From Crisis Communication to Roman Ruins: Euromed PPRD Workshop in Jordan

My long experience in facilitating courses and workshops has taught me that no two audiences are alike, much less when you are moving into an entirely new country and culture.
The EUROMED PPRD SOUTH II program landed this past week in Jordan. A country rich in history tradition, sunshine but most of all in warmth from its people. As a Lebanese, I can assert that there is a special bond that always connects us Levantines with each other. We have shared history, geography, climate, traditions, family ties not to mention woes and troubles.
Jordan has always been one of the most welcoming places I have visited and I was extremely enthusiastic to be back there again, this time with the PPRD team.
In case you have not caught wind of what our workshops are about, they are part of a bigger effort to prepare mediterranean countries to face crisis and disasters. Our team addresses Communication in times of Crisis more specifically and helps countries create the awareness needed to build their communication teams and apply the right communication strategy for those difficult times.

The audience in Amman was similar in structure to what we had noticed in Beirut, in the sense that attendance extended beyond the Civil Defense forces to include members of various ministries and official bodies. We did however have members of the (official) press present with us like in Algiers.

Excellent Workshop with my Colleagues Laurent Vibert & Veronique Ruggirello

The Jordanian hosts' enthusiasm for the learning process was no less than their counterparts in previous workshops. Although hesitant at first, and not sure what to expect  from this workshop, they quickly got into the motion, with some taking-on leading roles among the group in various exercises, such as the simulated TV interview or the Social Media Crisis simulation.

The Civil Defense members extended their hospitality further by offering us an amazing trip into the ancient but well preserved ruins of Jarash, located roughly 45 minutes north of the capital. This trip was extremely exciting for me personally, as I am a big fan of historical sites. My previous shorter visits to the country had not left me enough time to go admire such beautiful pieces of history.

In our free time, we also managed to uncover beautiful parts of a city that is friendly, safe, vibrant and with a great potential for more achievements.
We left hoping that our visit helped bring valuable insights to the brave men and women of the civil defense and other public protection services with whom we managed to build friendship and camaraderie ties.

As for me, I can only say one thing: See you soon Jordan!!

Empowering Crisis Communication through Workshops

For slightly more than a year, I have been actively involved in a series of seminars and workshops as part of the EUROMED PPRD SOUTH II program. Funded by the European Union, the program aims to increase Prevention, Preparedness and Response to natural and manmade Disasters.
One of the cornerstones of this effort resides in managing communication in times of crisis. For this purpose, we have been enabling public sector entities across the southern mediterranean with the know-how to implement an effective communication strategy, with the right mix of written, audio-visual and digital elements.
Workshops that initially received participants from multiple countries, allowed cross cultural barriers to be taken down and gave insights on how each country would communicate during a crisis, giving a much clearer image on what needed to be done on the national level.

Earlier this week, we embarked with the national workshops: a more focused "on steroids" version of the introductory workshops. The target is for national authorities to designate representatives of various entities that would be playing a key role in a smooth communication in times of crisis.

Beirut was the first to benefit from this, and I was thrilled to have kicked off this effort in my home city that, I believe, stands to benefit the most in these difficult times we are facing.
Further workshops are planned in the coming months in both Algeria and Jordan.

The Beirut workshop, held at the Grand Serial under the auspices of Lebanon's Prime Minister's Office, grouped members of rescue services, security forces, public ministries and official press agency.
Spanning over 4 days, we were able to introduce attendees to the general basis of communication, print media, radio, TV interviews, press conference and , most importantly, the proper use of digital tools and social media channels.

Initially met with resistance from some of the attendees, who deemed themselves to be already well versed in these disciplines, we were glad to later discover a cohesive group of individuals who invested themselves in each simulation. Q&As were elaborate and diverse and the audience emphasised at the end of the workshop the skills they acquired, wishing there had been more time to dwell on topics even longer.
There can be no greater satisfaction for a group of facilitators than to see that the message they have tried to deliver was well received. This group of attendees was exceptionally committed to learning and applying what they had learned in terms of crisis communication management.
While I hope they will never be faced with a crisis big enough to require them to all gather again to address it, I am twice thrilled, as a speaker and as a citizen, to see such a commitment from the public sector into issues of national importance.

