Mind Soup

In an attempt to promote inspiring stories about people from the Lebanese Online Community, we, at Cloud961, have decided to dedicate a monthly column to interview an inspiring figure that has left a mark in the Lebanese online sphere. For your suggestions for this column, feel free to email me on mhijazi@cloud961.com . Maya Zankoul is a Lebanese designer and visual artist. She grew up in Saudi Arabia and moved back to Lebanon for university in 2004 where she got her BA in graphic design and graduated in 2007. After a couple of years in the workplace, she started a comic blog "Amalgam", the first Lebanese comic blog. The blog received a large amount of positive feedback from the local and international online communities, leading to it being published in two books (Amalgam vol. 1 and vol. 2) in 2009 and 2010 respectively. Both books have been translated and published in Italian by il sirente publishing house. After the blog and books success, Maya was able to quit her job...

This article was originally published in Cloud 961 July issue. You can download it here  (page 13). For more information about Design for Social Media, check out this post . Including images or visuals in your posts on any social media platform increases the post visibility and interaction. Tweets with images get 88% more retweets and Facebook photo posts see nearly 3x more engagement. If you are going to overlay text on the image, shoot the photograph with this in mind, so compose your image to incorporate white space. Photos that include a human element tend to be more engaging than static non-human photos. For example, a shot of a food plate will tend to be less interactive than if it also included someone eating the food or the chef of that dish. Always keep consistency with your identity and branding. When you create your own images, always include your logo. This shows it's your original image and increases brand awareness. Do not use stock photos or designs from the...

As part of Beirut Design Week 2013, Maya Zankoul and I held a joint workshop entitled: Design for Social Media. In this workshop, over 25 attendees got exposed to the basics of design for different social media platforms. Topics that were discussed include: technical social media design components on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, such as dimensions and regulations, do’s and don’ts, branding guidelines, color theory, typography choices and types of visuals that can be shared. Additionally, the session included a discussion on best practices through real examples and a hands-on application. Below are the slides of my part of the presentation. For questions or comments, do not hesitate to contact me on mhijazi@onlinecollaborative.org. Below is an article by Selim Njeim on this workshop that was published in Cloud 961 . When Design and Social Media Come Together By S é lim Njeim | @seleemnjeim Long gone are the days when people used to live in jerkwater towns in whic...

My name as it appeared in the event brochure I was invited earlier this week to talk at Hadeer Conference about how NGOs can use social media to benefit their organizations and campaigns. I gave a general lecture and discussion about the basic tools that they can use and some tips. These include: a brief introduction of Social Media and its importance, objective, target audience, monitoring, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, blogging, Facebook advertising, crisis management, content calendars and integrated campaigns In the presentation, there are also two local case studies of Be7ke and Donner Sang Compter . Check out the slides from the presentation below. If you have any questions or would like more details about my presentation, feel free to email me mhijazi [at] onlinecollaborative [dot] org. Social Media for NGOs مواقع التواصل الإجتماعي للجمعيات from Mohammad Hijazi

A while back I was asked to give a couple of lectures at the American University of Beirut for the Strategic Career Planning course on how to use the internet and social media to find a job or present oneself professionally. It seems that not many people are aware about the potential that social media holds in recruitment and job search. Many students and job seekers have found this presentation useful from the number of comments and messages that I received so I decided to share it here in hopes that it can reach more people. This presentation starts off as general tips that can apply to everyone in the world, but the job recruitment websites are resources are mostly tailored to Lebanon and the Middle East. If you have any questions or if you'd like me to check your professional online presence, feel free to drop me an email: moudz [at] mindsoupblog [dot] com. Good luck on your job search! Finding a job online in 10 simple steps from Mohammad Hijazi

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...

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 ...

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...

Tobacco control legislation will come into effect in Lebanon on September 3rd, 2012. As usual, the Lebanese government will implement random laws without studying the effect it will cause on society and the economy. Don't get me wrong, I am not against the smoking ban, but it should not be like this. This law that was approved is out-dated and comes back from the early 1900s and is technically very strict that I doubt it will even be properly enforced. What's mainly wrong with this law is that it does not allow for smokers to have specialized places to go to. It is also incomplete as it sets the stage for poor implementation, corruption and a non-negligible negative effect on the country’s tourism and hospitality sectors. The figures and infographics below are prepared by The Syndicate of Owners of Restaurants in Lebanon and are part of a study conducted by Ernest & Young in Lebanon. It makes you think twice before following the tobacco ban law blindly. UPDATE...

I’m gonna say it once and for all: Blogs are not a medium for free advertising or pushing press releases. If this is what your sell to your clients as community management or blogger relations, you have to reconsider, and this is why. If you send a press release to a blogger every day, they have most likely spammed you by the third day. On the occasion that they haven’t, you would have probably just pissed them off. Shall I demonstrate? (I have been taking screenshots about this topic for a while to build up for this post). Let's start with this PR Agency in Dubai. Every quarter, they send bloggers an email as below: complete with very annoying follow up emails: Not only are they spamming bloggers with their advertising, they don't have the decency to find the blogger's contact information themselves but keep harassing bloggers to send it to them. It's as if someone is asking you to shoot yourself in the face. And if you don't reply to...