Social media
A wake-up call for aspiring citizen journalists in the UAE (and lessons for Middle East marketers)
The story is now well known and has received media coverage around the world. An incident of road rage in Dubai captured on video by a bystander and posted online inadvertently breaches United Arab Emirates laws, resulting in the arrest of the citizen journalist a couple of days later, even though he removed the video […]
MENA Twitter lists
As our Twitter friends will know, Spot On is a big fan of Twitter and was one of the first brands to begin using the social media platform in the Middle East and North Africa. Over the years Twitter has helped us meet new people and brands from all over the world, find job candidates, […]
Intelligent use of social media
The chaps at Studio One wanted to explore how best to use social media, especially if you were starting out with a small business. What top five tips could we give an SME. Naturally, as so often happens with these things, we didn’t really stick to the top five tips and then ran out of […]
The buzz around Arab film
Those of us that are old enough to have known 1970s and 1980s television in the GCC, will remember, among other things, the broadcasting of old Arabic movies from the golden age of Egyptian cinema (or, indeed, turning the TV on to watch the English language movie of the week!). The video quality often left […]
Flipboard and the future of content
It’s no secret that the Internet has radically changed the way we create, consume and share content and continues to do so. Spot On often talks about concepts such as disintermediation, the atomisation of communications, the social consumer and the pressure on all organisations to become publishers of content. It’s easy to spot the big […]
Taking a bite out of the CITC
‘Biting the hand that feeds IT’ is UK-based The Register’s amusing theme line, a reference to the IT news website’s irreverent editorial style, which often has harsh criticism for IT company announcements, spokespeople and other IT news. This week, Saudi Arabia’s English language newspaper the Arab News seems to have decided to do some biting of its own, running a […]
Why retiring Google Reader is anti-social
The web is now full of reactions to this week’s announcement that Google will retire its RSS feed reader on 1 July 2013. Perhaps, as pointed out by Tech Crunch’s Matt Burns, the retirement of Google Reader will pave the way for more innovative feed management apps from competitors that have hitherto been too intimidated […]
Marketing after the click
In the old days, we used to place advertisements in trade magazines. These often carried ‘bingo cards’ for advertisers to circle numbers corresponding to advertisements. These ‘reader responses’ were collated by the publisher and the contacts of interested readers were sent to advertisers for them to follow up with a brochure and perhaps a follow […]
Ooredoo or just plain redo?
In the age of 24/7 online news and social media, what reaction should brands expect to receive from a major global announcement? Many marketers would expect the answer, and the preparation required to harness the benefit of such a reaction, to be second nature to most global brands. However, it seems that this is not […]
Has the Arab Spring turned into a torrent of cash?
Whilst debate continues, even now, on how pivotal the role social media was in the revolutions of the Arab Spring, there can be no doubt that Arab digital activism woke up businesses and governments across the world to the potential of new digital media. In the Middle East the change in attitudes towards digital media […]
