How People in the Middle East Actually Use Social Media: The study shows how people are relying on news from different channels, such as Newspaper, TV and Internet. The results focus on both the quality and reliability of the news distributed via these different channels, and showcases the difference in usage according to the selected countries. In terms of social media platforms, Facebook appears as the most popular channel with 94% of the respondents using the social network, whereas LinkedIn seems to be the less popular with 6%.

Saudi Web users among Most Active on Social Media: Saudi Arabia is one of the leading countries on social media in the Arab world with more than 13 million users. Their uses vary from one social network to another where 51% are active on Twitter and 42% active on Facebook. While these numbers show high demand for online presence, this also goes back to the fact that network carriers are offering smart phones and easier online access for these users. From a business point of view this is very important as people are now gaining the power to make any business a success or failure.

How Social Media is Affecting the Arab World [Infographic]: The unemployment and workplaces have changed a lot during the past years. For every young person who has a job, there are 4 others who are unemployed. Social media is playing an important role in simplifying the access of young people to the job market. The infographic also shows the effect of social media on innovation, where 86% of the people surveyed believe that social media help innovation, and 84% believe that social media also contributes to developing innovation in youth.

Dubai Islamic Bank goes live on Social Media: While companies strive to reach enter social media playground and start creating conversation with customers, some banks are also tapping into the power of engagement and clients’ centric business perspective. The Dubai Islamic Bank, started their own social media plan to reach out for their client’s through different platforms which will serve as a communication channel where client’s can send their feedback, suggestions and complaints also will be updated with the latest products and services.

Why Saudi Arabia is the world’s top YouTube nation: The Saudi Arabian are the most active on social media through their mobiles, preferring YouTube as it is the most used platform amongst all. 3 simple reasons explain that: easy access and availability, and the fact they have a lot of free time and that they are hungry for data. After the Syrian revolution, YouTube has become one of the favorite sources of politics and news. Before the Arab Spring, only 3% of the uploaded videos where related to these topics.

Please share with us on Twitter @social4ce anything that you think is worth mentioning for our upcoming Social MEdia Bytes and don’t forget to follow us on scoop.it

Social media has changed the way we watch TV shows by allowing us to interact with other viewers in real time even when we are not watching the same screen.

This concept, called “social TV” usually involves the use of social media platforms in order to achieve the following goals:

- Promote a TV program or any other TV content and give an echo before, during and after the broadcasting

- Enrich the experience of watching a TV program and bring interactivity

- Extend TV coverage and conversations with viewers

- Broaden the audience share and create an online community around a particular TV program

- Create more integration with advertisers and device (such as tablets or smartphones) companies

The development of social TV is a result of the spontaneous viewers’ behaviors but it is also due to marketing strategies adopted by TV channels.

Lebanese TV channels are still not aware of the huge potential that can come from social technologies: they have started to use social media but only in a very limited way. They have established their social media presence on main social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, and they are posting the same content that is featured in their programming.

This infographic gives us a view about how Lebanese TV Channels are doing on social media.

In terms of social media presence, it appears that MTV Lebanon has the highest number of Facebook Fans and Youtube subscribers, but that LBC is leading the way on Twitter.

Concerning the share of voice, MTV Lebanon appears to be the most popular channel, being mentioned in almost 50% of the 3 811 relevant conversations that occurred between February and March 2013. LBC follows with 33% of the mentions.

From a programing perspective, MTV Lebanon is leading the way with two programs that are very popular in the viewer’s conversations online: “Dancing with the Stars” and “The X Factor”. The other programs from our Top 5 are “Kalam El Nass”, “Celebrity Duets” and “Ahla Jalseh” on LBC.

These data makes us wonder when was the last time we entirely watched a TV show without interacting with another device. Our addiction to our mobile devices during TV time isn’t surprising; this is why Lebanese TV channels should start seeing this as an opportunity. They should understand that having that commonly called “second screen” used while watching a TV program can help them increase their audience share by providing a rich viewing experience and creating interactivity.

How should they do it? They need to start creating possibilities for audience engagement across social networks and mobile applications by:

- Using social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to engage in real-time conversations related to TV programming, giving the opportunity for viewers to give their feedback and use this feedback during air time.

- Delivering bonus programming and deeper social interactions by creating mobile applications where viewers can interact and learn more about what they’re watching on TV thanks to exclusive content.

