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Showing posts from September, 2012

I see fake marketers

If you own or manage a Facebook page for a brand, cause or personal reason, you are bound to get spam messages from people claiming to get you more Facebook likes for cheap or free, something like the below: What is more annoying is how they try to convince you that their services are legit. Check out the below conversation that occurred on one of my client's pages. To begin with, I do not allow any of my clients to purchase fans or likes on any platforms. If you know anything about marketing, you would know that purchasing bulk followers does not get you anywhere, for the following reasons: These users approach uniformed or uneducated page owners to take advantage of them. These "companies" work by hiring a bunch of underpaid people in China, India or Egypt and stuff them in an overcrowded room to create fake Facebook accounts with randomized named and their only job is to like "client" pages. ( Side article:   83 million Facebook accounts are fake

Who is faking it among the Lebanese top Twitter users?

Twitter users and the media are amazed and impressed by the amount of followers that celebrities and some influencers have acquired since they started using twitter. To avoid any sampling bias from myself, I chose to use the " 20 Most Powerful People on Twitter in Lebanon " list by 2famous.tv . I then used a service by Status People that allows you to figure out the percentage of fake followers a user has in addition to the percentage of inactive and good followers. I obtained the following results: So what do we take from the above figures? Most celebrities (singers, actors, presenters, etc...) have a big percentage of fake and inactive followers. This is mostly due to them (or their agencies) buying followers for bulk. Notice that most celebrities have 40% or less good followers. Notice how evident this is with Zaven's follower analysis: 69% are fake (which is a whopping majority) and only 11% are real followers. If we do the math, he would easily be

GUEST POST: In Lebanon's Hands

Below is a guest post by my favorite politician in Lebanon, HMA Tom Fletcher , the British Ambassador to Lebanon. In Lebanon's Hands Lebanon tends to be high on our August watchlist. This year there was no major single crisis, but five developments raised anxiety. Israel accused Hizballah of involvement in the Bourgas terrorist attack. A pro-Assad former Minister was arrested. Kidnappings returned in a dangerous 48 hours. Some Gulf countries told their nationals to leave. The Tripoli powder keg re-ignited. Throughout, the media were quick to accentuate the negative. Lebanon has learnt to live with a certain level of instability. Periodically, for millennia, it has gone through phases of fragility, as regional tectonic plates and delicate demographics shift. The result is often conflict and political realignment. Are we in such a phase? Not yet. But I think there is an increasing realisation among Lebanese that Assad’s ability to directly influence political life in Lebanon is