Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

Wizards Productions has appeared in the Aug. edition of Venture magazine, a monthly Jordanian business magazine that discussed the Jordanian business intelligence.

The article goes on for 3 pages starting with an introduction of Wizards Productions, how it was setup, its main business (MMO Games) model and their market, some of the challenges that faced us is establishing the company as well as other operational and payment collection issues. The article then discussed some of our game features and upcoming projects.

Below is the 1st page of the story

The video of my presentation is now made available via Aramram Web TV, the 10 minute video goes through the initial 5 minutes presentation (mostly spoken in Arabic) the follow up discussion with some of the attendees, and then the quick follow up presentation after the open discussion.

Sohaib Thiab, AmmanTT

The national newspaper released an article covering the growing gaming sector in Jordan, Wizards Productions was one of the companies covered in the article, the article goes over a general over view of Arabic gamers and quotes from founders of the biggest gaming companies in Jordan.

You can check out the full article online here, below is a screen shot of how it looked in the actual newspaper. (I am the 1st person from the right)

Sa7ara one of Wizards games screen shot included in the rest of the article:

The social media edition of AmmanTT last Tuesday was a great success, this 3rd edition of AmmanTT was the most successful in my opinion, with the amazing turn up of visitors, it was a full house with many not having a seat! the speakers  did a great job conveying their msg’s and the feedback I got from some of the visitors found the event very informative.

My presentation went well, i think i was able to convey my message across of the ability of making money online in general and through social media, this has been something proven and is old news for many in the west, but it is actually news for many people here.

Affiliate marketing seemed to be the most interesting topic for most that talked to me in the networking session, I will try and post a couple of posts explaining the basics of Affiliate marketing and how people in Jordan and the Arab world can get started, with some pointers to offers that pay for traffic from our region (mostly ring tones), payments will be one of the biggest challenges for most affiliate marketers in our region due to the fact that some Affiliate networks only pay through paypal, which isnt yet available in our region, but there are others that can wire payments to your bank, I will explain all of that in my upcoming posts. I just created the Affiliate marketing category on my blog, where my affiliate marketing posts will go.

Below are some pictures from my presentation and from the event, you can view more picture here

AmmanTT (Amman Tech Tuesday) is happening today at 7pm at the Princess Summaya University in Amman-Jordan, this month’s edition is all about social media, I will be speaking at the event along with 9 other speakers. I will be focusing on ways to make money through social media, speakers have 5 minutes only to convey their msg.

I originally planned my presentation to include details on website flipping and other ways to make money online, however that presentation will need around 10 minutes to finish, so i had to cut it down to 3 main slides, however i will be uploading the full presentation on my blog so anyone can download it later on, if you have any questions about it or need more information on how to get started, please do let me know!

You can RSVP on the facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=135683683116658&index=1

Also do follow AmmanTT on Twitter @AmmanTT

Below is the event schedule:

Speakers:

Mohammed Zayed from #Microsoft will be talking about Inovation and Social Media (15 minutes)
Razan Khatib will be speaking about Social Media thoughts on the now and the Futuren (15 minutes)
7iber will be talking about Journalism and challenges on the Social Media (5 minutes)
Sohaib Thiab will be talking about his experience with Social Media and how to make money (5 minutes)
Malik Shishtawi will be talking about Social Media Marketing (5 minutes)
Osama Romoh will be discussing some of Bloggers challenges (5 minutes)
Mohammed Altaee will be Talking about Reputation 2.0 – Manage your own reputation (5 minutes)
Raghda Butros will be talking about @7thjar upcoming event (5 minutes)
Ali Dahmash will be talking about #Activism utilizing #Social Media (5 minutes)
Rami Al-Karmi will talking about http://www.sm3nasotak.com/

Then there will be a brainstorming session with the 5 minutes pitchers who will engage the crowd with the challenges they are facing
Networking Coffee Break
Afterwards there will be a panel talking about the outcome of the crowd sourcing session and Q&A session

Video coverage will be provided by Aramram TV

I am currently running a content for a twitter background for my profile on 99designs (which is a great site btw for design contests), so far there has been 28 entries, below are the top 4 I’ve selected between them, please let me know what you think is the best one and if you have any comments on any.

