What Startups Need: An ArabNet Community.

Photo credit: imthiaz blog

When you work in the social media field like I do, it becomes inevitable to run into startups that are eager to launch the newest idea, the most tech-advanced service or the best-specialized network. As a startup, it is perhaps important to believe that the product you’re developing will be a success, will bring you fame, and help you cash in, hopefully sooner than later.

I do not claim to be an expert on entrepreneurship and startups, but if there is one thing that I can deduce by common sense, it’s that every successful business needs a COMMUNITY!nAn interesting definition of a community is by Michael Wu, the Principal Scientist of Analytics at Lithium Technologies Inc.:

A community (both online and offline) consist of people from all walks of life that seem to have no relationship at all but is a very robust social structure. What holds a community together is common interest. It maybe a hobby, something the community members are passionate about, a common goal, a common project, or merely the preference for a similar lifestyle, geographical location, or profession. People join the community because they care about this common interest that glues the community members together. Some stay because they felt the urge to contribute to the cause; others come because they can benefit from being part of the community (source).

Building a community may or may not be a long daunting task depending on what your product is, but it is a known fact that it is never as easy as “Build it and they shall come”. Growing Facebook from a small college community to the largest global community did not happen in a day. It wasn’t that the idea of Facebook was so revolutionary, in the simplest terms, it succeeded in capturing a fraction of a community with common interests (college students who wanted a social way to get to know each other), then gave way to that community to create other sub-communities with other common interests that others joined in, until everyone else felt they MUST be part of that community. According to Matthew Shampine, a serial entrepreneur, as a startup founder, you should not “be too focused on your product, because if you’re not building a community for it, it may never get off the ground.” He gives 2 successful case studies on how building a community the right way can help your idea or product (Source).

As a startup in the MENA region, your best chance is to find opportunities where early adopters, fellow entrepreneurs and potential investors... For you, that means the digital MENA event of the year, ArabNet Digital Summit. It’s the biggest event for web and mobile in the region! Last year’s summit brought over 1000 attendees, 100 speakers, featured 18 panels and 17 talks, in addition to 20 entrepreneurs pitching their ideas and startups. And this year’s summit is less than 2 months away so you better start working on your pitches and hone your skills in building your community! This year’s event is going to be even bigger. Cutting-edge panel discussions, specialized workshops, exciting competitions, focused networking sessions, social activities and more, spread over 5 action packed days including:

• Two Developer Days with technical discussions and workshops for programmers. Even though I am not a developer, but I did enjoy this day as you can read in my post from ArabNet Digital Summit 2011.
• An Industry Day about how web and mobile are transforming traditional industries like healthcare, travel, education and banking.
• Two Forum Days, the largest gathering of digital business leaders in the region featuring over 100 globally renowned speakers covering the latest trends and technologies in web and mobile.
• A Community Day raising public awareness about the the power of digital.

The Digital Summit will also include ArabNet’s annual competitions: the Ideathon and Startup Demo. The Ideathon aims at turning bright ideas into functional products will introduce the top 20 entrepreneurs and startups in the region, exposing the latest in digital entrepreneurship and giving entrants the chance to win big cash prizes and the attention of investors, incubators, and developers, not to mention the media! You’ll for sure have a better chance at exposure if you actually participate in the Ideathon. So you put your entrepreneurial hat on and get ready to network!

As one of the official bloggers of ArabNet Digital Summit 2012, I'll be bringing you more news about the conference and will be live covering it from March 27 till March 31. So don't forget to subscribe to my RSS, and follow me on Twitter if you aren't already ;)

The 1st Arab Social Media Forum: More Social, Less Forum Please!

 On December 11th, I had the pleasure of attending the 1st Arab Social Media Forum in Amman, Jordan. The forum was the 1st of its kind in the region to target only Social Media topics and share both clients' & agencies' experience dealing with Social Media platforms & different social engagement approaches / show cases (according to their website). 

The event, held in Regency Palace Hotel (which, on a side note I must say, has AWESOME beds XD), was under the patronage of His Excellency Mr. Marwan Juma, the Minister of ICT in Jordan, who was introduced by Mr. Malik Shishtawi , the man behind it all, a social media expert in the Middle East... A rarity indeed.

Now honestly, knowing the agenda beforehand, I wasn't looking forward to the introductory speeches (and I know that not many of you do either so don't give me the stink eye >_>) because I figured they're just going to be boring, bureaucratic and seem too lengthy. Fortunately, to my surprise, they were very casual and interesting. Mr. Marwan, as shockingly as it is for a politician, was actually a pretty cool and laid-back man. He started his speech off by talking about the significance of such an event to the Arab region and to the future of Jordan, specifically. He admitted to being a geek and reminisced about the days "Email" was the new big thing.

