There is nothing out of the usual in this campaign and yet This campaign provides a good quality step up from the regular wishy-washy stale sweepstakes.

What is good about this campaign:

- It puts Rak Bank’s new product at the center of the promotion, by giving people a packaged message  to tweet. The message is short and concise.

- Does not force you to follow or like anyone.

- Message provided is impartial and hence does not in any way affect credibility of the tweeter.

- It is extremely simple for users to execute and only involves one step.

- It provides transparency by showing all the rules, number of prizes, campaign duration, method of selecting winners…

- It costs Rak Bank close to nothing and would be extremely easy to monitor.

- It is less of a bribery model (cheap sweepstakes) and more of a reward for promotion model.

Keep following @rakbanklive  on twitter to see their other ways of interacting with the audience.

P.S. I am lately resorting to short posts, as opposed to not writing at all.

This post is inspired by the lawsuit filed by Benihana Kuwait against the author of one of the most popular Kuwaiti blogs for an objective review they did not appreciate.

In my previous  job, working in the International Sales Department, our main objective was to get new agents across the world to represent our brand and supporting them through thick and thin with Marketing Materials ranging from catalogs, brochures, photos, samples, emailer templates, templates, microsites…  And that was not an easy job. Many a time clients would come to us directly from countries where we already had agents because they felt that we could service them better, more efficiently, that we had more know how, or simply because the agent was rude, unprofessional, unethical… And I can imagine how much more pressures you have for controlling standards and ensuring brand integrity in the B2C world, from making sure your outlets correspond to certain standards of look, feel, smell & sound, to a unified experience and service levels… especially if you have franchised your brand and no longer hold the remote control, only having access and being able to voice concerns on matters that are distinctly outlined in that one franchising agreement. Whilst on the other hand the franchisee, has the golden key and has the ability to drive your name into a wall at any time.

via BlogBaladi.com

Well guess what, with the world wide web, your reputation is not only threatened in that one location, worse come to worse, one slip up can cause a global ripple effect damaging all of your brand’s properties.

So today brands playing internationally also have to develop clear branding and marketing strategies for managing their digital identity and reciprocate those experiences into clear guidelines and strict policies with lots of case studies and canned responses for their partners to follow worldwide, otherwise, you’ll have another Benihana Kuwait nightmare on your hands. And well of course, have a clear cut crisis management plan.

I feel so sorry for Benihana New York  and can imagine the nightmare they are going through at the moment unable to control anything and trying to explain to their partners how much damage they have done and convince them to change course of action. For all of you other brands out there, this is not an excuse for you to get scared of the online world and run away, it is just one more proof that you should be online, listen, monitor and engage in a structured way respecting the community that constitutes a large portion of your target audience and learn from cases such as these.

Make sure to check Mark’s roundup on all the amazing posts the community has written to support him and appeal to Benihana Head offices Japan through this easy was provided by @Alexandermcnabb.

For more marketing perspective also check @youmny’s post at Marketing in Lebanon blog – Benihana Kuwait, the art of creating a PR crisis. You can also check what Lebanese bloggers had to say on this.

Disclaimer: 24am is a blog that I have personally been following for a long while and  recommend for all of you to follow due to the amazing quality of content it has and the objectivity of its authors.

Lately I am going to so many events , most are tech or social media related, but … well… a lot of the time… the digital me feels at unease and disappointed, unable to share the event with the world or growing a grudge against the organizers, so I decided to write this simple guide declaring openly to all event organizers that anything less would be a disappointment, and ,well if they do the things I mentioned, they will make the online community more involved in their events and expand their reach and visibility. Don’t they all want that?

Ah well, as my main objective is self centered I mainly focused in things that need to be going during and after the event. (Plus most of them score well on before event stuff after I corner them with my questions in emails) .

1. # – Have a HASHTAG!

This is an out most basic, but then again most event organizers forget to make it short enough, announce it publicly more than once and most importantly forget to register it at a hashtag repository like twubs or  wthashtag,  so most of the time I am livetweeting from an event my followers start asking me “what is this and that #xyz … any links…  ?”

