKat, Nestlé Egypt, Schweppes Egypt, Makani, CBC TV, McDonalds, Vodafone Egypt, and Sunny, tweeted with various message, employing the technique of ‘newsjacking’. The simple definition of newsjacking is inserting an idea into news. From a business point of view, and according to Hubspot Blogs, newsjacking would help you amplify your sales and marketing success by capitalizing on the popularity of news story. David Meerman Soctt’s video on YouTube explains more about Newsjacking; you can watch the video by clicking here.

My analysis of social media content that the companies indicates that companies employ social media to suggest that their customers should use one of their products. This technique attempts to ‘sell’ rather than just to remind the customer about the brand name of the company. McDonalds Egypt, for instance, tweeted about the hot weather saying that ‘this weather needs a Sunday ice cream. Kitkat was funnier by making the chocolate bars something to rest on.   Schweppes Egypt dig their soft drinks in the beach sand. Nestlé Egypt illustrated how hot their coffee is by showing the sun coming out of the Nestlé cup. Nestlé aslo asked customers to keep a Nestlé water bottle to help them in hot weather. Only one company offered an advice for customers without trying to sell their product, but it was funny though. Vatika Styling Gel tweeted to advise their customers to “Stay Home”.

Companies in Egypt embraced social media to remind their customers with their brand and often to sell some of their products. It is hard to tell how successful Egyptian companies are in employing social media. The last study was conducted in 2012 by Bayt.com, which one of the largest employment agencies in North Africa, and examined the use of social media platforms by companies. A least 46.8% of surveyed people think social media are not effectively employed by companies. Eight in every ten respondents believe that social media could harm reputation of a company, and they believe that companies should use social media platforms carefully. The study found that companies have three challenges when using social media platforms: (1) Making profits online, (2) delivering the right message in the right tone, and (3) responding to all comments and feedback.

Do you think that companies would have other challenges when using social media platforms? And, do you think that companies, special big brand names, can successfully respond to all comments?

Despite media reports – Doubts on the success of Twitter campaign to boycott meat in Egypt, Officials say

Egyptians are fed-up with the continuous rise of meat price, which reached EGP100 ($13). They decided to have a social media campaign on Twitter using the hashtag:  #forget about meat. The campaign aimed to put pressure on butchers to sell meat for less.  BBC, CNN, and traditional media in Egypt, such as “The Seventh Day” (Al-Youm Al-Sab’a), “The Delegation” (Al-Wafed) newspapers, reported that the campaign is successful and citizens starting their meat boycott.  Despite media positive media reports, officials believe, that campaign may not have “any effect” as butchers have nothing to do with the price of meat; it is more about the low production of meat in the market. Meat production, the Daily Star reported, has actually jumped from 702,000 in 2000 to 965,000 in 2013. Again, this increase does not seem to saturate the demand of the market.

Meat industry in Egypt is different from meat industry in developed countries. You can find companies in Egypt that prepare uncooked meat for sale. You also can find mega market that sells uncooked and cooked meat. But what distinguishes Egypt is most of meat vendors are private and small businesses. It is not hard to know the volume of meat production though; what people do not know who decides on the meat production that people need. As people see meat price gets higher and higher every year, they know that there is more demand on meat and less production.

I believe that Twitter campaign to boycott meat in Egypt will not have a short-term success, but it will fail at the end to bring a long-term effect on the price of meat production. This expected failure is due to the fact that Consumer Protection syndicates do not communicate the real reason for the growing rise of meat prices. Instead of asking people to put more pressure on the Ministry of Production to increase the volume of meat production, lack of information pushed campaign organizers in the wrong direction. As the campaign organizers recently realized that the campaign will not have a long-term effect on the price of meat, they called on the President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi to establish a company for meat production.

While the #forget_about _meat campaign indicates that how popular social media is, it brings to our attention the fact that a campaign organizers first should have examined the real reasons for the growing increase of meat price, and that they have talked to butchers and meat producers before launching the campaign. Had they done that their hashtag could have been different.

Not good for business yet, Arab Social media 2015 stats do not rock

If you plan to have a business in the Middle East, particularly in the Arab World, you may need to re-read the finding of the Arab Social Media Report of 2015. The report is based on interviews with more than 7000 social media users in 18 Arab countries, focus group discussions with social media users from the citizens of the Gulf Corporation Council (GCC), Yemen, Iraq, and North Africa, and in-depth interviews with experts in media/communication, economics, and government. According to the report, What’s App is the most preferred social media application (41%) with 96% of the users access it daily. The Facebok comes second (39%) as a preferred social network that enjoys access from 89% of the Arab social media users. Only 6% of the Arab social media users chose Instagram as a preferred social media application; Twitter and YouTube were only preferred by 4% & 5% (consecutively) by the users.

The report has controversial finding. On the one hand, the report showed that Arab social media users have positive image about social media It found that 81% of interviewees use the social media connect with each other, 66% of the users believe that social media encourage people to be creative and innovative when discussing ideas, 67% depend on social media to follow the latest news, and 61% of the users consider that social media have positive impact on the society. The report, on the other hand, indicated that social media users do not trust social media, and that social media have negative impact on traditions and culture.  According to the report, only 44% of the social media users trust social media. The majority of social media users (64%) believe that social media do not help in preserving Arab traditions and culture.

While the above stats seem contradictory, a good gaze at the report findings reveals that social media users trust social media as a news source. This fact was previously highlighted in the 5^th Annual Arab Youth Survey that was conducted in 2013. That is to say that Arab social media users trust social media as a news source, but not as a business source, but why? The answer is not simple, but can be predicted when looking at another Arab Social Media Report, issued in 2011, by Dubai School of Government. The 2011 report found that number of Arab social media users has increased significantly in most Arab countries, particularly in the countries where protest took place. It is obvious now that Arab social media users use social media to consume ‘political’ content; they are busy debating political issues, posting content about catastrophes in the Arab countries.