Next up was Rashid Al Balla from National Net Ventures; he shared a lot of interesting, if not shocking, insights on social media in the Arab world. Apparently, only 2% of Arabs online are comfortable using English. That makes you wonder of the amount Arabic social forums out there in the world wide web that are only in Arabic. Speaking of which, there was a huge debate throughout the event on whether forums are considered a part of social media or not. I would rather think they're not, but one can not deny the significance of forums in the Arab world, and how they are still the number one Arabic source of information.

Brightening up the forum with his sense of humor, Mark Comerford  spoke of Social Media in a Changing Media Landscape. What perhaps most caught the audience attention was Mr. Mark's habit of... swearing. Oh, he swore a lot. Although, kids, that's not a good thing to do :P, but it lighten up the professional business world that tend to get over-serious. You can find Mr. Mark's presentation from the forum on Slideshare. You'll love it!

The following speaker was Mr. Sameer Issa speaking on "Practical Strategic Approaches to Social Media" (found here); his presentation, although very useful, lacked one thing... enthusiasm! Let aside the fact that as a public speaker, you should engage your audience with your tone of voice and body language, but when you're talking about Social Media (and it's part of your job and who you are as a professional), then you should do it with so much passion that the entire audience can be motivated to listen. At the end, this isn't a boring academic lecture... THIS IS SOCIAL MEDIAAAA! < Mimicking the This Is Sparta meme, if you don't know what I mean then, know your meme.  "Listening & Monitoring: The New Way to Market" (found here) was up next with Mr. Patrick Atallah. Unfortunately, you will not find many tweets on Mr. Patrick's presentation because by then, there was panic and frustration in the room, by the social media addicts & bloggers, due to internet difficulties that left us all unfocused. Not to make this very long, I'll urge you to look at the forum's agenda here search for the rest of the amazing speakers who shared lots of wisdom on that day, of which, Silvia Cambie is most worthy of mention, being the only female speaker at the forum and spoke highly of women's role in Social Media for Social Change. Yes, I'm a feminist. 

What I'd like to share with you most was how great it felt to be among the "ambassadors" who were there specifically to share the event happenings on Twitter. I went to the event as a regular attendee, and being the twitter addict that I am, I was surely tweeting like mad about the event. By the end of the event, that earned me -to my surprise and delight- a place among the ambassadors on stage with a special thanks from Mr. Malik. Darine Sabbagh, who was one of the only two people I knew on Twitter before the event (the other being the amazing Noor Al Hajri to whom I'm very thankful for helping me), spoke of her journey with the other Lebanese bloggers who came specifically for the forum.

At the end, I'd love to thank Noor, (most sociable!), Darine (most adorable!), Ali AlHasani (a real sweetheart), Ata AlQadi, Muoffaq Qabbani, Mohammed Azzam, Mahmoud AlDwairy (who's apparently a big shot and I didn't know :P and was part of the panel discussion as a representative of Jordan Open Source Association, Assaad Thebian (who introduced us to Jafra of the Palestinian culture and is quite an interesting person), Zamil Safwan, Kamel Al Asmar, Eleena Korban, Bernard Sadaka, just to name a few of the many many people I met in Jordan who made me feel to be among a big cool family!

TedXArabia: An Experience Worth Spreading (Part II)

Resuming my first post of my TEDxArabia experience and the presentations after the first beak, Thamer Shaker got it off on the right foot by bringing in lots of laughter to a really serious topic with the video below. In his presentation of "Elf & Giant", he urged the youth on choosing between being elves, small and insignificant, or giants, grand and visible.

Bassam AlKharashi's Innovation Process and Hani Khojah's Innovation and Collaboration were informational and educational but not much entertaining. The Innovation Process was too technical and directed to a corporate level audience that didn't have a heavy presence at that hall. Hani Khojah's presentation depicted an innovation model which was compromised of an overlap between vision, values, operations and support where he sweetly pointed out his family as his support system.

Following those was Mohamed Al Bakri with his "Mail Man" presentation; his Young Initiative Group is a real inspiration, a group of young guys and girls helping out the world, one initiative at a time. The true inspiration about it is that they all got to know each other on Facebook and decided to collaborate... Yet another successful case on social media for social change!

And for the truest part of ideas worth spreading, comes Joshua To. Invited all the way from USA to KAUST, it was a real pleasure having him speak at TEDxArabia. He immediately got us started on an exercise of making ideas a reality by letting the entire audience write one word on a piece of paper and share it with those sitting around them until each of us had a list of 3 words. With those 3 words, real brainstorming begins to connect them into an unusual idea. His example included an AC, a box, and a flower. The idea that generated was a box attached to an AC that normally sheds enough amount of water to bring to a life a flower planted in that box. That was just a simple idea that brings great benefit to our environment. His presentation was amongst the most vivid in the event.