2. Official LiveTweeting

That brings us naturally to livetweeting. I have already talked about the importance of livetweeting here but i just wanted to emphasize that event organizers need to keep on livetweeting from the official event account to update people at the event on what is happening, remind who the speakers are and what their handles are, tell them where the live feeds are (doesn’t hurt to do all that in parallel on linked in and facebook as well) … AND if you are an event sponsor, especially at an event centered around social media, especially if your produce is focused around social media, big thumbs down to you if you are not tweeting about the event and not quoting your guest speaker. Yes @zawya I am talking about you and your zero tweets at MediaMeForum and your replying only two days later to my tweets. Which brings me to my next point.

3. Answer & Engage Tweets

For starters, there is no fun for a hashtag without a livescreen. At MediaMEForm the guys did a great job of livetweeting what was happening, BUT [yes it is a big but] they completely dismissed the twitter community. The twitter Screen was live only during the panels and it was put in a place where no speaker can see what we were talking about, and even the moderator did not address any questions from the tweets, nor did their official twitter channel. Unlike ArabNET, where there were ginormous screens dedicated to tweets and speakers paying full attention to what was happening with one speaker undressing to get a wave of tweets. Still , I think the impact will be even more augmented if you have a dedicated moderator to pick at least two questions from the twittersphere for each panel/speaker and ask them at the event. Honestly speaking, the questions are more pungent, very well formulated and more daring and provoking more mindful discussions, isn’t that what you want? Aren’t your events targeted at identifying the trends of the future?

4. Live Ustream

I was on the peak of bliss drinking my Pepsi, eating popcorn in my PJs watching the pitches at Yallastartup weekend day 1 and working on the other laptop in parallel… but then, lo and behold once the pitches ended and we started getting some cool behind the curtains views of the audience, their feedback and interactions, seeing familiar faces….. THEN the stream turned off and a vigilant message told me that the stream will only resume after one day to show the final pitches and that all in between will not be documented… I felt that that was plain mean… YallaStartup weekend is a sort of non-commercial example.

So all of you event organizers will be saying :”why should we put the stuff live for free, when people pay to attend?”

And I’ll tell you. one has nothing to do with the other.

Most of us attend the events for the networking and has nothing to do with the panels and the speakers, who by the way we realize travel from one event to the other with similar presentations, who most of the time blog a lot and more in depth about the subject, or write whole books on the matter… So you putting up a live stream doesn not diminish your financial gain, which BTW you have reaped in full from teh event sponsors and paying attendees. So you may as well give the sponsor’s their money’s worth and help promote their brands and spread their messages and you event’s messages (while your at it) to even more people. People, who by the way are highly targeted individuals, who simply could not catch a flight, or whose bosses came to the event but left them at the office, or teh bosses who sent employees there and want to make sure that they sent them to an interesting event… People who would love to come to the event next year. People who would tweet about the event and talk and talk about it…

It was so amazing to watch the few panels I have missed (due to my weird trip schedule) at Media ME Forum on their UStream account and the quality of the videos/voice/ the nice music they put when nothing was happening – really professional! And ArabNet, they really understood that if they just empower the social media addicts, their event will be promoted across the roof and that’s what happened.

4.PHOTOS

We live in the now and like to see photos now, and share them and comment on them – ALL NOW! So do not make us wait two days for your flickr or facebook gallery upload. You can set up something extremely simple on site, like that photo booth Arabnet had (could not find link), that immediately sent all photos to their flickr account. Also make sure if you have something like that up & running, promote it well before and during the event.

You have a lot of room to be creative here and there are more wonderful ideas out there to engage people in crowdsourced photography at your event.

5. Icing on the Cake – Netvibes

So you do all of the stuff I mentioned above and integrate all of them into one awesome netvibes page that people courting your event could easily follow.  This is one of the more magical tools out there and one I really, really adore to look at when it comes to events I am not at and ones I am at (if they have one that is). For instance check the cool netvibes page SpotOnPR does annually for Gitex and while you are at it, check Spot On PR’s Netvibe’s page. Don’t you see how that will help your event to become more sharable and viral?

