Digital Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0, Web Analytics, Web Design

I added this photo cause I thought it’s really funny it is a myth that an Ostrich hides its’s head from fear of danger, the truth is it does  this sort of behavior beacuse it’s giving itself a free deep cleansing facial (Joking)

The new media on everybody’s mind and probably some agendas; some took it on and experimenting with it others are reluctant to dive in!

During the time I have experimented myself and then studied the subject I extracted some of the most common myths about Social Media which have been circulating around it:

Social Media is for kids and geeks only

Well that is true; if you want to spend time gaming and chatting with friends! but for marketers it’s no game at all, social media is powerful tool to present brand personality at times where consumer gains control over the sales process and has total freedom to post his opinion whatever it was!

So the truth is social media is a legitimate marketing platform just as TV, Print, Web, Outdoor is!

Social Media jeopardize business reputation

Well if you accept to be an ostrich with its’ head in the sand at first sense of danger! Well the danger you are hiding from is inevitable it exists whether you like it or not. Choosing to hide from it is the real ‘Danger’. Consumers are already discussing your brand so you technically are on social media without you knowing. Your passive existence will put your business reputation in danger.

Social Media no time to play

An excuse I hear often is we don’t have time for Facebook and Twitter, we are too busy working on real marketing strategies! Well not good excuse! And you won’t get away with it for long! Social Media is a real marketing platform which must be integrated with your overall marketing strategy with time and staff assigned to it.

Social Media is for free

This is not entirely true, social media is certainly not for free; it is in the cost effective and cost saving category. The real truth is you need specialized people to run it for you and this will cost you, you do have the option to train your existing staff but you need specialized people to train them. Eventually you must deploy the right measurement solution to maximize and optimize your social media presence and give you an overall picture of your performance including ROI that will cost you.

So Social Media is no scary monster, no play, not a free ride, join in with no excuses!

As  I was expecting Google to be intrigued by all the data posted on “Twitter”, it was not difficult for them to think of searching Tweets archive or even live Tweets search!

Google is introducing a new feature named “Google Replay” a search facility to allow users to go back and search for tweets. It will take you back to March 2006 to the beginning of Twittersphere! The engine will archive tweets and make them available for search after 6 months of their published time. The feature also provides a diagram allowing search for Tweets by hour, really cool, check the demo

This comes just in time with launching Twitter Search, a full-fledge real-time Tweet search allowing users to search by language, and a more advanced search with very smart filtering! You can even search Tweets by Attitudes, VS !

Tweetup is another engine allowing paid for search created by the old time bid-based marketplace  inventor Bill Gross. The service allows advertiser to pay per impression and calculates rankings based on an algorithm that uses data from which measure tweets influence.

“TweetUp is to Twitter what Google is to the Web,” Said (Steve Case, the former chairman of AOL Time Warner. )

Happy tweeting….

By Dawser Al Hadidi

Are you getting the right results from your website?  Have you defined your website goals and never ever measured them?

Even if you do not want to go fancy and perform A/B testing on each and every web page, transaction, or banner campaign etc… still you need a web analytics tool and you will have to measure, who, when, where, what, and how long? Who is visiting my site, where are they coming from? What are they doing on my site? How long are they spending time overall and on a specific page? what devices and browsers are they using to browse my site? The answers to these questions will tell you so much not only about your website performance but also about your business. Using such facts can help you adjust your website and grow your business. No one will help you in generating those results and reading those metrics except for a well educated “Web Data Analyst”.

Who is a Web Data Analyst?

A Web Data Analyst is not a “Business Analyst, Content writer, Designer and God forbids a Programmer” Nor is he/she a Marketer! A real Web Data Analyst brings numbers into business decisions! He/she sits between marketing and IT, works closely with both, and the outcome is enhancing web performance to enable taking educated business decision and increase conversions, and largely achieve those KPIs which have been hammering on your bosses head!

Web analytics software gives you so much data to deal with; exhibiting those on your sales pitch might do you some good; whereas a continuous web traffic data measurement and actionable analytics feeding directly into your marketing strategy will go a long way.