- Implementing incentive programs that will drive direct engagement and generate viewers’ loyalty through rewards or gamification.

So before thinking about proposing new TV shows, TV channels should think about a way of creating new experiences with their existing programs and give their viewers some sharable moments.

But above all, they need to really know more about their audience and most importantly keep in mind that the content king.

Facebook Users in Arab World 2013: This inforgraphic gives insights about Facebook user’s base growth in March 2013 for each country in the Middle East. Leading the growth in terms of Facebook penetration from population is Qatar with 78.66%. As for the Top increase from March 2012 to March 2013 the winner is Iraq with 79.01% increase of users within one year.  Lebanon holds the highest female presence of all Facebook users with 45% of Lebanese users on the social network being women.

Saudi may crack down on social network users: Saudi Arabia’s communications regulator are considering linking national Twitter bloggers to personal social media user IDs as the Gulf Kingdom steps up a crackdown against social network abusers, according to a local newspaper. The Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) is studying ways to uncover social media users” real identities”. According to officials, this could easily be accomplished by monitoring users who access Twitter from mobile phones, by requiring them to register an ID when they add money to their phone accounts.

Social media empower businesses to innovate :  86% of the 5000 people involved in a study by Dubai School of Government’s Governance and Innovation Program and SAP focusing on Arab youth, believe that social media empowers entrepreneurs. This means that a better environment for start ups and entrepreneurs to sprout in such conditions.  Many movements in the Middle East encouraging start ups along with incubators and crowd sourced project like kick starter to help new comers with the idea and the funding for their ideas.

Mideast Twitter frenzy: 3,993 tweets a minute: It’s been a rich year for social media, especially for Twitter. The Arab Strategy Forum reveals that 173 million tweets were made since March 2012, which represents 3,993 tweets per minute from the Middle East.

Abu Dhabi Airport named Best Airport in the Middle East joins Social Media: Just this month it announced its Twitter and LinkedIn accounts for both passengers and employees. According to Moodie report, the Twitter account will mainly update readers as well as passengers about latest news and regular updates on developments, competitions, weather status, and it will serve as a social media help desk as well.

According to Matthieu Chéreau, brands in the Middle-East need to have better control over their social media activities by optimizing conversations monitoring, increasing user’s engagement and creating innovative social campaigns to drive user acquisition.

In order to do that, they need to strengthen their social marketing programs with the use of social tools that can help them directly evaluate the performance of their social media actions because understanding the ROI of their investment has become crucial.

From a consultancy perspective, we noticed since we’ve been working with brands in the Middle East that there is a huge opportunity with social platforms to reinvent the relationship between clients and their brands in the region. Tigerlily’s products help optimizing those social conversations and engagement, giving the brand a lifetime social value.

Tigerlily which has already helped more than 80 iconic brands such as Orange, Yves Saint Laurent, L’Oréal, Canal +  etc… across more than 60 countries will be expanding and serving more clients in the Middle East following the announcement of regional partnership for the Middle East with … social4ce : )

Here is Matthieu’s Presentation for those who missed it.

You can also read more about how Tigerlily works over here.

Yesterday, the famous Jeff Bullas has run a workshop on How to Plan and Execute an Effective Technology and Social Networking Strategy.

I had the opportunity this morning to meet Jeff and discuss with him the different social media landscapes and maturity, comparing the reality of how brands are using it in Australia, US, Europe, versus in the Middle East. Jeff, I have to say you’re a great aussie guy

For my part, I have been tasked with presenting my views on How to Best Build a Social Media Strategy for the private sector. To make it as clear as possible, I have build this following presentation based on 11 key principles:

Principle 1: Define the vision

Principle 2: Set clear goals

Principle 3: Establish a SM project team

Principle 4: Know where are your customers

Principle 5: Build the right presence based on your needs

Principle 6: Establish rules of engagement

Principle 7: Rethink your content

Principle 8: Be customer centric

Principle 9: Co-create with your online community

Principle 10: Empower your employees

Principle 11: Build social into every business process

As we all know, the Lebanese heritage is being gradually destroyed in favor of bigger buildings and towers which generate more money and profits for the property owners, at the risk of having the country lose its beautiful old architectural structures.

A campaign focused on user generated content:

Through its “Worth doing” movement, Dewar’s initiative invited people to share pictures of houses that are part of our Heritage, whether they were considered as endangered properties or revived ones.