6. Social booklets

You lovely event organizers always give us those nice and creative booklets with all the info about the speakers, but why oh why don’t you mention the speakers’/moderators’ twitter handles, websites, blogs next to their names, so we can connect to them, address our questions to them, or just plain stalk them? and while you’re at it, dedicate a page at the beginning providing us with the event hashtag, livestream, netvibes page… et all

7. PLUGSSSSS

I always email event organizers about plugs, they always feel so happy when i tell them i am planning to bring my laptop to livetweet and welcome the thought and assure me WIFI and electricity plugs are available, but up till now, none of them have delivered on that. Do you expect our battery lives to be infinite? Do you expect us to have spare batteries for our iPhones? We want to enjoy the event all of its durations while checking on work email and tweeting or life-blogging YOUR event. Plain and simple, there should be a dedicated plug at least for every four attendees… Not that I mind making eyes to the camera guy to co-share his plug and carrying around at all times a multi-plug adapter, or stealing power for my mobile from a fellow attendees dying laptop…

8. GOOD WIFI

This probably should’ve been at the top of the list, but I consider it a basic and only as I reread the whole thing I decided to highlight it, just in case….

9.Screen & Screen Brightness

Also a little after thought: try to have several screens at the event and make sure that their brightness is optimal, so we are able to take good cellphone pics no matter how far from the stage we are without stealing your speaker’s valuable “top secrets”.

After Event Tips

• Encourage us to send feedback
• Send us all the lovely links for the photos, social pages, videos, slides … post event stats, news clippings about the event
• It is also lovely to receive some post event answers to questions that were asked during teh forum but did not have enough time to be answered properly or the material/numbers was not at hand.
• Send us an industry newsletter (yeah i do not mind up being automatically signed up for that)
• Ask us what do we want to see at your next event
• Continue Tweeting, Updating the Facebook/linked in page of the event and engaging all who were at the event

Next month, I am planning on attending the 1st Arab Social Media Forum, which the organizers are promising to be a wholesomely dedicated event to all social media aspects… so…. Guys, I am really hoping on seeing all that stuff there [wink, wink]!

Have I left anything out? What is it that you found missing at the last event you have attended?

*Update 1: Forgot to tell you how at Microsoft Open Door Event this year there were special giveaways prepared for tweeters. Small giveaway, but nonetheless, it was pretty sweet.

So running on cockiness and adrenaline after @azzi told me that my tweet became a top tweet and @ambitionista pointed me at how to actually see that, here it is:

” Israel should publish a guidebook “How to start a war and blame others 101″ #lebanese “

And this summarizes my humble opinion on yesterday’s clash. As a final bout of  cockiness, I would like to add ” Top that Israeli Social Media Propaganda” and ” I will moderate your comments on this post, and block any twitter users that try to @ me convincing me of Israel’s innocence – so do not even bother!”

Now back to my normal self, this just shows that although we are not as organized as the enemy, we could resonate together with a unified message just as strongly. The tweet was just a spur of the moment thing that came to mind, for really sarcastic tweets on any situation follow @uxsoup, this man is a treasure trove.

Was tweaking through foursquare for businesses section when this stopped me in my feet. I felt so ecstatic with the idea I wanted to share with you what Flipside Beirut are doing, by pioneering location based marketing.

I will try to contact them to find out more, in the meantime let me know if you’ve tried the place before.

And Check:

- Their foursquare page

- Their twitter page

- Their Website

- Their Facebook page

It is obvious that the promotion is quite new, but let us keep watching to see where it gets.

So, do you know of any other businesses in Lebanon that have effective foursquare promotions? Or any ones in the Middle East per se.

Got a mentioned by the lovely @laradunston in her article about twitter in the middle east, here it goes:

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What’s happening?

Suddenly everyone’s using Twitter. Lara Dunston (@laradunston) went to tweet-ups in Dubai and Beirut to find out why

update

At a tweet-up in Dubai, a woman whose Twitter handle is @Kangayayaroo glances around the table. “This is an atypical expat experience,” she confides. “Because of Twitter we’re friends with people we wouldn’t normally meet socially.” Joining us are “tweeps”, as Twitter users call themselves, from all over the region and beyond.

