Tag Archives: content distribution

Freshly Pressed and why it’s good for you and your WordPress blog!

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I was Freshly Pressed last week by the good people at WordPress and all I can say is WOW, what an experience! Not just content in offering one of the best blogging tools and content management systems around, WordPress has a wonderful feature called Freshly Pressed.

Basically Freshly Pressed is a means by which WordPress promotes a handful of blogging sites on a daily basis through their home site (have a look here at http://wordpress.com/#!/fresh/). Freshly Pressed aims to bring to a wider audience some of the great content being produced and published in the blogosphere.

The team at WordPress have a great write-up as to why you should care about being Freshly Pressed and how to be noticed by their editorial team – you can access their tips and hints here at So You Want To Be Freshly Pressed.

To date there’s 425,657 bloggers on WordPress and 891,995 new posts being published daily, so there’s a lot of content to be read and reviewed by the editorial team at WordPress.

However, if you are one of the lucky ones to be featured on Freshly Pressed you are going to find yourself being viewed by a whole new audience of bloggers who will engage, read and follow you. It brings a whole new meaning to the concept of content distribution and is an example of the importance of promoting your content. No matter how good you are, if your words are comparable in quality, wit and style to Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Sophie Kinsella, you’re only good if you are read. Get out there, be read, and gain an audience!

My experience with Freshly Pressed was just remarkable. A hundred fellow bloggers liked the post, I had fifty insightful comments, and then there was the traffic. Put simply, it’s the blogging equivalent of Christmas Day.

Thank you once again you lovely people at WordPress, and all of you bloggers who engaged with me. You really do make all of the time, effort, energy and research that I put into blogging worthwhile.

A screen shot capture of my blog on Freshly Pressed. Once you’ve gone Freshly Pressed blogging will never be the same!

Is the Middle East’s Communications Business now 24/7 due to #SocialMedia?

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There have been a slew of articles coming out from the US and Europe on social media and when to communicate to ensure that a message gets heard by a maximum number of people. Blogs from Bitly and other social media tools have highlighted the issue of timing and its importance in terms of how content goes viral.

The When Should I Post this Infographic by digital agency Raka was based on Bitly’s data for social media content distribution

I hadn’t heard of anything along those lines in the Middle East until recently, when one agency told me they’d won a contract to promote a national sports league via social media. The agency in question claimed that they had an ace up their sleeve during the pitch; they’d guaranteed the client that they would communicate in the evenings during the matches themselves, rather than promoting the games during office hours.

The thinking was simple. The target audience would be most focused on the sport an hour or two before, during and an hour or two after the games.

By that logic, wouldn’t the same also ring true for a variety of other audiences across the region? For example, for non-alcoholic drinks such as Barbican one of the prime times for selling is during football games. Similarly, wouldn’t restaurants and other venues which do most of their business in the evening do well to communicate afternoons and evenings rather than in the morning?

It’s an interesting one to think about for marketing and communications professionals. I’d love to see someone coming up with similar studies to the bitly blog and Infographic above, particularly for the GCC region. But I’m guessing most business and brand-related social media communications in the Middle East are being posted during office hours.

Everyone I know in the marcomms industry has a smartphone, a laptop, a tablet, and a 3G mobile connection. Connectivity doesn’t seem to be the issue to communicating outside of office hours, so then what is? Is it all down to the permissions and approvals processes that companies here have in place?

There are a myriad of tools which can help measure responses and even suggest the optimal time to post messages on social media based on previous data. One to look at is Crowdbooster. This online tool is free to use and you can use it to schedule messages to Twitter and Facebook. If you’re looking for a basic but useful tool to work out when to post to social media, try out Crowdbooster.

Crowdbooster is a great tool to use when you need to know the best timings for posting messages

But do remember, don’t sleep and tweet or Facebook! Or else you might end up writing something that you will regret.

Who controls the message? The case of #Qatif and official Saudi policy

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“May you live in interesting times”. That ancient Chinese proverb is a favourite, and never has it rung truer than today for anyone who lives in the Middle East.

The past 18 months has completely changed our region. Few have been immune to the changes that have swept the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. During this time so many taboos have been broken. As a media junkie and former journalist what has been most striking is how people are now controlling the message themselves through the use of the internet.

For decades governments in the region controlled the news agenda. Saudi Arabia’s news channels, both television and newspapers, are all state-controlled. The use of satellite dishes was illegal (I can’t ever remember reading any official announcements legalizing satellite dishes in the country) and all foreign publications imported into the country were censored with a black pen. Anything that was critical was either black penned, ripped out of the magazine or newspaper, or, in the worst case, the publication would be banned.

What has happened over the past 18 months has changed this perception. For reasons that I’m not going to go into on this blog post – I’m only focusing on the communications aspect rather than the politics – various events have taken place in Qatif, in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Region. There have been several incidents of late in Qatif. What is remarkable is how those who are protesting in Qatif are using Youtube to spread their message. Previously, they never had any means to tell their story. To see how that has now changed, look at the below.

The above video has been viewed 160 thousand times in the space of two days. What is just as remarkable is the channel where this is hosted on Youtube. The channel’s name is Qatif News Channel, and videos are uploaded daily.

The Qatif News channel is hosted on Youtube and has been viewed over 200,000 times since it was set up on February 9th 2012.

This media is being used to tell a story that is feeding global media, such as this report by Al Jazeera.

Confronted with today’s ability to collect content, upload it to the internet and distribute that media, there’s little that official media or policy can do apart from run editorials condemning such actions. The below is from the English-language Saudi Gazette and sums up media reactions in the Saudi press.

Maintain public peace, Al-Qatif sheikhs tell youth was the standard line in many Saudi media publications.

The question faced by governments is how do they regain control of media channels and ensure that their message is heard loud and clear? There’s no going back, there’s no closing down the internet (Egypt’s Mubarak tried and failed). Some governments have become media-savvy and are now creating their own content for distribution online. A rumour circulated last year that Saudi’s King Abdullah had bough Facebook to stop the Arab Spring. Maybe someone wasn’t joking when they suggested buying Facebook?

No, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah did not offer to buy Facebook for $150 billion.