The data sitting behind your website can be extremely valuable to your business continuity and growth; so don’t wait, add a Web Data Analyst to your team.

You might also benefit from reading Quality First, Quantity Second

By Dawser Al Hadidi

As 2010 is the year of online migration, I pledge to all businesses that online is the present and the future.

First of all, have you ever thought that moving the world of business online would actually help sustain the environment? The less paper we use, the more trees and oxygen we will have to keep our planet healthy. And if the environment is not your main concern, I can still convince you to move your business online …

Face it, the number of Internet users are increasing along with their expectations. It is easier to get traffic, conversion, customer loyalty, satisfaction, and overall rising among your competitors using your website than with any other form of traditional marketing tool. At this age and time, your customer is expecting you to be there when he/she logs in at any point using any device! Internet accessibility has also expanded its reach to mobile and other innovative devices; we are at an age when your customer can login to your services while flying to another country. How could you let this great opportunity pass?

With Internet users currently surpassing 1 billion – Middle East & Africa holding 57.4 million users alone – (source World Internet Stats), this is definitely not a point to be taken lightly.

Whether you are concerned about saving the environment or increasing your sales, an online existence is a must! And by existence, I don’t mean just putting up a gorgeous website. Go for the whole nine yards! Offer your business online, automate your services, and create an online bridge between you and your customer. You’ll be glad you did.

If you are worried about the investment, I assure you it is much more economical than print and the traditional business process. With online business automation, your telephone, paper, postal, fax, and payroll bills will grow smaller. The investment you make into building your online business will save you operational costs in the long run and guarantee ROI, and you cannot argue with that. Your business will be available to your customers beyond working hours, and you’ll no longer need to close your business at 5 pm. Business will keep pouring in even when you are asleep!

So what are you waiting for? Start on your to-do list today! Here are some steps to help you get started:

1. Set your online business objectives
2. Establish an online marketing strategy
3. Select and implement the right technology
4. Hire the right people to implement
5. And you’re on your way …

GOODLUCK!

The Association of Image Consultants International (AICI) recently hosted its second Dubai Chapter conference, at which Stylendubai co-founder Dawser Al Hadidi was the event’s key speaker.

Presented at the prestigious Address Marina Hotel and Resorts, the conference was coordinated by Rana Saab, who serves as the official AICI Ambassador for the Middle East. Guests included AICI members, Image Consultants, and non -members of small business entrepreneurs and professionals attending the event to glean new ideas on social media from Al Hadidi’s lecture.

“Social media has become an integral part of any business’ marketing strategy,” Al Hadidi asserts. “My objective at this event was to help marketing professionals embrace social media and make it second nature in their marketing approach.”

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1. One highly effective usability habit is “Design with the user in mind”!
2. Naming your links is another key rule in website usability! choose your wording like your users wants them and expect them to be!
3. Usability rule! user must remember his way through your website on his second, third, fourth …etc … visit!
4. Don’t let the Design of your website overpower the content! Remember content is the “KING”

By Dawser Al Hadidi

For all those with “Twitter” accounts! Twitter is a responsibility! Once you gain your first follower, you are accountable to entertain his ears with your Tweets.

If you are big, small, medium business, or a celebrity figure! You have got to use it! Your first and utmost goal is to increase your followers and not just any followers, remember I spoke in my article “Road Less Travelled” about technologies’ blessing which allows us to target ads and messages to the right people! Twitter is no different, you really want to gain the right followers, and make sure they are increasing, in Twitter’s case both Quantity and Quality are equally vital to the success of your Twitter life! You also need to make sure that the gap between your followers and following is not that far, 100 to 200 maximum. If it is more than that it suggests you are not interested to listen or interact with other Tweeps, and this certainly defeats the purpose of Twitter being an interactive and collaborative social media platform.  In this case I say please “lose it”! On a technical level it will get you into trouble in future keep reading to understand why…

Twitter best practices to increase followers are not yet that defined, however, you must work hard to grow your followers, and I believe organically is the best way. I grew my follower organically and now I feel safer and more confident that they listen to me and my influence numbers have massively spiked up from 0 to 39 according Klout. Yes! This is what you want. You want to influence people, get your message out there!