A couple of presentations after that, AlBara Taibah shared with us one of the topics that I always failed at... time management; apparently, as his book and presentation are titled You Can not Manage Time, and oh boy was I glad to hear that. We all struggle with time, always having lots of things to do and no time to focus on any at all. Or maybe we want to do something we really love but can't find the time in our schedule to do it. AlBara suggests that it is the human that need to be managed, not time. Your activities define the value of your time & how fast/slow your time goes. You need to change your behavior and activities if you wan't to control time. Focus on the activities that add value to your time and eliminate those that has no value to you. On a side note, I really enjoyed the graphics of his presentation. Great job on the branding!

Now this one is a little personal to me and I got a preview of it a day before the event but it was still as good as I expected: Said Baaghil's The Power of Belonging presentation. Being a branding guru, he focused on his journey of branding himself in Saudi Arabia from the moment he got here about 5 years ago. That is a personal passion of mine as I'm a great believer in personal branding and the value you can derive from it. The first highlight of his presentation that got the audience cracking up was his picture with blond hair, the way he met CEOs shocking them with an unexpected look. What better way to leave an impression than to break all pre-perceived conceptions?! 

Though what really left the crowd puzzled was Said's question: 

What will happen to the Apple brand on perception after Steve Jobs? The personal brand of Steve Jobs is Apple and Apple as a brand is Steve jobs. 

Another marketing guru is Dr. Hani Al Manii, and his presentation on Marketing Innovation shared many insights on how to spread the word about your innovation. Most remarkably, he urged innovators to seek (brand) enthusiasts who are characterized of being mavens (really knowledgeable in your domain) and being well-connected. If these enthusiasts believe in your innovation, and spread it among their connections in a positive manner then word-of-mouth advertising taking its course will help you achieve your goal. As a last point, he also urged people to spread other people's innovations! That is an integral part of what Dr Haidy Al Askry suggested at her earlier presentation on being an enabler of innovations and innovative people.

One of my favorite presentations for the evening was Dr. Bader Al Shebani's "PR as a Marketing tool", with the powerful statement in the first slide "You = The Brand". As Said Baaghil pointed out earlier, the power of personal branding is undeniable. Being able to use your own image to leverage your business creates a strong connection between you, your target audience and your brand. He started the presentation by making us all stand while he sat down on the floor of the stage, it was a good move to get the audience lively after a long day of sitting there. Then he went on to talk about his business, Kai gym, and how he utilized PR and marketing himself to promote it. He used humor throughout the speech which made it as fun as it was useful. I'd definitely love to hear more from him.

Another amazing presentation was by Archie Lee, one of Joshua To's teammates, titled "The Office" where he showcased his team's idea on having "+Pool", a plus-shaped pool in the streets of USA to regenerate clean water. The Plus Pool is not only an efficient solution for supplying clean water, but it also looks very refreshing and cool that I can imagine people taking a dip after a busy day at work. Wow, imagine that kind of fun! Same as Joshua, Archie is part of the exercises running at KAUST, and what he came up with with his group of students was on a much larger scale than an AC and a flower in a box. His brainstorming session with the students ended up with a suggestion to use the footsteps of the millions of people who walk around the Kaabah all year round to generate energy which would help sustain the entire city and the regions around it! Imagine the public's reaction when an American who just came to Saudi Arabia on a visit can think of efficiently using the center of Islam for the good of the country in a way that locals who've been here for years never thought of it that way...

The highlight of TEDxArabia was indeed the big finish and Dr Naif AlMuttawa's "The 99". The essence of innovation is seeing what others can't see... and bringing it to reality so brilliantly! An idea that sprung to life from a brainstorming conversation with his sister in a taxi: Pokemon, animation, the West, image of Islam in the West, God, his 99 names... And then the idea grew into an entire production of The 99 comics and movie which we had the pleasure of watching a part of in the event. I'm telling you it felt really special being able to have a theater experience in KSA lol. You can catch the preview below.

And there you have it. I had to skip some parts and presentations and I know that I can talk about this for many posts to come but it will never fully communicate the excitement of being there and gaining lots of insights from so many great minds who are basically just regular people like everyone else but had an idea, and sought it through and now they're spreading it around!

If you were at TEDxArabia, let me know which was your favorite presentation. If you weren't there, and you've enjoyed this post then do your part and spread it around ;)