Experts Team

I share the credit for this success with the fine people from the Prime Minister's Office: Veronique Azar, Nathalie Zaarour and other staff, and my excellent expert colleagues: Veronique Ruggirello (Kalimat Communication) , Laurent Vibert (Nitidis) and Cherine Yazbeck (Reporter at France 24)
Our team of experts is currently working on a Communication Workshop tailored for the private sector. If you are looking to empower your teams with the help of multinational experts, feel free to reach out to me on patrick.chemali@sharplemon.com or to any of my colleagues and we will gladly work with you to address your needs.

You Are Not A Strategist

Up until recently, I had been using "Digital Strategist" on my Linkedin headline. No more!

No, I did not lose faith in my capacity of devising a strategy for operating a business in the digital realm after 15 years in the field, nor have I done a major career shift away from this. I have just grown weary from the constant abuse of the word Strategy and its derivatives.
The amount of occurrences where these words were used to describe people who operate a certain basic, less-than-tactical function online has exponentially skyrocketed over the past three years.
Try repeating this: "Digital Strategist, Social Media Strategist, Online Sales Strategist, Digital Marketing Strategist, Senior Digital Marketing and Online Social Media Strategist...."

This has become frustratingly boring to the point where I thought to write a code snippet which would generate a title with the words: Online, Digital and Strategy in it and publish it online for companies to use when hiring someone.

What most of you out there are calling strategy barely falls under the terminology for tactics if we really want to give it any importance (a great deal I would call merely secretarial work...ehm...sorry, executive assistant work).

• Posting Status Updates with pictures of fluffy cats on a tech site is not strategy
• Putting a roller coaster picture on an ISP page is not strategy
• Asking users to like if they agree and comment if they don't is not strategy
• Buying Facebook/Google/Twitter/LinkedIn  Ads is not strategy
• ...

Strategy usually involves a solid analysis of the market forces in play be it online of offline, the use of existing data to determine trends and behaviors and then calculating the risks associated with charting a path that leads to a market position that you would like to acquire. 

I seriously doubt all of the social media gurus, namely all the fresh grads who have taken a course in their overly expensive college about social media, have even come close to grasping that. 

It is largely the fault of HR people and line managers who just replicate techno-babble without any real understanding without forgetting all the wannabe media that usually aggregates and repeats the same stories you see on The Verge, Mashable and other similar sites.

At one instance a global agency that had hired us to "devise a social media strategy" for one of their clients was confused because when we delivered them the 30 page strategy study they could not find the list of tweets they expected us to prepare for them daily for the next 90 days!

The best to summ up the point I am trying to make is if we revert back to the military root of the word Strategy.  You do not need to know about "Art of War" (Sun Tzu not Wesley Snipes) to understand that your fresh recruit cannot and should not be entrusted with deciding how you move your army on the battlefield, even if he or she (along with their posse of hip friends) decided to self-attribute the title: Major General.

The Miniature Book Version of Art of War

The Battle of the Digital Kimonos

A while ago, as I started actively using Google+, I came upon a list of agencies that I could import to create a circle of digital professionals to follow. I did exactly that, and have since enjoyed a lot of posts shared by digital marketing experts from around the world.
Surprisingly enough one post caught my eye. The logo of the person sharing it looked way too familiar. The post came from a Mexican agency called "Black Belt Brands" and it only took me a few seconds to realize why their post had sparked that reaction.
Their identity is highly reminiscent of that of "COM FU" a Lebanese digital agency headed by friend and fellow blogger Ralph Aoun.

These two agencies, thought completely unrelated and thousands of miles apart had managed to reach an identical concept without any of them being a copy cat of the other and I find this delightful.
So, without further ado..here's the head-to-head visuals from their digital presence:

The Mascots

I am rooting for the home team here, but the Mexicans do walk away with the more geekish award in this round although they do loose in mascot doodle vs real design.

Facebook

• https://www.facebook.com/blackbeltbrands
• https://www.facebook.com/comfu

I would call this one a tie, especially that none of the paid any attention to the overlapping elements on their cover page.

Twitter

• https://twitter.com/BlackBeltBrands
• https://twitter.com/com_fu

BlackBeltBrands loses points for not having any cover picture but COM FU also loses because their cover picture seems broken and is not loading so it's another tie.


I think this give you an idea on this Asian/Latin-American/Middle-Eastern digital martial showdown.
I really enjoyed checking both brands back and forth and watching how they both evolved separately but along the same lines. Who knows, maybe one day one or both brands will be big enough to compete on a common turf and then we'll really get to enjoy a Battle of the Digital Kimonos.