One very important piece of information you must know is that Twitter monitors accounts for aggressive following and follow churn (repeatedly following and un-following large numbers of other users). Usually some people do that to draw attention and gain followers so they start following people and then unfollow them a short while later. Twitter considers this a spam technique and will suspend the account that uses this practice that’s why I always believe that automated following services is not effective in that sense, as it may cause you to unintentionally commit the follow churn!

There is a limit on the number of people you follow enforced by Twitter; you are only allowed to follow 2000 people, however, you can increase but  this depends on the ratio between your following and follower, example you will not be able to follow 10,000 people if you have 100 followers,

Twitter has a very good reason for  imposing such rules; these limits improve site performance by ensuring that when Twitter send your message to all of your followers, is actually meant to reach those followers and it’s not just throwing message to large numbers, It’s basically a healthy way of disabling spam on their server.

You should not feel bound to follow who follows you, but make sure you respond to their “@messages” and interact with them when needed. Again I repeat that Twitter is not a passive media, it is no more broadcasting messages to the mass! Twitter is targeted and interactive.

Another good rule of Twitter do not “tweet too much or too little”! Meaning you are allowed 1000 Tweet a day limit set by Twitter, 250 Direct messages. Use them… They are yours.

A healthy Tweep will Tweet 5 – 10 Tweets morning, 10 – 20 afternoons, and 20+ at night, do not exceed your limit. And always leave at least 5 seconds gap between each Tweet, remember people are following many others and they need time to catch you Tweet thread.  You can read further about Twitter ethics in my previous article.

One last and not at all least do not disappear from Twitter, you are only allowed 24 hours of absence! Twitter is an engagement media engaging your followers is a must to maintain your Twitexitance.

Have you ever wondered what would it be like to know what your customer really wants? Reading his brain and watching every move to deliver what he needs at the right moment! Well Behavioral Marketing allows you to do so!

Behavioral Marketing or Targeting is a marketing method; it is a web technology which allows tracking user behavior by following his navigation pattern and interaction path. This valuable information about a user’s website visit is then used to target advertising to his needs and optimize the website services to align with user’s requirements.

“Behavioral targeting is advertising’s attempt at supplying you with specialized ads developed from your Internet history”. Tech Republic Definition

Behavioral marketing is not being effectively used in the Middle East; main reasons not effectively employing this beautiful and miraculous online marketing practice are:

1. Lack of industry practices awareness
2. Lack of online marketing techniques on marketers’ side
3. No real efforts are invested into web data analytics and analyzing behavioral metrics.
4. Lack of Behavioral Targeting technologies on the publishers side

Apparently watching the pattern of user’s behavior and registering his activities on the website can get marketers to know him better and therefore satisfy his needs and in return get yours fulfilled! So behavioral marketing actually promises better conversion rates and guaranteed ROI not to mention increase of open rate for email direct campaigns.

Through employing the right technology and efficient marketing analyst marketers will be able to design the ad campaign in relation to the user’s behavioral data, therefore capture his attention, and drive him right in the funnel and getting the desired results! Money well spent!

There is however a privacy in association with the cookie technology issue (cookie is information in a shape of a “code”  that a Website puts on your computer’s hard disk after agreeing with your browsers default settings so that it can remember something about you at a later time) this directly connects to the behavioral marketing which is still under debate, I personally think it is irrelevant! Do you think the super market is private? Your gym, Shopping malls even banks?! They all have their ways of knowing customer behavioral and therefore target advertisement to suit his needs! So where is the privacy issue! And if there is actually a privacy breach in this sort of marketing, then let it be! Let’s ask the users do they wish to be bombarded with irrelevant advertisement or they would rather get exposed to the right and targeted type of ads tailored to their needs!

