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Richard Branson and Demi Moore do it everyday. Britney Spears is addicted to it. Coldplay like doing it as a group. And even Barack Obama is at it in the Oval Office. OK, no need to snigger at the back – like everyone else right now, we’re talking about Twitter.
 
"Just want to thank all of my beautiful fans for making me number 3 on Twitter! Love you guys! –Brit”, tweeted Spears on March 17, at 11:44PM. “Back in London having gone around the world for the first time on Virgin. It was great. Come fly with us and try it yourself...” tweeted Branson on March 2, at 1:27PM.

The President of the United States may not have tweeted since his inauguration in January, but his marketing campaign has been widely applauded as one of the most successful ever, partly thanks to its brilliant use of social media. “Obama created an official blog for the White House and a YouTube account, and he is broadcasting on both of them,” says Baher Al Hakim of Cloud Appers, a Dubai-based social media agency.

From Twitter to Facebook to YouTube to blogs, social media has never been easier to use as a marketing tool. Major companies across North America and Europe are using one form of social media or the other to engage consumers and interact with them, and to make their brands a part of their target audiences’ lives. Hi-tech companies like Apple, Dell and Microsoft have led the way in using social networks to become more approachable.

Recently, Skittles combined Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and widgets to create a new corporate Web site, helping to draw widespread attention to the rainbow candy. The site may be visually overwhelming at first sight, but the company’s message is clear: customer feedback and opinion is what matters most. By putting its followers at the forefront of corporate strategy, Skittles is in perfect step with the social media trend.

On this side of the world, the region watched and waited whilst the financial crisis played out, and now that its force has been felt here companies are turning to more frugal marketing ways. Facebook and the like were well established for personal purposes, but marketers are only now truly jumping onto the online networking bandwagon.

Al Hakim appears on Twitter under the name DrBaher, and credits his business’ success to the site. “I tweet about what I’m doing, what I’m passionate about, I post links, I discuss social media. That has got me some sort of regional reputation, and I’d say 80 percent of my current business I got through Twitter,” he says.

In February Al Hakim and fellow social media enthusiasts organized a Twestival – an event where people on Twitter met in the flesh – in Dubai at the Le Meridien Mina Seyahi hotel (which also tweets). Since then he and other social media insiders have seen use of Twitter explode in the region, and particularly in the UAE.

“The adoption rate of Twitter in the UAE went through the roof in February,” says Carrington Malin, managing director of Spot On Public Relations. “It was about a 150 percent increase in users, going from around 500 users to around 1200. That includes brands, employees, and people who represent brands.”

Virgin Middle East recently turned to Spot On PR for strategic help in branching out into social networks, and plans to expand its social media initiative. “We started using social media about six months ago, by creating fan pages on Facebook,” says Elie El Massih, head of marketing at Virgin in the UAE, who sponsored the Twestival. “We have the Virgin Club, where we promote activities or our latest products. We’ve got about 90,000 fans on there.”

“We started using Twitter about two months ago,” continues El Massish. “We tweet about promotions, competitions, giveaways, and concerts. It’s picking up really fast, but membership numbers are not like the fan pages on Facebook. We have a dedicated person in our store, a marketing executive, who dedicates one hour a day to Twitter to reply to everything. We’re going to change her title to Tweet manager.”

With all the hype and excitement surrounding social networks, companies must be aware of the pitfalls of being connected so extensively all of the time. Malin says companies must remember they still need a marketing plan. “Everybody’s seen how easy it is to create Facebook pages and MySpace profiles, or go online with virals,” he says. “But at the end of the day, if you’ve got a marketing program online, the same principles apply as with marketing programs in other mediums in terms of planning and strategy. So we’re involved with clients on that level to ensure that they have a solid plan before they start.”

Smaller companies could benefit the most from social networks. With costs kept at a minimum and widespread reach, the medium proves beneficial for up and coming businesses such as Wild Peeta, a Dubai-based restaurant owned by Mohamed Parham and his brother, Rashed. Long before the restaurant even opens its doors, the siblings are using social media to publicise their venture.

“Funny enough, by being on Facebook, Twitter, BlipFM and MySpace and others, we’ve been getting a lot of opportunities on mainstream media, such as this interview and an upcoming radio interview on Dubai 92,” says Parham. “The opportunities that have come up just from us interacting with our audience have been amazing. “

“Basically, Twitter is on pretty much all day,” he continues. “I ask a lot of questions, I get feedback. Getting that perspective from our consumers, you can’t put a price on that. Our menu today is different than it was at the beginning of our project because people have written in with suggestions. I also got some advice from a fellow Tweep about my site, and I eventually found out he was an award-winning restaurant consultant from Texas. So it’s not just people from this city, country or region giving advice, it’s people all over the world.”

Engagement is the name of the social networking game, with marketers venturing into that world under high pressure to listen, interact, and innovate at a rapid pace. Jassim Ali, digital director at PHD iQ, the interactive media arm of PHD, says it isn’t enough to just put up an online advertisement and wait for business to come knocking. “That’s not exactly the most effective way of using that media,” he says. “An interesting example is a campaign that ran on Jeeran.com for Nescafé where they asked people to take pictures of their coffee mugs and put it online, and then the best looking one would win some sort of award. So that’s a pretty good example of how you can utilize a community to engage your brand.”

At Virgin, El Massih says the instant feedback provided by social networks is a great way to stay relevant and reply to customer comments right away. “But it’s not easy, because it’s instant,” he says. “You’ve made that commitment, so you have to be online all the time. Customers demand that you reply to them within hours, and we would be fooling ourselves if we said all the feedback is positive. We have to deal with complaints very quickly and get back to customers.  So we’ve taken that as a challenge, because we want to be involved in social media.”

Strategists agree that while a social media plan is valuable, this fast-moving medium is high maintenance and needs regular upkeep. “It’s very easy to set up a Facebook page and begin communicating online, but if you look through fan pages of brands and retail organisations and companies in the UAE, there’s an awful lot of stagnant pages just sitting there with nothing on them,” says Malin. “No new content, no new users; they’re effectively dead pages.”

And while the rapid flow of information brings marketers closer to customers, Malin stresses that the pressure this puts on organisations requires planning and organisation. “If you put that planning and organisation in place, then you’ve got a very powerful tool to use where you can get continual feedback.”

As for the all-mighty ROI marketers are always looking for, social media doesn’t provide an exact outlet to calculate revenue.
People may join fan pages or follow tweets, but in terms of knowing what social networks are doing for a company’s numbers, the domain is still grey. Charging clients for social media work is also an undefined domain for media agencies.

“Social media as a concept is quite new, hence a lot of things you do are not very defined, such as monetization,” says Ali. “How do you know when an agency is doing work for you, how much business is your money generating? It’s not defined as of now. Partly also because tools to monitor these things are still being developed or are, dare I say, primitive.”

With social media a new concept, and even newer to the region, Malin says regional efforts to use the medium as a marketing tool are still too young to judge. And while it’s taken on a big role in the world of marketing, social networking is just one part of what should be a wider, integrated marketing strategy. “The more people that respect you and know what you do, the more opportunities you get,” says Al Hakim. “Social networking is an easier way to do networking, but it doesn’t replace it.”

“Social media is still very broad, it can’t be defined,” he adds. “It can be defined more by the emergent behaviour of people on the web, connecting with each other and expressing opinions without any control. Some tools will fade away; we might have something other than Facebook take over. So it’s not about the tools, it’s about the behaviours.”

Speaking of which, whatever happened to Friends Reunited?

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