Meanwhile, all I can say to them is:  好工作

The Rise and Fall of MonotStreet.com

The Backdrop
 
The year was 2002, I was four years into my career as a web developer and I saw everything in HTML markup and Hexadecimal color codes.
I had springboarded myself from working at OGERO the local state-run fixed-telephony operator towards Cellis, France Telecom's burgeoning mobile operator in Lebanon (currently rebranded as Alfa). I was the first web developer to join the company.
Although my job offered me the chance to work on various challenging projects, it was just not enough to satisfy my hunger for more challenges. On top of that, my employment conditions had taken an unexpected turn to the worse and this incited me towards wanting to build something independently from my day job. An idea that would potentially allow me to run my own show without having to report to individuals who were, at the time, much less informed about the business of the web.

The Idea

At that same period, a tiny street in Beirut was becoming the hottest spot in town, where all the club, pubs and cafes were opening up. Monot Street was where nightlife happened. Unlike myself, Chris, a childhood friend of mine was an aficionado of the Beirut night life and It only took us one discussion and the idea was born: www.monotstreet.com a website/portal dedicated to Beirut's nightlife.
We were going to go all digital on a city that still lacked DSL internet, in a country where in many houses echoed still the distinct whizzing of the dial-up modem handshake; but we did not care.
Chris would be in charge of the field operations and I would handle all the digital aspects of the projects.

The Rise

In March 2003 we went live with a unique nightlife-inspired branding and full arsenal of gimmicks:

Our nightlife portal was armed to the teeth and ready to take on the scene with features such as:

• An exhaustive Directory of all the hot spots with detailed listing on venue style, music genres, opening hours, price range, location and popularity
   
• A regularly updated list of all the major Events happening in the street
   
• A news section ironically called @Monot way before twitter came into existence
   
• The Party Planner service which would suggest venues based on criteria of date, price, style and number of attendees provided by the user
   
• The Music section contained a directory of DJs who worked in Monot along with a weekly top 10 of the tracks being requested the most by clients of the establishments on the street.
   
• The Photos section contained picture galleries of people enjoying their outing in Monot - For the geeks reading this, I had implemented a JavaScript hack that worked like AJAX (the term was not coined yet) for viewing pictures without reloading the entire page and even added server-side code that would watermark the images on the fly -
   
• The interactive section contained a Chat Room and a Forum where people would be welcome to interact and exchange ideas. It also contained a poll that was intended to help us enhance our features further. At one point we had also partnered with Vibe Lebanon, the first Lebanese online radio.
    
• Daily Horoscopes were provided and updated automatically through a provider in Italy.

Chris at our stand during
Fete de La Musique 2003

Upon launching the website we quickly gained momentum in spite of a competitor launching shortly afterwards. Although they were quite dynamic on the field, they were outclassed by our website build quality and our premium domain names (monotstreet.com & ruemonot.com). We made sure to cover all events such as Fete De La Musique and became familiar with the Monot scene. All we needed was to start bringing in some revenue.

The Fall 

We had set out to ensure revenue by proposing premium listing subscriptions to venue owners. The premium listing offered them several perks such as increased coverage, prime location in the directory and on the homepage, newsletter and forum mentions and preferential recommendation in the Party Planner section.

We soon realized this was not going to work, as only a handful of locations opted for premium. We had omitted to analyze the profile of the average venue owner and their understanding of what we were proposing. Many of the owners had converted into this business from non-related activities and did not really understand why they would pay a subscription fee (even a small one), since, anyway, their shops were always full and money was pouring-in like crazy.

We fell back onto plan B. It involved eliminating the premium subscription fee and relying instead on making the site popular enough, so that we could sell on-site advertising and ensure some form of revenue from all the efforts being poured into this venture. This approach soon proved itself also insufficient. Neither online nor offline we could build enough momentum nor find a market for advertisers. Club owners were un-cooperative even when we gave freebies and would not help us promote the site even if this would eventually help them highlight their own businesses.
We hung on to the project for several months before eventually giving up and calling it quits effectively abandoning all efforts in maintaining the website.

Afterthought

Writing this post 11 years after MonotStreet.com went live has given me some perspective (on top of a lot of market experience). At the time, we had attributed our failure to the negative and dismissive attitude that often characterizes the Lebanese society especially when dealing with club owners. We also wondered if we needed to have built some more features into the website. We didn't!
As far as blaming other stakeholders for not being able to push the service effectively, we were only half-right. Yes, we had trouble dealing with some people, but we also had trouble marketing to the end user. Getting the word out, familiarizing people with the portal, making it a daily go-to online destination was simply not possible at the time.
A deadly mix of weak internet, market penetration, slow connection speeds and mobile internet limited to WAP had dealt the coup de grace to our project in 2004.