The Middle East is racking up Twitter users at a rapid pace. A survey by Spot On PR found that users in the MENA region quadrupled in the second quarter of 2009, with 14,000 accounts by September. Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed (@HHShkMohd) and Jordan’s Queen Rania (@QueenRania) are among them.

Continue Reading HERE

Today, IVY was giving dating advice on twitter and asking people for feedback on her make a move rose giveaway and planning a tweetup dinner.

Yesterday, at the table, we sat arguing for around 20 minutes whether IVY is real or not.

The whole week before, people were passionately interacting with IVY on twitter…

Two weeks ago, Ivy registered to attend a tweetup and blogged about it.

And the truth of the matter is that we shouldn’t care if IVY is real or not. We should be happy that companies have finally understood the language of digital natives and is creating campaigns that resonate and interact with us, as well as the other poor mere mortals. After EXOTICA’s  unexciting Different Christmas campaign, that even failed to point us to the blog on their billboards, Leo Burnett, Exotica’s ad agency,  reviewed all of its mistakes and came up with something with a phenomenal snowball effect. Yes, as I said before my friends, social media marketing is sparking to life in the middle east and you are either with us, or eaten by the competition.

Things to learn from Exotica’s IvySays Project.

1- Give and you shall receive

The IVY we have come to know and love is a giver. She started by giving us dating advise, which though we may not all apply, but we all loved and we felt compelled single people everywhere felt compelled to try out Ivy’s moves and then… Ivy slipped a rose into our hands and made it all the more easier. Think about your clients, think about what they need. And even if you are B2B business, think: Do your they need education, help, comfort, care, empowerment? All of us do, don’t we? Now how can you use all that your expertise to help them, regardless of your product?

2-Engage and you shall be engaged

Before IVY got to her first post, she got a twitter account and after that, she did not just re-tweet her own posts, she replied to people, she talked to them, shared her opinions on outside issues, gave them advice and encouragement. There was no pushing her message or asking for anything for herself. That is why, when IVY asked questions she got enormous feedback, even from those who were in doubt about her true identity. And that is value you will not be able to leverage unless you create a genuine online persona [not to be confused with a retweet bot].

3-Go where they go, do what they do!

Ivy blogged about various creeks and corners in Beirut, be in Kayan, Greedy Goose or Le Grey, and that is what made her connect and resonate with her audience. Ivy did not blog about flowers she blogged about fashion, make-up, glamor, plastic surgery, national pride, chocolate- SUGAR, SPICE and EVERYTHING NICE – and we all like nice things.  Then again, she went to twitter to reach digital natives and, mind you,  she even guest blogged and re-blogged it on her own site. Did IVY ask girls to go to EXOTICA to get the flowers? No, they went out to  the most up and coming place – Gemmayze, Achrafieh and Hamra. The only thing that could’ve been done differently would be  giving out roses all around Lebanon, and not just Beirut.

4-Empower and you shall be empowered

Even if they did not comment, retweet or send emails, thought they actively do, with every dating tip IVY empowered ladies to take actions. Girls, being the gossip machines they are, would discuss it – which means GOING VIRAL offline. And then again with every rose given out to a guy Exotica created a positive sentiment, that is teh first step to along lasting relationship, not with the guy, but with the brand. And come 2011 I expect more girls to send out flowers to beau’s, and now, not because they[roses] are free, but because it makes them feel good. And this is the golden key to any successful brand. And did I mention the publicity, Ivy’s campaign is getting from mainstream media?

5-Going against the current and bringing the currents together

There are two stakeholders in any relationship – MAN & WOMAN. Exotica’s outdoors visuals empowered men, by teasing them with images of women they could have had in 2o09 if only they were brave enough. While Ivy, took a less traditional approach, and she looked to empower women. Mind you, women are not traditionally the ones we think first of when we think about selling flowers, right? But then again, I have seen countless times flowers being delivered to men at our offices from girlfriends, wives or wanna-bes. And then again, think of it, if a girl gives a guy one rose before valentine, and the guy likes the girl, on Valentine he will get her no less than a bouquet and what will his 1st choice be? Certainly EXOTICA. So you see, by bringing people together and spreading love Exotica may actually have record sales on February 14.