Entry #1

Entry #2

Entry #3

Entry #4

I am leaning towards the 1st entry, what do you think?

So what is social media marketing, we’ve all been hearing about social media marketing online, in seminars and in the tech community, this article aims to shed some light on what social media marketing is, its benefits for business and dive into some of its details.

1^st of all and in order to understand how to market through social media, we need to understand what social media is? Social media enables communities to communicate and share interests effectively, they share their passions, common interests, products and brands they love (or hate), photos and videos, political opinions etc.

For those of you who are not familiar how big social media is (I doubt anyone reading this blog doesn’t know it) but ill give you a few quick statistics to get the picture:

• There are more than 400 million active users on Facebook worldwide.
• There are over 160 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups and events) on Facebook
• 100 million visitors to Youtube every month and 5 billion videos streams monthly.
• Over 100 million registered users on Twitter and 300,000 new users are signing up each day!
• 55 million new tweets each day and 3 billion requests on the Twitter API daily.

The best way in my opinion to explain what is social media, and instead of giving out random examples lets categorize social media sites in 4 main categories.

Social Bookmarking, websites in this category allow their users to bookmark websites and pages they like and share them with the community, sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon are the most popular sites in this category.

Social Networks, such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Bebo and Hi5 are amongst the most popular social networks of Today, there are many sub categories that fall under social networks such as professional social networks like LinkedIn.

Blogs, blogs are online journals, probably one of the most famous form of social media, this site for example is a blog.

Social Sharing, sites like Youtube, Flickr allows you to upload videos and images and share them with your friends and the huge community residing in those websites.

Social News, sites in this category allows you to share news articles, vote them up and down, sites like Digg and Sphinn fall in this category.

So what are the benefits of engaging in the different social media sites? Or in other words why should you or your business get into marketing through social media sites?

To answer that question and to shed some light to the endless benefits of social media marketing , I thought of sharing some more facts and numbers with you:

1. The most credible source for information about a brand on social networks is a consumer; social networks have reached 940 million people.
2. Online Moms doing product research put their faith in descriptions from consumers nearly 12 times more. Emarketer. http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007509
3. Most companies know that the best feedback they get is from their consumers.
4. 45% of adult internet users have created content online.

Can you imagine the benefits for your business when you tap into this space of social media? Pepsi for example cancelled their usual super bowl sponsorship and shifted their budget to social media, with bigger returns. SocialMediaInfluence

Some of the benefits you can get from social media marketing is getting a real feel of what your consumers think of your brand, your brand’s awareness and reputation and it gets you closer to your consumers and their needs and allows you to support and help them more easily and more cost effectively.

Lets give an example of what some of the big companies have done in social media marketing to better illustrate the benefits.

Siemens Youtube Channel

As you can see the page is now branded for information about the company and South Africa (world cup) the channel has 987 subscribers.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/siemens

Ikea Facebook Fan group

Link: http://www.dell.com/html/global/topics/sl/index.html

Image credit: istockphoto

Thought i should post this funny video about a gathering for social media addicts, enjoy

Online gaming in the middle east has been growing quickly in the past few years, something that makes sense with the explosive growth ( 1,648.2 % in the past 9 years) of internet users, there are currently 57 million internet users according to Internet World Stats in the region, the MENA region which includes north Africa (mostly Arabic speaking countries) has 85 million internet users! The Middle East region witnessed the highest increase in internet users compared to the rest of the world.

The  rest of the article is now posted at Arabcrunch, please read it here.

I’ve spent most of the day online and watching the developing news regarding the shocking news of the Israeli forces storming 5 aid ships carrying medicine, food and medical supplies such as 500 wheel chairs, the attack resulted in the killing of at least 10 civilians and injuring more than 30 others.

Join us at Twitter with #freedomflotilla, latest stats as of 4:40 GMT: 21,901 tweets 8,378 contributors 3,128.7 tweets per day 2.2% come from “The Top 10″ 63.1% are retweets 69.3% are mentions 36.4% have multiple hashtags.

Below is a video of the soldiers boarding the ship in international waters conflicting with all laws!