Alexander McNabb
Alexander McNabb has been part of the Middle East's media and marketing scene for 30 years. He's a communicator, speaker, moderator, workshop leader, radio presenter, blogger, author, swimmer, rider, photographer, cook and even finds time to help companies with their communications.
Alexander McNabb's Latest Posts
When social media programs grow up…
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 […]
Facebook bigger than newspapers? So what?
Does this mean the death of newspapers? Not quite… The seventeen countries we included in the Middle East and Northern Africa Facebook Demographics study have widely varied news media: some, like the UAE, have strong English news components while others, like North Africa, have strong French language daily and weekly news media. When you look […]
Tweets like grains of wheat
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 […]
We’re no longer wowed…
In my thirty-odd years of involvement with technology, my favourite acronym remains TWAIN. In an industry so littered with acronyms, that’s some achievement. You may well recognise it if you’ve ever used a scanner hooked up to your computer – changes are that you’ll have been told you’re using a TWAIN driver. To my continued […]
The coolest agency in the world
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
Night of the anonyhaters
Our use of online media platforms is providing a challenge in terms of how we ‘behave’ online compared to offline. Many people find that they are more outgoing online, that they go that little bit further than perhaps they would in a face to face situation. This is particularly true when anonymity is brought into […]
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