Finally,  I want to congratulate Exotica on the Brilliant Initiative and hope that IVY , whoever she is, continues blogging even after February 14, otherwise the digital natives all around, both those who think IVY is Real and Fake, will feel beguiled and disappointed.

Googling I found this song called IVY SAYS, I wonder if it had anything to do with the origin of the campaign.

-What is Live Tweeting?

- It is a lot like Live TV transmissions or Live Radioshows, only on Twitter.

But , you’ll say that everyone is Live Tweeting, and you are right because Twitter is all about the NOW. But you need to think of Live Tweeting as a live transmission of some football championship or a Miss World pageant, per se. It has to do with live coverage of a certain event by tweeps through tweets.

So why would you* Live Tweet ?

1- For Advanced and Compact Note-taking

Live tweeting seemed very natural to me, being a multi-tasker by nature, it is very hard for me to concentrate on one thing. So concentrating on a talk, while tweeting, helps me concentrate better on both.  But not everyone is as screwed as me, I know. So think about it this way. If you watch Oprah, you’ll notice Oprah sometimes repeats several times tips, ‘aha moments’, conclusions, main idea during the talk show to direct the conversation and concentrate the viewer’s attention. In that context, livetweeting is the equivalent of bullet-point summarizing an event. But instead of using pen and paper, you now have the ability to do that online, while sharing it with everyone who is interested in ”what are you doing right now” – your twitter followers. Which brings us to the next reason to live tweet.

2- For Personal Branding

When you are at an event, especially a conference, you hold access to privileged information. Afterall, there are a maximum of 2,000 people at this event, sharing the same experiences with you at that moment. As we are in the ME, a maximum of a 100 (very optimistically) of these might be tweeting about it. How many people are out there who want to know what is happening at this event? How many are tracking the event’s hashtag? How many searching this event on Google? How many people will RT a clever idea, a quote or a remark you beam from the trenches? By providing quality ( content is king at all times) exclusive information, you are not only tweeting to your followers, you are tweeting to everyone interested in the event/subject. Are you seeing the implications of this: the greater number of followers/blog readers you will get, the people at the event who will want to meet you, the grateful organizers who you can now ask for a favor….

And after a series of live tweets of various events, you will have complete authority in the community on the subject matter(s) you’ve covered, but not only that, they will be grateful to you for sharing your experience and dedicating your time to making them a part of it , their own Prometheus. In short, “Sharing is caring!” and caring in the Social Media world is always recompensed in tenfold.

{Not to mention that some events now provide free entrance to live bloggers and live tweeters}

3- To Promote Your Event (During the Event)

Here’s something I learned from the queen of  twitter:  Even if you do not have one follower on twitter, even if no one in your niche knows what twitter is, you can still harness its power. You can summarize the key points of your event as it happens, you can post photos of your event live and display your whole twitter stream on YOUR event’s website.

Did I hear someone say: “What if my customer / target group does not visit the website, is not computer literate?”

Well if worst, comes to worst, besides advising you to find a job in a web 2.0 savvy industry, I am going to tell you two things. One, it is always hard to be the pioneer, but you will leverage the greatest benefits. Sooner or later everyone will be online, be it on twitter or any other en-mode platform. But now you have the advantage of learning the rules of engagement, and experimenting with social media limitlessly, something you will not be able to do in the future. ans second, if for nothing else, once your event is over, you will need to have a good old press release or or your newsletter (printed or online). And the summary of all the tweets about your event ( be it yours, or your community’s)is not only a good place to start gathering your thoughts, but also a good appendix to your press kit (all of which is a part of traditional media) . And third… well I was going to talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) again, but then I remebered you are still in Web -1 so ask me about it when you catch up!