Users were able to choose to view any of the entries, with the possibility to share, like and tweet them, giving more exposure to the content generated by the users on the Worth Doing Lebanon page.

Involving public figures from the media and artistic scene:

Dewar’s initiative went a step further by getting the support and collaboration of some famous public figures, such as Marcel Ghanem, Jean Marie Riachi and Roger Moukarzel. Called the “doers”, they brought all their support to the campaign with testimonials around what is actually “worth doing” to protect our Lebanese Heritage.

The social media developments:

We worked with Impact BBDO to help them integrate the social media features into the global campaign.

Organizing visibility, content collection and distribution on the different social media assets (Facebook , Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest) via social features development and adequate community management, allowed Dewar’s to reach a large audience. An audience that was actively engaged around this sensitive and important cause, creating mass user generated content (around 3 000 pictures) helping the initiative gain more exposure. Dewar’s was joined in its effort by Save Beirut Heritage, one of Lebanon’s most influential NGO, in addition to many activists groups.

Industry awards and recognitions:

Dewar’s won the Cristal Gold Award in the Web or e-communication/Digital PR / Social Media category at the Mena Cristal 2013, and also won the Dubai Lynx Awards in the PR and Corporate Reputation Category for Best Use of Social Media.
Discover the whole campaign through this video, and check the Facebook page if you haven’t done it yet. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

A Heritage Worth Reviving / Ets… by cristalfestival

The Forum will bring together scholars, authorities, practitioners and experts to discuss emerging trends and future economic opportunities in technology and social networking and its economic impact on the region as mentioned on their website.

The main objectives of the Forum are:

- To contribute to shaping public policy related to technology and social networking.

- To increase public awareness about rights and obligations related to social and digital media.

- To discuss economic opportunities and challenges arising from use of social media

- To discuss benefits from advances in technology and safe guard against cyber risk (legal, technological, etc).

Patrick Attallah our CEO, will be delivering a 20 min presentation on What it Takes and How to Best Build a Social Media Strategy for the private sector in the region..

Check out the conference program.

This edition focused on Community Engagement and Management, will be held on Wednesday the 20th of March from 9am to 12pm at Hotel Sofitel Beirut Le Gabriel.

We will be hosting Matthieu Chéreau, co-founder & CEO at Tigerlily, also author of the book “Community Management“ published in France and Italy, treating topics such as:

-       How to optimize you social media marketing actions? Best practices and case studies

-       What is community management? How is it organized and who should be in charge of this discipline within a company?

-       How Tigerlily can make a business succeed when it comes to social marketing strategies

This event is on invitation only. If you would like to request an invitation, please contact us by sending an email to the following address: karine.j@social4ce.com

Check out the below presentation, a case study made by Tigerlily on how the French Telecom Operator Orange worked on social media to manage one of the latest crisis they have faced.

Poor Social Media Practices can Negatively Impact a Businesses’ Bottom Line and Brand Image

According to JD Powers, businesses can no longer adopt a trial-and-error approach to social media as shown in their last research study which found a link between social media and business metrics such as consumers’ likelihood to purchase or interact with companies through leading social channels.

Jacqueline Anderson, director of social media and text analytics at J.D. Power and Associates, says the extensive study provides companies a model structure for the successful integration of social media into business strategies. She adds that it shows the link between the buyer intention and good social media experience. Regardless of the differences in marketing and servicing engagements among age brackets, the impact of brand representation and purchase intent for both are consistent.

She explains that companies focusing on either brand promotion or consumer service are barring key groups of their online followers – this leads to bad satisfaction rates and affects future purchasing decisions.

Nowadays companies must see how consumers gather on social media, and they must create a strategy to deal with their use of the platform.

But Customer Experience is about Customer Perceptions, as Customer perceive their experiences at 3 levels: meets needs, easy and enjoyable.

Every time they interact with a product, a service, a person or a social media channel, they judge how well the interaction helped them achieve their goals, how much effort they had to invest in the interaction, and how much they enjoyed the interaction.

David Dubois (Assistant Professor of Marketing at INSEAD) when talking about companies wanting to shape social media success refers to Voltaire: “We must cultivate our garden.” In his recent article he says:

A common trait among many of the recent successful social media campaigns is companies’ ability to create and sustain an online culture around their brands – in other words, their ability to “cultivate their own garden”.

Culture is hard to pin down. It mainly consists of three main building blocks: a language that supports communication among community members (social base), a set of goals that community members aspire to (social engine), and a set of codified interactions or rituals based on shared symbols that guide actions (social glue). Key to success in social media arenas is engineering platforms where people interact with one another. This is a major opportunity for brands to create and sustain their own culture by creating a completely new online culture around their products.

Patricia McDonald, executive planning director at Isobar UK, says there is a ‘near-insatiable’ need for social validation. ‘Sixty per cent of UK consumers agree that they feel good when someone acknowledges their posts online and there’s evidence to suggest that receiving recognition in social media activity releases endorphins in the body, so it’s a near-addictive activity,’ she adds.

Social media has added an urgency and immediacy that has raised social validation as a priority for consumers and brands alike. For brands, the benefits of social validation are clear: they can achieve real-world rewards in exchange for offering consumers virtual validation. However, despite the growing number of brands embracing social validation, success is not a certainty.

But, in the last few weeks, we’ve seen 3 brands (Ford, KLM and Heineken) who have put the social validation at the center of their customer satisfaction.

The U.S. automaker reintroduced its Fiesta Movement campaign this week, which will provide bloggers and other high-profile individuals with the keys to 100 brand-new Fiestas for a six-month test drive. The only catch: they have to document the experience online. The photos and videos participants share via social media may end up in Ford’s TV and print advertising campaigns, Scott Monty (Head of Ford’s social media) said.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has launched KLM Must See Map, a social media campaign which enables tourists to create a personalised city map – with the bonus of a high quality printed version being posted out to participants for free.

Each map can be populated by tips from friends offering sage advice on the best spots to see, collating all such information in one place and negating the need to scan multiple social media channels and email trails.
This is achieved by first pulling a map for your chosen destination and then inviting friends to post tips via Facebook, Twitter or email.

Heineken, the world’s leading premium beer brand has activated its global campaign - The Candidate, as a curtain raiser to its UEFA Champions League activation, as it sets out to recruit a Heineken Social Reporter. 

One lucky consumer will get an opportunity to report on the Finals Live from Wembley, London. The attempt is to recruit a lucky football fan, who is digitally and socially savvy, creative, witty, passionate and eager, to report on the UEFA Champions League Final weekend for Heineken’s Social Media channels in India.

With this in mind, here are nine rules of engagement for successful social validation detailed by Nicola Kemp:

1. Embrace the Age of Influence
2. Meet the Prosumer: a ‘like’ isn’t enough
3. Understand your customer, understand status symbols in the digital context
4. Go beyond gamification
5. Accept the end of the ownership era
6. get to grips with the experience economy
7. the Rise of the ‘portfolio people’
8. Address ‘digital’ anxiety
9. Recognize your real-world responsibility

At social4ce, we monitored social media conversations about Valentine’s in Lebanon. The following infographic shows how people are actually talking about Valentine’s Day by unveiling main topics, trends and mixed feelings expressed by the Lebanese crowd when it comes to this particular day.

A total of 1 009 relevant conversations occurred between the 4^th and the 14th of February. 60% of these conversations were neutral, which means that people were talking about Valentine’s Day without expressing any particular feelings.

Whether we want to hear it or not, there are some people who are actually very positive about this “special” day to celebrate love since 23% of the global conversations are positive. There is even a small part of them (15%) who actually directly expressed their wishes for a happy Valentine’s Day on social media channels. Some of them gladly participated and shared competitions that were specially launched by many Lebanese brands for the occasion.

Haters were also at the rendezvous. Nearly 17% of the audited conversations show that there still are many detractors of Valentine’s Day, people who just don’t believe in this “holiday” expressing out loud that the only ones who are actually taking advantage of such a “celebration” are the brands.

And they are not entirely wrong. Out of all conversations during this period, 40% of them mention at least one brand. The Top 5 mentioned brands are all from the same category: shops and retailers from where people were actually buying their gifts.

You thought that most people were starting to be “afraid” of saying “I have plans for Valentine’s Day”? Well this is not perfectly true. 30% of global conversations were mentioning Valentine’s Day plans. Going out for dinner seems to be the most popular thing to do amongst the Lebanese people celebrating Valentine’ Day. As for the gifts, offering flowers, chocolate and some gadgets are still the most “standard” way of celebrating.