Read all posts

I'm excited to be taking part in the first Digital Marketing Conference at the University of Reading. The theme: Digital Disruption Where? The University of Reading - Palmer Building When? 11th March, from 5 pm   Overview of the conference: Digital Disruption is...

According to Salesforce, 80% of senior-ranking marketers state that a cohesive customer journey is absolutely critical for success. These marketers understand how a customer or user journey map can streamline processes and provide customers with a consistent...

Should high profile bloggers give credit or pay special fees to take pictures in private locations? This is the question that a small boutique hotel called The Reading Rooms was trying to answer last week.   The situation   Estée Lalonde (@EsteeLalonde) a...

Dark Social has become a major topic among marketing practitioners in the past years. The reason behind this is that marketers are realising that dark social behaviours are increasingly popular among consumers. In this article, we will look at what dark social is, and we’ll share some recommendations on how to leverage on this online behaviour.

Social media was, without a doubt, at the centre of all candidates’ campaign strategy in this General Election. However, this was not always the case. The Obama campaign popularised the use of social media for political reasons in 2008. Before that, ‘respectable’ politicians tended to shy away from this channel. The reasons are similar to the one’s brands experienced in the early stages of social media adoption: it is hard to control what happens once a tweet or Facebook post is out, and politicians (as well as brands) were not very keen on criticism on these public platforms. However, the attitudes towards social media by politicians worldwide is more welcoming today than ten years ago, and many of the most prominent personalities in the global political sphere have a prolific social media presence and covfefe. However, is it a positive thing?

Performance marketing in the UAE is like the latest Lamborghini: everybody wants it, many people talk about it, but at the end, it is very rare to see it in action. No matter if we are speaking about Google AdWords or Facebook Advertising, most advertisers are using soft or no metrics when it comes to analysing their campaigns. They are satisfied with “something is happening” but they do not really care whether they are getting some returns on their investment or not.

Mobile advertising is in an experimental phase in MENA region, where marketers are simply just “trying it out” and hold the attitude that the mobile “doesn’t work yet”

I was invited to give a talk on Facebook fan page engagement at the Social Media Summit in Dubai. This was based on part of the research that I have done for my PhD and some other new research avenues that I am currently investigating. What was interesting from this event, was how much relevance social influence marketing is having among marketing practitioners.

Facebook offers companies several options to contact and communicate with their customers. Four behaviours are possible for a Facebook brand page user. Users can decide to look into a page of a brand and “Like” the page, which will lead to being able to see further messages from the brand later in his Facebook newsfeed. Furthermore, once that content is displayed, the platform allows users to “react” to the content, leave a comment on the content, and share the content with others. This post examines more in detail all these engagement behaviours.