There is not one resource, more powerful than twitter for spreading word of mouth, and that is what marketers dream day and night about, isn’t it? So Why not use it and leverage it, after all, it is also FREE!

4- To measure an event’s success

As I said, everyone needs to be concerned about word of mouth, and your real estate space on the web. By announcing an event hashtag prior the event, provide a live-tweets stream on your site displaying all tweets with your hash tag, reply to all questions and comments, learn from positive and negative feedback… then you are on the right track. It has become customary to evaluate and event’s reach, success through evaluating the volume, quality of tweets during and after it.

Simply: Tweets = Publicity = Brand Equity

5-To promote your business in the context of the event

If you are just attending/visiting an industry related event or venue, on behalf of your business / personal brand, you can tweet about things that are in context of what your company does around the subject of the event. Let us say your company sells Ceramic tiles. “Twitter and Ceramic Tiles?! !” – say you? Well you go to Italian Exhibitions about Ceramic Tiles, don’t you? Do your customers know that? Wouldn’t they want to know what kind of tiles you are going to buy for your new collection, what are the tile trends this season, what colors/materials are in? Wouldn’t they want to see some photos? Wouldn’t they want to share this with others who want to buy tiles, change their home decor, interested in interior design?

And now tell me, wouldn’t that enhance YOUR company’s image as a point of reference and an expert in YOUR  field?

As I mentioned, Live Tweeting has always felt very natural to me, but what has inspired me to write this post  was the launch of livetweeting.com today for the live broadcasting of LeWeb to the Arab world. Livetweeting is the 1st Arab Live Tweeting Platform with Crowd-sourced Translation to and from Arabic.

” A group of live tweeters will be covering the event in its Native Language, for example English, and at the same time multi-lingual tweeters will crowdsource translation of the coverage to a second language, for example Arabic. All that will be presented in real-time on LiveTweeting.com.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzn6l7zq_LQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

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* as a marketer , someone who is online for networking or building their personal brand

* you may also want to check some tips for livetweeting

You may remember that @ammouni had one those great “creatively organized” desks in the #MYDESK post. But people on twitter were gauding her, nominating her desk as the “most messy” desk . Not being able to bear it any longer, she decided to join the ranks of  “normal desks”. Below is a Before & after So let’s give her a hand of support!

Before

After

So would this change last for long?

If you are not following me on twitter you have missed a lot! We have been going at this for about 2.5 weeks and I am really impressed by the tremendous feedback from all my tw-friends… And now is the moment of Truth!

 How did #MYDESK Start?

Well, I was reading this blogpost about “working space image” from one of my favorite bloggers – Penelope Trunk. So basically it says that your desk portrays your image and you should be careful on how you manage you desk space, and what that projects about you. Having a messy desk myself ( even extremely messy at times) , I was disgruntled by that people with neat desks are considered more productive.

I am one of those people who can not manage a tidy desk, i simply can’t work on one, having so many projects I need all my papers to be within reach and combined and mixed for me to start forming the bigger picture. I feel less productive if I have to put the files back every two seconds… Even Penelope’s blogpost provides a counter argument saying “”Messiness is related to creativity because it tends to juxtapose things that don’t normally go together.”

Anyway, I know that its a pretty radical subject so I will not be blabbing about it any further, here is a photo of my desk at its worst! There you have it!

need to say in my defense that i specifically chose a very messy photo to post. (why do we messy people always feel the need to justify ourselves?)

So anyhow, after I read this post, I wanted to know if there are people out there like me. And I Tweeted about the link and asked the question. I did not even to gets pics… and then I did… and everybody started participating and commenting…

The Desks

 As I said it went back and forth the pst three weeks, with me encouraging everyone on the network to show us what their desks look like and starting a mini competition. and at one point I wasn’t able to keep up with you guys:)

So let’s move the competition here. Comment, tell me what you think ?

 & if I’ve missed your desk, give me the link & I’ll repost it.

The “Creatively Organized” (code name for messy, but we do not accept the negative connotation)

(hover over the photo to see whose desk it is)

The Elegant

The playful

The Zen Like & Minimalistic

What Normal Desks should look like?

