Social Media Week comes to Beirut!

Following on the great success of Social Media Week February 2011, the next iteration of Social Media Week will again span the globe this September 19-23, 2011, with simultaneous events in cities from all over the world. Confirmed locations include returning cities like Milan, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Bogota, and São Paulo, plus new entrants from Rio de Janeiro, Moscow and now happy to announce BEIRUT and I am thrilled to be part of the organizers.

With each successive iteration, Social Media Week has grown exponentially, leading up to the February 2011 edition, which hosted simultaneous events in nine cities with over 600 events, 30,000 attendees worldwide, and generating more than 300M impressions online, made it the largest distributed conference in the world.

Far more than just a conference, Social Media Week is one of the world’s most unique organized events, providing through a series of interconnected activities across the world a global and local perspective on emerging trends in social & mobile media across all major industries.

Social Media Week Beirut (SMW Beirut) will be organized for the first time in Beirut, brought to you and produced by 90:10 Group Middle East. SMW Beirut is aimed to be a unique and innovative social media week, happening over 5 days, with more than 30 events in different venues in the city, giving access to as large audience as possible, connecting people & content around diverse and rich themes, with speakers and participants from different horizons, bringing to all the learning experiences for a better understanding of social media in each of industry sectors.

SMW Beirut will be as well fun 🙂

Your thoughts, advices, tips and all are more than welcome.
You can follow Social Media Week Beirut on Twitter or on Facebook

Go Beirut!

Middle East Edition Of Cosmopolitan to be launched in March 2011

The 62nd edition of Cosmopolitan, is set to launch in the Middle East in March 2011. Looking forward to see what it’s going to be like…

ITP, the Middle East’s leading consumer and business magazine publisher, today announced the launch of Cosmopolitan Middle East. The magazine will join ITP’s growing portfolio of market-leading women’s titles which include Harper’s Bazaar, VIVA, L’Officiel, Ahlan!, Grazia and Shape. The best-selling magazine in its category, Cosmopolitan has 61 international editions, most recently launching in Mongolia. The magazine is published in 32 languages and is distributed in over 100 countries, making it one of the most dynamic brands worldwide according to the press release.

Cosmopolitan Middle East will be aimed at a young, female audience offering its readers information on every aspect of their lives from fashion and beauty, to relationships and romance, the latest on women’s health and well-being as well as what’s happening in pop culture and entertainment. The magazine’s engaging, upbeat and informative tone will resonate with the young women of the region. “The Middle East has one of the youngest populations in the world so introducing a local edition of the world’s best-selling magazines for young women seems an obvious decision. Cosmopolitan is a colossal brand and we are looking forward to launching and developing it in this region” said Walid Akawi, CEO of ITP.

Cosmopolitan Middle East will be published in English-language with an initial print run of 15,000 copies and will be circulated across the GCC and Lebanon, available at all major retail outlets. The Middle East will be the 62nd edition of Cosmopolitan and the 3rd Hearst title that ITP has brought to the region.

Advertising in Lebanon: TV remains n.1 and internet is inexistant!

I just came through this article on the Commerce du Levant website about the advertising spending in September 2010 in Lebanon. These expenses are down 8% from August and 4% compared to September 2009. Despite this slight decline, the third quarter was relatively good with an increase of 8%.

OK advertising is still growing, even if it is growing slowly. But the thing that hit me the most is the fact that there is absolutely no spending for advertising on the web or that it is really really insignificant. Check out this repartition:

As I was wondering about the average time that lebanese people spent watching TV, I guess I have the answer to my deep concern. Television takes it all and it is still the number 1 mass media. Will the web ever kill the TV stars?

Throughout the world, the strong growth of the Internet, and the development of its uses, confirms the mass media crisis (for the press and TV in the first place).
More profoundly, the belief in the mainstream media is dramatically affected by a movement that sees the legitimacy of traditional media organizations disintegrated by a permanent suspicion particularly related to a certain political affiliation.

Considering that a mass media (according to Marshall MacLuhan) is characterized by a communication of one-to many and by a one-side message (the public does not interfere with the message vehicle) we can of course question the belonging of the web to the “mass media” category. The web in its core, and thanks to the massive user generated contents created by the audience via blogs, wikis, social networks etc… creates a new situation: the communication pattern which used to be from one to many (vertical) has completely evolved to many-to-many (horizontal).

My main point here is that these new models of direct production of information are drawing an innovative media landscape, and advertising investments should definitely be following this trend.

“War – What is it good for? – Absolutely nothing!”

Along the lines of the Lebanese reconstruction after the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, The Lebanese Republic Higher Relief Commission (go check their website, it is AMAZING :p) has created an anti-war commercial which compares the visual effects used in Hollywood, to the violent reality that happened in Lebanon during this war.

With the tagline “Act Now”, the spot aims to raise money for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

I really don’t know what agency is behind this commercial or when it was produced so do not hesitate to share!

Watch the spot.

Inspiration or lack of creativity?

Business rule n.1: Think of ourselves differently than the competition.

They even say we have to hate what our competition stands for and maybe even our industry. We have to hate it so much and we want to improve it so badly, that usually, we develop something new. Sometimes we go at the total opposite of the industry norms, sometimes we innovate from modeling a complete different industry. But either way, succes certainly comes when we are different.