As a marketer you can choose to target your ad to a specific behavior, Example, if a visitor is browsing through IT content most of the time, it’s likely that he is interested and maybe working in the IT domain, so targeting latest IT inventions ads for this particular user will encourage click through and possibly leading to a sale!

I must say that behavioral marketing has become essential in these difficult economic times. US and Europe has been effectively using behavioral marketing for several years , according to Forrester reports, behavioral targeting adoption has massively grew from 10% of European advertisers in 2007, to  26% of in 2008., Middle East publishers must look into it sooner than later and I promise it will relieve the distress cause by economic meltdown.

By Dawser Al Hadidi

This is not about “cake” I put this picture to make drool!

I decided to write this article to teach new tweeps how to use Twitter. I will write a more advanced article after this one so keep visiting this blog.

For those of you who did not read my previous posts about Twitter, I will quickly summarize it:

Twitter is a micro blogging social media platform allowing 140 characters to speak your mind, thoughts, daily events, market your brand, skills, support you customers, anything you want to say read more about how to best use this medium in my Twitterethics article.

Signing up for an account:

Visit www.twitter.com press on the green button “sign up” as shown in screen 1

Once you are on the sign up page you need to enter all fields to be able to create an account, make sure you select a light and short user name, remember you have only 140 characters to use for your tweet messages and your username is counted within those characters. So making it short will allow you to tweet easier.

Note: don’t let the CAPTCHA scare you, enter the scrabled letters as you see them if you cannot see them clearly you press reload it will give you another one until you are able to see it and type it correctly.

Now that you signed up and you got your account, you can start tweeting, so get on www.twitter.com and enter your user name and password, just click on the “sign in” button on top right of the page, the sign in window will appear and enter your credentials, make sureyou always remember your password. If you happen to forget it, there is a “forgot password” service below the sign in button.

Tour around the home page:

When you land on the home page you will see your Twitter Home page, on this page you will see a display of other people Tweets (Tweet is a term for the message entered in the text field on top, under What are you doing?) once you start following them. I will speak about getting followers in just a bit. Now we focus on getting oriented with our twitter home page.

@username on the right bar, is your mentions, anyone who mentions you whether it’s a reply to something you tweeted, or a retweet (repeating what you say will elaborate on that later on this article). Remember all @replies and retweets are visible to the public.

The Direct Message you see just under the @username, is your private Twitter inbox, it is a feature which you can able or disable, allowing other Tweeps to send you message which you will be able to view only, this will not be visible to the public. I advise you to allow DM as it will open more opportunities for you on Twitter to connect with others.

Favorites is a button you use to distinguish the best tweets, if you really like some of the tweets    you can press on the star shape next to a tweet and it will be gathered in the favorites page

The search box you see under favorite is used to search for names of people celebrities or a subject of your interest.

Trending Topic, any topic comes with a “#” symbol means it has been a most talked about subject and Tweeps have given it the “#” sign, therefore, it will be categorized within the trendy topics.

RSS it means “Really Simple Syndication” meaning you can use this tool to access Twitter Feeds without actually logging into Twitter. If you are a blogger you might want to check out Twitterfeed. This tool automatically sends your blog update to Twitter.

Getting on with Tweeting:

Tweeting is like speaking, it’s up to you what you want to say! however, I must let you know that if your tweets are not interesting enough people will not follow you. So share thoughts, ideas, knowledge, books you read, anything that will add value and raise interest, you can also speak about your day you experience, the point is to share and interact. Twitter is a social gathering place, I personally find it a great source of information, and many use it in marketing their product and services, so it can be used in the professional world.

Followers & Following:

The essence of existing on Twitter is to follow people and be followed, the term follow means follow their thread of tweets, and the same goes for you as a follower, you choose the tweeps you like to follow.

The follow menu is very easy, once you click on any name you will find a small arrow once you click on it you will find a menu as shown in the image:

@ Mention Username: is what is used to reply to this user and the message will be shown on your page, his and your followers.