The Musical

Social Networking Workspace

The Hig-tech

The Untraditional

 The Office with the Best View

I couldn’t embed Twitvid so you have to go through the link, but truly this office space needs to be seen http://www.twitvid.com/163C5

& this @mhallani's desk at this amazing office Lots of natural light and a beautiful view of the marina!

So What does your desk look like ?

* I’ve noticed there’s a new user on twitter Mydeskpicwho got recently created yesterday, just wanted to tell you, that it has nothing to do with me.:)

I am really glad to inform you about my first ever guest post over at Krikor.info , which a very interesting design & architecture blog.

The post is actually a follow up on the Ramadan Greeting cards post, as it is a selection of the Eid Al Fitr cards I have been collecting .  Without further ado I will let you now go over and visit this post, but first I would like to once again thank Krikor for the invitation and more so for allowing me to do things at my own terms. But of course he will be all too humble about it and say that he is not CNN.

Also do not forget to follow @krikor over at Twitter.

As much as I wanted to go to the first Beirut Twestival, I wasn’t able to make it.  Seems like I am missing out on a lot lately. But , as I always say,  everything has its time! So let’s see what I’ve missed.

Sunset as seen through the eyesTwestival Beirut

As Twestivals worldwide have been raging around the Tweet. Meet. Give moto contributing to local charities, Beirut was on the closing wave ‘Twestivaling’ on  the lucky  13th of September. As Sana Tawileh*, one of the main players in making Twestival Beirut a reality, put it, right after the event in a state of disbeleif and euphoria ( my own sermise) – it went much better than expected (and my liberal quote).

The thing that pleases me most is that , from what I’ve been able to see, throughout the organization & the event, this Twestival had a typically Lebanese flavor: the short time given for set-up, finding ‘the volunteers’, an environmental cause,  a beautiful seaview from Cafe Rawda in Manara, an international movie crew who sponsored media coverage, and tweeps who just showed up last minute… to me this is uniquely Lebanese.

The Oragnizers: @lucyhanna @onoffbeirut @sanatawileh

While mystery shrouds the actual activities that took place at the Twestival and the number of tweeps who attended(the group photo has over 30) this is known:

- All preparantion were made under a VERY short time-period

- Avatars matched up to real people (this is the most magical part for me)

- A giant screen with a twitter stream was projected and plugins for real time updates were available

- Competitions over sponsor prizes were underway

- All proceeds went to a great cause, one that is being gaudingly overlooked in this country

-And finally Twestival is here to stay!

Interested in seeing more of Twestival Beirut?

Anyway, if anyone who was actually there stumbles upon it, I would really like to hear your recollection of the event, so please comment or DM me:) and see you there next year!

[Photos via: Twestival Beirut]

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Please pause for a huge round of applause for this amazingly professional and sweet lady ! I really can’t wait to meet her in real life!

The amazing guys at Spot On PR conducted a thorough study of the MENA Tweeps and came up with a detailed MENA Twitter Demographics & Stats Survey (press link to check it out).  And in the spirit of Social Media Marketing and Sharing Spot On PR have released their report to be copied, tweeted, quoted and perused in any way you may wish. Thank you Spot On PR!

It wasn’t surprising that 40% of MENA twitter users are from the UAE, however, with such a great cultural diversity it would be interesting to find a more microscopic dissection of these users, I am sure that would lead  to very curious results.

Another interesting thing is how the age distribution differs from global trend. For instance, the 15-19 make one of the largest Twitter user groups worldwide, but has only a small percentage in the MENA scene, which is prevailed by those 20-29.  Which I have found quite refreshing, as you get to twitter in a community of tech savvy professionals, which is a challenging and learning experience.

Twitter influence is growing in the MENA region, Spot On PR have mentioned that only in Augustthe total number of Twitter users from MENA region has increased by 17%.

Marketers, are you ahead of the curve?

* According to Spot On PR statistics may still be fuzzy due to the limited geographical tracking the Twitter platform offers at the time.

** as a show of good faith follow Spot On PR’s Blog & follow them @spotonpr.