If Magazine Covers Were Honest

I almost never buy any magazines, aside from the Smash Hits & Photos magazines I bought as a teenager, my only encounters with magazines are at doctors' clinics and when they run TV ads citing their headlines. This has not stopped me from being highly admirative of the amount of bullshit that these magazines can dish out, especially in their titles a.k.a the ancestors of clickbait.

I conceived this cover a couple of days ago as an attempt at satire, based on first-hand experienc with the topics I chose to highlight. Many people picked-up on the gest of it but others were not on the same frequency and asked me to explain. So here goes nothing:

Mashrou' Leila: This highly overrated and barely audible Lebanese band rose to international fame by using the openly gay card of their lead singer, thus creating controversy in a region not receptive to such a public declaration. Their die hard fans usually accuse their critics of being homophobic to suppress the fact that their sound closely resembles that of a squeaking door.

Facebook Posts: In these tumultuous times that we live in, where the world seems to implode on itself, with a war raging next door, refugees flooding the country and other continents, and a general malaise swarming up globally, one cannot escape the numerous "humanitarian" status updates by individuals who claim to support or defend a good cause but who in fact use a passive-aggressive approach to advance their political views at the expense of those who are actually suffering.

Freebies: I don't need to explain this much, as it's become public knowledge the amount of bloggers who just echo promo material offered by brands or agencies. Some of them still hide behind their finger (ironically so), others are just outright shameless about it. Of course it's fine if a blogger monetizes their presence, just make sure you still offer valuable content not just act as a billboard, because we're on to you...yes, you...you know who you are!

Brexit Nightlife: That's basically putting a buzzword which is trending now (Brexit) with another buzzword which seems the only thing going for us in Lebanon since the end of the civil war. Who would not want to know more how a Brexit is going to help the Lebanese nightlife? Woohoo Lebanese F***ing Joie de Vivre baby!

So folks, scurry along now and don't forget to pick up your edition before it runs out...it's selling like hotcakes!

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Facebook takes a Page Out of a Lebanese Developer's Book

image source: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/10/introducing-safety-check/

This morning Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg posted an update announcing "Safety Check", a new service that would allow people in times of natural disasters to inform their friends that they are safe or whether they need help.

Post by Mark Zuckerberg.

This is a big move by Facebook in terms of serving the public and a much welcome initiative.
In Lebanon, we have been spared the natural disaster scenarios for some time. Aside from the occasional highway flooding, and road blocked by snow, we have had a smooth ride for the past few decades in that area. Instead we prefer man-made disasters, and for those of you who have not heard of the on-and-off streaks of bomb attacks on various suburbs in the past  few...er...decades, that's something that we've adapted to over and over and again.

In recent years with the surge of yet another wave of bombs a young lady by the name of Sandra Hassan coded and published an Android app that with a click of a button would allow anyone to publish a quick message saying "I am Alive" on Facebook and Twitter. I recently had the opportunity of  highlighting the importance of such an app while speaking at an EU sponsored workshop in Cyprus for Civil Protection.

I am not sure we'll ever know if Facebook got inspired by this app, given the good number of Lebanese talents on board, or whether this is something that has been in the pipeline for some time but the similarity was worth highlighting.

So there you go,  my contribution to stroking the proverbial Lebanese ego and one more opportunity at gloating the usual "we did it first" and "do you see what Lebanese can do?".
Now you can bask in the sunshine of your self-satisfaction and wait for next earthquake to test out the new service or just read about it here: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/10/introducing-safety-check/

Facebook Launches Instagram Connect for Select Pages

I am sure many of you are already familiar with the twitter connect inside Facebook which allows you to connect your business page to a corresponding twitter account by visiting this page: facebook.com/twitter

With the rise in Instagram's popularity and after it was acquired by Facebook a question lingered on on whether deeper integration was going to happen. This question is still hanging although we saw several areas where the knowledge exchange took place. Brand, however, were still obliged to jump through several hoops inside the Instagram app to connect and share to the brand with no equivalent to the Twitter connect page (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiq43A0v6-s) .

A few days ago, while accessing one of the page that we manage, I was surprised by a prompt that appeared on top of the page inviting me to click to link the client's Instagram to the Business Page.

I followed the link and landed on this page:

The Connect Page with the client's page name hidden

The page is accessible via the following link: https://www.facebook.com/pages/instagram/
At the very bottom was the client's page name listed next to the "Connect to Instagram" button but I have chosen to obscure that name for the time being.

Interestingly enough the link is not generally accessible and other pages could not be connected to Instagram using this technique. When asking a friend who shares no common pages with me to try the link out he obtained the standard Facebook 404 page not found.

My best guess is that Facebook is rolling out this feature as part of an A/B test or for select high profile pages. I should mention that this specific client has well over one million fans with a very high engagement rate.

We have reached out asking some more info from a Facebook representative, no answer has been received yet.

Have you also encountered this? Did you connect your Instagram? Let me know in the comments.

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.

TV interview on Seven with Serge Zarka on MTV Lebanon

I recently had the privilege of being invited by the distinguished Serge Zarka to appear on his show "Seven" on MTV Lebanon to discuss various topics related to my work in Social Media. I had been a big fan of the show for a long time and, more specifically, of Serge's professional and courteous approach to various subjects. The show always allowed guests to offer the best they had, while keeping the entire conversation dynamic and interesting. This was exactly what I got during my interview and the professionalism in every aspect leading up to the filming and throughout the interview was felt. I must infinitely thank Serge along with all his staff from MTV for for the invitation, the gracious welcome and reception; An experience I will cherish dearly.