How ‘social’ was GITEX 2012?
The Middle East’s largest technology trade show, GITEX, took place at Dubai World Trade Centre last week, bringing an estimated 3,500 exhibitors from around the world together with more than 100,000 businessmen and IT professionals (estimates vary). That’s equivalent to about 20,000 visitors per day, plus more than 10,000 company representatives on stands each of the five days of the exhibition, and we can assume nearly all were carrying some kind of smart connected device. So, with all that connectivity, one might expect GITEX to have dominated social media conversations.
Apparently not. Twitter activity using the #GITEX hashtag averaged less than 1,000 tweets per day, a little more than 100 GITEX videos have been uploaded to Youtube since the start of last week’s event and Facebook brand pages posting GITEX content seem to have generally elicited a poor response. By way of comparison, the amusing #Emarati_Comebacks Twitter hashtag that appeared spontaneously the weekend before GITEX drove over 2,500 tweets over 48 hours.
This seems all the stranger given how eager many GITEX exhibitors were to tell you all about how well their products worked with social media. IT professionals seemed to be falling over themselves to assert how important and integral social media was to connecting with customers these days. However, the ICT brands that did run some kind of social media campaign for GITEX, by and large, seem to have done so ‘on the cheap’. Mixed messages?
Note: there were, of course, other Twitter hashtags in use during GITEX, including #Gitex2012, #GITEXTechWeek and others, but the #GITEX hash was by far the most popular, so we’ve used that for a quick assessment of Twitter buzz.
Read more about social media
GITEX 2012 Social Buzz (8 October 2012)
#StopTimeOutDubai rings alarm bells (25 July 2012)
Five Smarter Tweeting Tips (22 January 2012)
Should you outsource your conversation? (19 January 2011)
Facebook bigger than newspapers? So what? (25 May 2010)
Twitter & Customer Service Survey (29 March 2010)
Sign-up for reports & updates
If you would like to receive reports and updates from time-to-time by email click here to join Spot On PR’s mailing list.
Connect with us
Tags: Carrington Malin, Facebook, GITEX, GITEX 2012, Internet, social media, Twitter, Youtube