Direct Message: the same as we explained earlier, this feature is to send a private message to a specific user

Unfollow: is used to stop following a particular use.

Block: is used to block a person from following you, it is possible to unblock a person. cleaning twitter for those who misuses this platform. So if anyone who you suspect as a spammer. you can report the account to Twitter.

This screen shows your own followers in brief, you can click view all, which gives you the full list of who is following you

Twitter Commands:

I will share only one very necessary commands for now.

RT @username: a command used to repeat the tweets you like, make sure you type it in the top text field box as mentioned here” RTSPACE@USERNAME” and then copy the tweet you liked and hit update.

Keep watching my blog I will write another article about more advance Twitter commands and get into the settings of an account, how to customize your background and picture and more…

I recommend you go through the Twitter blog to read more Twitter stories.

by Dawser Al Hadidi

I have a feeling that this article may result in part 2 of the same subject so I will call it 1.0.

This is to all Tweeps, old, new and people who are thinking of becoming Tweeps. Twitter is a microbloging social media platform offering 140 space of character to share your thoughts, ideas, issues you feel strongly about, experiences, daily happenings, anything worth sharing with the public. Not to forget you can use Twitter for marketing your brand and build awareness for your business. The 140 characters are good enough to make a point!

Anyways let’s get to the point; to understand Twitter, think of it as part of your social life, there are social ethics that govern it, but with less facial expressions at least for now! More exposure and wider range of social reach.

Twitter Social Rules:

Following & Followers

1. Follow your good followers
2. Send Thank you for new followers – You can use this automated service to action a “thank you message” for all who follows you (www.tweetlater.com)
3. Get to know your followers and interact as much as possible.

Tweeting:

A term applies to the 140 character you enter in the “what are you doing?” text box and send out to your fellow Tweeps.

1. You do not have to answer the “What are you doing?” question, just speak your mind, share knowledge and add value to the Twitterommunity.
2. Tweet on daily basis.
3. Do not tweet too much, or too little, you have to keep your followers engaged.
4. Keep intervals between your tweets, at least 5 seconds.
5. Ensure your Tweets are understandable, logical, and reasonable; this is what will keep them following you and increase your followers.
6. Make your tweets interesting, even if you want to tweet about taking your lunch you can make it exciting and engaging.
7. Do not tweet too much personal stuff, it’s not only unexciting it is also unsafe, there are the places for personal chats.
8. Retweet Good Tweets – Simple Command “RTspace@Username” and add the Tweet you liked.
9. Thank Who Retweets your Tweets.

Follow Friday

1. A sweet way to recommend good Tweeps for others to follow.
2. Mention #FollowFriday each Friday, simple write #FF and @username/s of the Tweeps you want to recommend
3. Thank who mentions you on #FF.

@replies and Direct Messages (DM)

The difference between @replies and DM, is the latter is private no one except the recipient can access it. The @replies can be public and will appear on the “@username” on the right side bar of your Twitter page, it also always appears in search results.

1. Check your @replies frequently

2. Reply to all @replies, since these are public and others may read it then try your best to make it understandable. I know it is challenging with the 140 character limits and that’s why I said try your best.

Only for Famous Tweeps

A note to VIPs, celebrities, companies, and businesses all must listen to other Tweeps, these Tweeps represent their fans or customers, Twitter is all about interacting, and you cannot interact without listening. You are on Twitter to deliver a message, support your service, satisfy your fans, or enforcing a global change; whatever it may be, you need to remember that you did put yourself on Twitter to get closer to the public, the way to do it is very simple:

1. Check your @replies frequently
2. Search using #subject, your name, your company name the issue your support I.E #Hunger you will find what is being tweeted about you, your service and subject you call for, then simply interact using the @reply command.

And Tweep please remember, if you got into a twitterugment make sure you listen respect what the other tweep is saying and make your point clear.

To understand the lingo used in my article visit http://business.twitter.com/basics/what-is-twitter/