Internet Privacy: Google and Facebook

While Google protects its users, Facebook might not be as concerned with their privacy.

After all the issues Google has had with governments, it finally fights back! April 20th, Google presents the Government Requests tool : displaying the amount of requests for data or content removal received from government agencies. The data shown were gathered between July and December 2009 and will be updated every 6 months.


What about Facebook? Well the news are not as reassuring. The Electronic Frontiere Foundation has recently posted information on how law enforcement agencies use social networking sites to gain access to data.. and Facebook seems very cooperative. Check this out: http://www.search-internetmarketing.com/2010/03/how-us-government-spies-use-facebook/

Lebanon: Internet Censorship?

Is Lebanon's internet subject to censorship practices? "The Middle East and North Africa is one of the most heavily censored regions in the world" states a report conducted by the OpenNet Initiative report on the MENA region.
What about Lebanon? Well, "Lebanon is one of very few countries in the Middle East where ONI found no evidence of technical filtering" - OpenNet's Lebanon Profile.
Opennet.net also provides maps that display the countries censoring each of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Orkut and Youtube. Interesting stuff, check it out: Filtering Maps

"My Crest Smile" Internet Marketing

www.mycrestsmile.com hits a home run. As Crest and Oral-B in partnership with Femme, manage to"place a finger" into the wound of our Lebanese society, shallowness caves in ...and ALTHOUGH what I feel like doing is mourn our superficial society, I am driven to congratulate them for understanding the population and conducting a great marketing campaign.

The internet marketing campaign relies on content generated by its visitors and their votes. It has gained monumental popularity by piggybacking on the power of Facebook (the number one website in Lebanon, according to Alexa). Thumbs-up to e-comLebanon for a phenomenal success.

"Become a Star", "get ready to be on the July cover of Femme" are what the website states to encourage female visitors to upload their pictures and ask their friends to vote for them.

While, the voting mechanism seems hard to hack, the terms and conditions of the contest only give voting the power to affect 40% of the results... Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't it make the votes kind of worthless?

Lucky for them, Lebanese tend to dive in without reading instructions.

Social Voting Marketing

Social Voting Marketing has taken off with websites like Digg and StumbleUpon and Reddit. However, Social Voting Marketing is not only about "link baiting" even Youtube with the 5 stars rating has a type of social voting established. The concept helps the visitors get worthy content, and gives them a say in the standing of the subject.

SVM might have started with bookmarking. Nonetheless, the digital marketing world has learnt a valuable lesson from this trend.

After the success of voting websites in driving traffic and getting visitors hooked to their "cause", the trend spread over the internet. One of the initial broad successes, the new 7 wonders of the world, stem traffic by capitalizing on the feeling of Patriotism.

It relied on its participants' marketing efforts in their respective countries, thanks to which, it got promoted in offline media around the world and its results were publicized on news-worthy channels. The success of their first campaign was so prominent that they soon introduced the new 7 wonders of nature allowing the visitors to nominate the participants first and go through the voting process next. Eventually, the concept evolved to a ridiculous "open source" contests, where the visitors contribute to the competition creation as well as the voting under "vote 7 campaigns".

Social CRM, the Future of CRM

Social CRM is the future.

Social media and CRM combined, social CRM has a lot to offer.

While most CRM tools work on cross-tabbing the CRM data the company introduces to generate new CRM insights, the future of CRM will come once social media will start contributing data: Once the CRM systems will automatically excavate the web 2.0 social profiles to find additional profile data about our customers.

I am thinking something like Google Buzz or Rapportive, a profile that combines all online information, to be automatically added to the MIS customer entries and matched to the company's CRM entries to generate new marketing synthesis.

Maybe in the future everyone will have a single internet web 2.0 CRM page where CRM data can be updated online to include all information from governmental to personal on the internet. The stored social CRM data could serve everything from VISA applications to user verification and save precious form-filling time. CRM privacy settings can be applied by type of visitor. Then all we would have to do is give a CRM reference code. The OpenID initiative is already a good step to a web identity creation.

...Just a globalized digital vision of the future.

BE STUPID.

Diesel's new campaign boldly states " Be Stupid". 

I don't know what this speaks to you, but to me, there's no turnarounds to the very definition of the word Stupid, try as they may with their campaign. 

The only message that does get through is Diesel proudly boasting that its clients are STUPID! I don't know about you, but if I had a Diesel jeans, you won't see me wearing it anymore! 

Never have I seen communication sink so low.  Whoever created this campaign, must indeed be stupid.

Try as they may to make stupid sound good... Stupid will forever be..well, STUPID!

Signage Evolution

Internet marketing is creating change in all aspects of marketing. Even retail signage evolved! 

I spotted a change in retail signage that to this date is not yet present in Lebanon: internet marketing through the signage.

Just got back from a trip to France and Belgium. Nothing better than a change of environment to get inspired!

Check out the web addresses on the signage of the retail stores.

I will let the pictures do the talking...