Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

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

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

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.

It seems that Yahoo! is continuing its trimming policy and closing more of its services, Yahoo! announced closing the Yahoo Publisher Network as of April 30.
Below is the email they sent out to their publishers:
Dear Publisher,
Yahoo! continuously evaluates and prioritizes our products and services, in alignment with business goals and our continued commitment to deliver the best consumer and advertiser experiences. After conducting an extensive review of the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta program, we have decided to close the program effective April 30, 2010. We expect to deliver final publisher payments for the month ending April 30, 2010 to publishers no later than May 31, 2010. All publishers eligible for 1099s for the 2010 tax year will have those mailed by January 31, 2011.
Because our content will no longer be delivered to your ad unit spaces after April 30, 2010, we recommend removing all YPN ad code from your pages by that date.
For the opportunity to continue earning revenue, we suggest using Chitika, a leading advertising network that syndicates Yahoo! Content Match and Sponsored Search ads. Chitika has set up a special process for YPNO beta publishers to participate in its platform. Click here for more information.
We thank you for your participation in the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta. If you have any questions regarding this announcement, please contact our Support Team at (866) 785-2636, Monday through Friday from 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. PDT. Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo!
This is not the 1st service that Yahoo! closes, one of the most recent services they closed was GeoCities, and their Briefcase Online Storage Service.
Yahoo! is recommending their exciting publishers to move to Chitika which has already setup a welcome page.
This is clearly big news! allot of YPN publishers will have to remove their ad code by no later than April 30 and they have to find another alternative, I remember when YPN 1st opened and the rush to getting accepted and making big bucks with them…
Another questions comes to my mind is Yahoo’s recent acquisition of Maktoob.com, will this policy of closing secondary or non-important services be implemented over there as well?

Arabnet 2010 was indeed one of the largest internet related events that took place in the region, with more than 600+ attendees and 10,000+ tweets which made the event trend globally on Twitter in the 4th place.

The event took place on the 25th and the 26th of March, 10 startups were highlighted in the event and 10 of them were appraoched by angel investors and VC’s, I am very excited that events such as this are now taking place in the region giving entrepreneurs a great venue to present their ideas and startup companies to investors on a large scale.

There were a number of panels in the event, day 2 included the gaming panel where Wizards Productions was part of that panel represented by my colleague Afif Toukan, I was supposed to attend the event but sadly I caught a bad case of flue before the event.

Speakers at the event included Wael Ghonim, Head of Marketing – MENA  at Google, Ghassan Haddad, Director of Internationalization, Facebook, Rabea Ataya, CEO, Bayt.com, Essam Al-Zamel, CEO, Remal IT, Rashid Al Ballaa, CEO of N2Ventures and many others, you can check out the full list at the speaker page.

I should be adding some photos of the event later on when Afif or Hussam get to the office, meanwhile you should follow @arabnetme on Twitter to stay updated about the future events.

I’ve noticed in the past couple of weeks that the networks link in Facebook’s header has been removed, at 1st I thought it was a small bug and the link will be added back soon, but I was wrong, today I find this msg in my network page:

” Network Pages will be discontinued soon

Facebook will soon be removing Network Pages from the site. Please keep this in mind when communicating with others on the Wall and on the discussion board. You can use Groups to connect with the people around you.”

Is this happening for country based networks or all networks even university based networks? my guess that its happening for all networks which is strange, considering that Facebook started on the basis of networks of universities and then countries, its a bit strange for them to take them out.

Here is a screenshot of how it looks

[tags]facebook, facebook networks[/tags]

Well here is the story, I signed up for twitter a couple of weeks ago in hopes of seeing what everyone is talking about, with all of those posts on blogs and sites like techcrunch, rev2 and Mashable I was expecting allot more than what I found!

So what did I find? a glorified Facebook status msg. or a very simple blog with some social networking abilities, its cool that you can publish news through your mobile, but lots of other sites have the same functionality to update your profile. In their explanation video on what Twitter is on their homepage, they say its a way to get to know your friends more, but cant I do that on Facebook or Myspace? those sites give me a better idea on what my friends are doing especially on Facebook and the Newsfeeds you get.

On a side note I do realize that Twitter is a strong marketing tool if used properly, it does offer you a good way of getting quick updates about your friends and colleagues, but thats just it, and that certainly doesnt deserve all the fuss that has been going around on social media blogs about it. Sorry guys but I am not a Twitter fan!

[tags]twitter, twitter sucks, social media, techcrunch, rev2, mashable[/tags]

Myspace’s new advertising program, named hypertargeting was recently launched, Myspace announced their plans for their new ad targeting system recently after the launch of Facebook’s Beacon which was covered well on Techcrunch, basically the hypertargeting system allows advertisers to target ads based on the information on the user’s profile, such as interests, occupation and other data as well as user actions.

According to Myspace, Google’s search dollars made $62 millions out of the $233 million that Myspace generated in revenue in the last quarter, this will place more strain and will be a good opportunity to see if the new hypertageting system will perform better than Google’s contextual ad system and which one is better for social networks. How well the Hypertageting system performs will also be a main indicator whether will Newscorp reach their goal of $1 Billion revenue in 2008 or not.

Social Media Ad company, lotame which specializes in serving ads for social networks and user generated content sites raised $10 million in a new round of funding, the company says that they figured out how to generate money out of social networks which are well know for their popularity and for their difficulty in selling ads on, which seems to be similar to Myspace’s Hypertargeting system.

All of this hype regarding this new method of ad targeting is exciting and might be the light at the end of the tunnel for social networks which so far have been struggling at increasing their ad revenue dollars especially after the not so popular Facebook social ads launch.

[tags]hypertargeting, myspace, facebook, social ads, social media, social networks[/tags]