Today, many similar concepts exist and thrive. They do because the ecosystem has changed, a new accelerator has been added to the formula. This new ingredient that has spiced up the mix in a way that allows to compensate for many of the issues that we could not surmount 11 years ago is called (yes you guessed it):  Social Media Marketing.

The existence of Facebook, Twitter and various other channels has made users spend more online time and familiarized them with the power and convenience of digital. Website owners can now run effective targeted ads to maximize awareness on their product and can push their content into these channels for optimized viral reach.

In a world of fast changing technological landscape, we are often warned that we need to anticipate things and move fast enough, yet somehow, moving too fast and anticipating too early was exactly what caused the downfall of MonotStreet.com. The End.

Tribal 2.0: The Great Digital Divide

We are Tribes, we always have been and we always will be. We gang up alongside those who look like us, talk like us, think like us but are not just quite us. We may call ourselves nations, states, societies and communities, but in fact, all we are is tribes unified around one or several common values and united by the motto: Members of the Tribe Come First (regardless of how idiotic, blind-sighted or annoying they are)

In today's connected world one would argue that the barriers maintaining tribal segregation would be eroded, blurred, gone. Perhaps in some measure they are.  Google translate brings down language barriers, Skype saves us the trouble of crossing borders, Facebook puts us in touch with long lost friends...yet we still manage to align ourselves in tribes. We pick sides even when there is no side to pick, we trash-talk the other side over a piece of technology which we don't even own but merely use.

Today's tribal feuds are digital, they live on the web, in virtual space, on the banks of social media channels.
Here's a brief look at some of those I run into most frequently:

• Mac vs PC:  In the beginning there was the mainframe but who cares about that. This is where the action took place as digital was unraveling itself. It still does in some way but this has been one of the oldest running digital feuds. Countless are the arguments breaking out in college cafeterias, dorm rooms and classrooms between supporters of each with a side dish of sarcasm by Linux lovers.
  This rivalry sparked a series of very successful ads by Apple.
  
  
• Microsoft vs Google: A software company hating on a search engine? what am I missing there? But we all know that Microsoft outgrew its software manufacturer a long time ago and that Google has spread its wings far beyond search. Google's Gmail, Chrome Browsers, Chrome OS and Apps were gaining ground on the supremacy of Microsoft's Hotmail, Internet Explorer, Windows and Office.
  The fans of each side are often arguing the merits of one or the other. My personal observation is that those who emerge from a corporate environment tend to support the more institutional Microsoft while Start-Ups, freelancers, hackers are pro Google. Left in the middle is the average computer user.
  This probably would explain an entire campaign entitled "Scroogled" aimed at taking jabs at Google's array of products in order to portray Microsoft's under a brighter light. Interestingly enough, Google have not reacted to this.
  
  

• Apple Fanboys vs Fandroids: So we've had Microsoft and Apple fans going at it for starters, closely followed Microsoft and Google supporters having their own little thing happening, so it would not be right if we didn't have Apple and Google fans at each others' throats. While I have been an Android user for as long as I remember I cannot deny the merits of either platform. The issue is that of relevance. If the fruit makes you happy bite into that by all means. Both are here to stay, both borrow from each other and the only one to profit is us the consumers. Of course if you ever hoped to work for either company and got turned down, we won't hold it against you if you spent your day bashing their product. After all we are all humans and we can't all handle rejection well.
  
  
   
• Facebook vs Google+: This might be the mildest of all the controversies you can see. Facebookers argue that Google+ is a ghost-town and that Google is pushing it down the throat of everybody who uses any Google product. The latter simply shrug their shoulders and poke fun at all the privacy concerns that have infected Facebook and the type of users and content that is being generated there.
  It's worth noticing that these two giants are probably going to end up doing the same thing. Facebook is spinning off new products (messenger, paper...) from its main platform while Google is connecting all is products (YouTube, Blogger, Android...) via its social platform. I guess it's a wait and see game.
  
  

There are certainly other examples to draw on from the House of Tech and the Clan of McSocial (Canon vs Nikon, Xbox vs PlayStation...) but I am sure you can dig-up more on those on your own or even better, give first hand example on your participation in one or the other. What matters at the end of the day is not what technology are you using but rather what are you using the technology for and is it the most appropriate one to achieve the goals you initially set-off to achieve.

I would love to hear your contributions below in the comments on these and other topics so don't hesitate to share your Tribal 2.0 experience.