At the Social Media Enterprise Forum in Dubai. Speakers from all over the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and India and just me from London. Learned more about the Arab world in two days than I've learned in years. All the talk at the conference is of course about Egypt and the role social networking is playing (and also in Tunisia, which unbelievably seems a long time ago). The jury is out about how twitter was used - we need to see the post event analysis from the experts. Yasser AlKharobi who is the Head of Corporate Marketing at the Rotana Media Group in Saudi spoke about how social media is used across MENA. Before the crisis, 40 per cent of all internet use in Egypt was on social networking and only 16 per cent on news. The figures post the crisis will be gripping.
Of course the use of twitter in organising causes and protests is beyond doubt. We saw it in London at the student fees demos. But there were protests and uprisings (see the fall of the Iron Curtain) before Twitter. What is interesting is HOW it was used and to what extent it truly changed the speed of events. I think I'll be looking most closely at the views of the Arab social networking experts I've met at this conference when it's time to make an assessment.
What's also interesting is the many different ways people in Egypt tried to get round the Egyptian government pulling the plug on the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment