UAE loves to socialize

Posted by Bhavishya Kanjhan on Jul 1, 2010 in Default | 2 comments

It finally happened, the first Social Media Day was celebrated all across the world including the UAE and it was a huge success. UAE’s version of it was held at The Shelter in Al Quoz, Dubai. The event was spearheaded by @mita56 , but in a true social manner, it was crowd-sourced with helping coming in from various means. The evening saw a turn out of over 200 people which included both individuals and businesses.

The main area had a bazaar style layout with businesses on either ends – everything from Home made toffees like @toffeeprincess to training companies like @Loomni – who got the platform to connect to a community they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. . The event even had an iPad 360 give away by @me360 and the lucky winner for that was @Dorksterdave. Local student darlings @campusradiome was present broadcasting live from the venue and despite my requests, they did not let me read the news. The inside room featured talks. The event also featured community talks which were on topics ranging from Nutrition among Emirati Society to Educating for Road Safety.

The atmosphere, as is always at such an event, was very jovial. People formed new relationships and strengthened existing ones.

Pictures from the event can be seen here (by @mich1mich) and here (by @faisalkhatib)

Socialising with Socialize

Posted by Bhavishya Kanjhan on Feb 17, 2010 in Default | 0 comments

It was about this time last year I was struggling to find a topic for my dissertation, a topic that would be academically acceptable and still not make me want to drill a hole in my brain.  Being the Social Media junkie I had become – talking about it, on it – meant I had to incorporate some element of it in my dissertation. Little did I know that my topic of measurement and monitoring of Social Media would get approved.

I decided to come home to Dubai to get involved with the Social Media scene here for two reasons; to witness the evolution of Social Media in the Middle East, and for my mom’s home-made food. More so for the latter.

In the few months I spent researching and covering the local Social Media market, I found there were more Social Media “Experts” than there were genuine enthusiasts. These “gurus” – who claimed perfect knowledge of what is still an imperfect and developing discipline – came across as nothing more than shady snake-oil salesmen. But things are not as dark and gloomy as I may have painted them so far. I did come across marketers with a strong foothold in and a flair for, Social Media – the likes of Abha Malpani, Reuven Proenca, Mita Srinivasan, Akanksha Goel, Baher Al Hakim and Sanjive Khosla.

Coming back to Akanksha Goel – from the very first tweets I saw of hers, I realised we were on the same page when it came to Social Media. She shared the same passion (more like borderline obsession) that I had, and expressed it in ways similar to I did.  This is why it didn’t come as a shock when she came up with the concept of “Socialize”, a social media training house – a name and a project I had secretly considered myself but not given much thought to it. She happened to mention about Socialize on Facebook (where else would the Social Media geek do it) and I didn’t take too long to send her an email about it. On meeting her I realised that the idea behind Socialize was not to do with what most Social Media “experts” were offering – running your Social Media campaign for the business without their involvement – but to sit down with companies, understand their USP and personal challenges and help them enter the Social Media space.  Not a lot of time passed before we were colleagues and were working on helping businesses do exactly that.

Here at Socialize, we really believe in the power of engagive marketing. We believe its time businesses started talking with consumers rather than speaking to them. While most experts will restrict Social Media to Facebook and Twitter with some video production for YouTube thrown in, we believe Social Media is tool-agnostic. It’s not just about having the technical expertise to use the various tools, it’s about understanding the reasoning behind it. Akanksha and I both believe that social is a layer which each company’s marketing plan must possess and that is the attitude we want to help companies adopt. At Socialize, we are trying to change mind-sets of and help them commit to the though process of Social Media marketing.