Social Media seminar, full house in MENA

In the Social world of Media, the Middle East is still gaining momentum. Indeed, during a recent Seminar entitled Social media listening for the Arab World: insights at market speed the space allocated was not big enough to accommodate Social Media professionals, marketers and the like that came to enjoy a presentation made by Diego Semprún, Head of Product Strategy, Europe, Nielsen Watch, & (myself) Khalid Dalil, Research Manager, NM Incite (A Nielsen/McKinsey Company), MENA. One thing is sure, we past the raising awareness phase and now the audience calls for practical insights on:

• how to capture the voice of the consumer as it happens and make sense out of the overwhelming stream of information
• how to use efficiently a Twitter account to interact with their consumers, 
• what type of landing page on a Facebook Fan page will allow users to engage more with their brand. 
• the list definitely goes on and on

The web is turning out to be an amazing tool for companies willing to collect significant thoughts and ideas about the brand, new campaigns, products… you name it, the Internet has it all. But in this sea of constant changes, how can a brand wade his way through unstructured raw data, use the blogosphere as the world largest focus group, monitor its e-reputation, participate in the conversation where people like you and me exchange real world information so as to praise, warn, contribute and learn from the community. 

Allow me to say it one more time Social Media is about respect, passion, consistency, interactivity, transparency because when you cheat (by this I mean creating your own comments or reviews, launching a non branded blog or forum fed by your social media professionals…) you need to bear in mind that what goes around comes around and hit you right in the brand.

Social Media in the Middle East as its own intricacies that people willing to use this discipline at their advantage need to know because, unfortunately, there is no miracle pill to help them define the Social Media strategy, spot the opportunities and restraint themselves when needed. And believe me it is worth getting down in the trenches to find out what are the real benefits of using Social Media in the Arab world.

Let me share with you an interaction that I had during this seminar with a C-level executive of one of the major FMCG companies that will summarize the importance of localizing Social Media concepts and best practices. This individual was willing to integrate Social Media lessons learned as an extension of all the Market Research effort, which I gladly welcomed because Market Research is the prompting, offline phase and the complement is the unprompted, online phase. Those two components allowing the marketers to have a 360 view of their brand health. This CMO briefed me on his current initiatives to weave Social Media in the fabric of the company.  He was currently using a Social Media monitoring tool to collect tweets, wall comments, blog posts, threads and other messages from several Social Media outlets so that he can keep an eye on all the interactions around his products and the brand from one single interface. Two markets were the priority Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Let me stop here for a moment, this initiative is the right one because no steps can be taken, without first listening - Figure out who your customers are and where they go for their information. Realize this as your number one priority part of the Social Media Intelligence cycle, Listening, Analytics and then Engage. So back to the point, the CMO was targeting two major markets within MENA region namely KSA and Egypt to collect the voice of the users and then percolating the data in order to know what the main topics of discussion are. When the CMO was done providing me with the details of its current enterprise In the Social Media space, I asked more details related to the collection process. One thing stroke me since I work in this field for several years and some lessons can only be ascertained with hands-on experience. The CMO shared with me the query used to collect the data at the brand level and the following were my two main comments:

• You do not take into consideration the misspellings of your brand name which will allow you to collect a larger spectrum of messages around your brand.
• You are interested in two major markets within the MENA region where an average of 80% of all interactions online are in Arabic, why the query is only in English?

Imagine a funnel-shaped process where the analysis is done only on 20% of the overall content and you make decisions on a small portion of the buzz made by a non representative portion of your online audience. What you need to take from this is that you can integrate valuable lessons learned and best practices from around the globe but you have to localize the usage, keep an open pair of eyes, a kind of one step back approach. Companies that are not in touch with their customers miss out on small but critical ways to make their Social Media efforts more relevant to the region.

Social Media is an iterative experimentation and as mentioned earlier you have to fail often to succeed faster. You have to embrace change to make it happen, and by this I mean surrounding yourself with the right people and provide them with the means and the environment to work their magic. Social Media is not about tools alone, it is a mindset combined with the right arsenal of tools and the regional ingredients that makes the recipe so successful. If you want your consumers to come back for more you have to put the right content, appropriate contests that respect the local culture and keep them entertained. Do not fool yourself into thinking that you are going to use Social Media as you use the conventional disciplines. 

I would love to have your views on the above and the local or regional challenges you face when using Social Media to monitor your brand health and engage with your online audience.