To be different, we need to be creative, and in order to be creative we need to think different.

Is it really what MTV and LBC are doing part of their rebranding strategy? Someone really needs to tell them that by copying their industry, they’ll certainly die slowly in the minds of everybody.

The resemblance speaks for itself…

Thanks bruzz

Ecce Hommos

This is a short film about Lebanese clichés directed by Claude El Khal. The images used by the French guy when speaking of Lebanon and the Lebanese society are so true (you should know if you have ever lived abroad, I deal with this everyday: p).

The title Ecce Hommos, comes from “Ecce Homo”, Latin words used by Pontius Pilate when he presented Jesus Christ, bound and crowned with thorns, to a hostile crowd shortly before his Crucifixion. But I don’t really see why was the analogy made…

Watch it! This is simply great!

Meet BeirutRestaurants.com

I have just discovered this website, a resourceful online directory for restaurants in Beirut city. It is, without any doubts, the most updated database for restaurants around, and has a diverse selection for residents or tourists visiting Lebanon.

So if you are looking for any information on any restaurant in Beirut, you can find it there. It offers a ranking of the best 10 restaurants, pictures and detailed description of each restaurant as well as a service of localization accessible through Google Maps.

Watch this video if you want to know more. Badeeh Abla is the managing director of Beirutrestaurants.com, talks about this great project.

You want to know more about Social Media?

Social Media Exchange (SMEX) is organizing Lebanon’s first dialogue between local grantees and representatives from major donor organizations about the role of social media in civil society in Lebanon and the Middle East tomorrow, on Saturday November 21 from 2:30 pm to 5:30 pm in their offices in Beirut.

“President Barack Obama called for a ‘new beginning’ in America’s relationship with the Muslim world during his historic speech in Cairo in June. Speaking in Morocco earlier this month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signalled the US would turn to the web to reach this goal, announcing a $5m initiative to ‘empower grassroots civil society organizations’ by helping them use digital technology.”

With this foray into ‘social media for social change’, the US government is demonstrating that the internet will be at the center of foreign aid and development policy in the years to come and funding opportunities are on the horizon for civil society and non-profit organizations in the region.

What are the real opportunities for organizations in Lebanon and the Middle East and how social media tools are already being used?

Many practitioners will be talking about their projects and the problems they encounter working with online technology in a low-bandwidth environment explaining whether social media really can help empower us and our communities.

Register or view the entire press release.

Online Marketing and Advertising: Why is it growing slowly in Lebanon?

Online advertising is still in double digit growth worldwide: after a 19% growth in 2008 and a 9% growth in 2009 (yes it is due to the crisis and NOT to the market saturation) worldwide online advertising growth is expected to reach 11% in 2010 (according to e-Marketer). So yes, the spending on online advertising is very healthy ($64.69 billion).

Online advertising and communication include many frameworks. Whether it is to create a website, an online newsletter, to launch banners on many existing online sources (newsmagazines, diverse websites, social networks…) or to monitor what is being said about your brand on social media and to engage online communities in your brand’s (or company’s) project, online media are very efficient (if not the MOST efficient) when to comes to acknowledging reputation (by mastering word-of-mouth), targeting people according to their interests, and measuring the impact of your campaign, especially for small businesses (contrary to what one may think)

But why are we still behind in Lebanon?

There are about 1 570 000 internet users in Lebanon today (for a population of 4 million people) against 950 000 in 2007 according to Internet World Stats. Despite this growth of 65%, the online advertising market is still behind especially compared to other forms of advertising. It appears that one of the main reasons comes from the advertising agencies themselves that are still reticent which is why they do not always include an online section part of the global strategies they sell to their clients.

Why? Simply because there are two types of clients: the ones who have caught the importance of being present online, because their marketing executives are young and they were born with the digital era, and the ones who still don’t see the interest in converting to these new forms of marketing because the traditional means are enough for them. They do not understand that internet is the unique mass media allowing a direct interaction between the brands and their consumers. Will all lebanese based advertising agencies will be able to sell cross-media campaigns to their clients when it is the right thing to do?

The main obstacle to an unstoppable growth of online advertising strategies in Lebanon is essentially (and unfortunately) structural. It comes, and it is no surprise for anyone, from the underdeveloped telecommunications facilities. Without the appropriate infrastructure, internet will never become common practice whether it is for the ad agencies, their clients or the consumers.

The explosion of the number of Lebanese on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter  and the emergence of bloggers and other digital influencers talking about subjects other than politics as well as the majority of newsmagazines going (or growing) online is, without any doubt, the main signal that the Lebanese audience is ready, not only for online advertising, but most certainly for a web 2.0 revolution.

Let’s just hope that broadband won’t be arriving very late…

One Hundred Lebanese Jews

Out of the 18 “peacefully co-existing” religions we so often take pride in, in Lebanon, it is seldom reminded that one of them is Judaism.

As the Beirut synagogue is currently under renovation, a French journalist: Julie Lerat, took advantage of a recent visit to Beirut to record a radio documentary with Lisa, one of the few remaining Jews in Lebanon. A fun, smart, extroverted 50-year old living  in the historically Jewish neighborhood of “Wadi Abu Jmil”.

A very interesting piece and a new insight on inter-religious relations In Lebanon.

(The interview is in French, original post on RSR)