E-Mediat 5th Workshop

We’ve finished workshop5 in 3 centers. It was one of the most interactive sessions as we celebrated the last workshop in the curriculum.

Sessions were focusing on how to use mobile tools in order to support your social strategy.  

Participants were very interactive as they share their experience in using mobile tools in their NGOs.  Most of them use mobile messages to raise awareness, fundraising & to connect with their audience.   

Tripoli participants use mobile messages to invite or announce their audience as most of them don't have access to internet.

Participants benefited a lot from this workshop, they learned that they should know their audience before sending the message & to know how to create  a  less characters with a content containing direct message depending on the cause they are working on.

Exxon Telecom was sponsoring this workshop & they offered 50 free SMSs for every participant NGO.

Thank you Cisco for the useful Flip offered to Emediat participants

Encourage Exchange @ AUB October 26 & 27

I attended a training session at the American University of Beirut on security exchanging through information technology; the workshop was sponsored by The Development Research Center –Virginia.

 The training was presented by Mr. Alan Patterson, Global Security Instructor; He covered a lot of topics: Security Risks Analysis, Cyber Security topics, Censorship & Circumvention. I really learned many useful things in this training, I learned about the importance of security in protecting our information by using strong passwords not less than 12 characters & preferable to be alphanumeric and about updating anti-viruses on a daily basis and also that we should not use pirated version of software to avoid being insecure.

Do you know that our emails are like a postcard & everyone can read it? To avoid this, check URL addresses of emails you received.

Today we are less secure than before due to our using of social media networks and because of this I will share with you some resources which I have got from this training as we always do in E-mediat: sharing information, but keep in mind nothing is secure 100%.

To be more secured on Internet:
http://onorobot.org
http://trucrypt.org/
http://secunia.com,
http://isc.sans.edu,
http://us-cert.com
http://www.icanstalku.com
http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/dailystat.php?date=082410
http://www.citizenlab.org
http://www.tacticaltech.org

Interview with Reem Dernaika (AZM & SAADA Foundation)

I was lucky to be selected in my association to participate in the series of the beneficial social media workshops from E-MEDIAT Program. As an NGO, we are interested in the social media & development of the internet & technology. What E-MEDIAT informed us is the strategy of using the social media which is a new skill that we couldn’t found elsewhere!!!.We learned how we can increase the nbr of our followers, how to communicate with them. Personally, I benefited a lot, I started communicating with people & experts working in the social media field. After applying the E-MEDIAT tools, our nbr of facebook fans increased from 10000 to 17000 persons which means 7000 persons in this short time & we’re hoping to get more fans & more followers on twitter. We started using social media tools to call for our event & recently, we organized a successful international festival for the 1st time in Tripoli. E-MEDIAT team helped us in using social media to let people participate .They watched the event on youtube & followed our tweets minutes by minutes on twitter & got latest updates from our facebook page;It was an interesting experience .We’r e thrilled to learn from the coming workshops & hoping to participate in the bootcamp & meet professionals & experts in this field & learn from them. In one word: our experience with E-MEDIAT is amazing!!!

Twitter tips and tricks

Below is a listing of our top 10 favorite Twitter tips and tricks. These tips will help make your Twitter experience more enjoyable and can help increase your followers.

Customize
• Change your profile picture. Use a picture of yourself to make it seem more personalized if this is your personal Twitter account.
• Utilize as much of the 160-character limit Twitter BIO space allows. Include keywords your followers or potential followers may be searching for.
• Create your own background image. However, do not make the image too much like an ad or sales pitch. The background image must be less than 800k and we recommend a size of 1600×1200 for a large image or smaller if you plan on tiling the image or just having it on the left-hand side. Finally, keep in mind that smaller resolutions and monitor sizes will hide much of the background.

Take advantage of the hundreds of different third-party online tools and services that enhance your Twitter experience. Below are a few of our favorites.

• TwitPic – Take advantage of TwitPic to post pictures on your tweets. If you want to post pictures while away from the computer, use the Twitterific app.
• Qwitter – Great service that sends an e-mail any time someone unsubscribes from your Twitter profile and mentions a possible Twitter post you made that may have caused them to leave.
• Manageflitter – Fantastic site for managing your followers and getting an easy to read overview of people not following you back, quiet users, and inactive users.
• WeFollow – Great website that allows you to add yourself to a listing of Twitter users by tags you find interesting.
• SocialOomph – Another great service with a collection of free Twitter tools including the ability to schedule when a tweets gets posted.
• Tweetbeat – An excellent site that takes the trending topics on Twitter and gives you a clearer explanation of present and past trending topics.
• TwitterMeme – Another great location to find the hottest links on Twitter.
• Twitter Grader – Great service that grades any Twitter account and gives you additional details and ranking information.
• Twitter Fan Wiki Apps – Finally, this wiki has a listing of several hundred different Twitter applications and tools for users wanting more.

Use Twitter searchTake full advantage of the Twitter search tool. Below are just a few tips that can help improve your search capabilities on Twitter.
• Search for your website or blog URL and see if others are mentioning your page.
• Search for anything near you by adding near:”city state”. For example, typing near:”Salt lake city Utah” club would return current tweets that have happened in Salt Lake City, Utah with the keyword club in them.
• Find people who you may enjoy following by searching for keywords that interested you.
• If you do not want tweets with links add ? -filter:links at the end of your search query.
• Need more options, use the Advanced Twitter search.
• Any time you get excellent results click the “Save this search” button to save that search. These searches can then be found under “Saved Searches” on the right-hand part of your profile on the old Twitter interface or under the “Searches” tab next to your timeline on the new Twitter interface.

Followers
• Engage followers.
• Do not follow too many people. No one is going to follow someone who is following thousands of people but only has 10 followers.
• Retweet interesting posts.
• Retweet and participate in conversations with people with a lot of followers.
• Realize it is impossible for anyone to read every tweet.
• When first joining do not follow hundreds of people, doing this may mark you as a bot.
Create useful and interesting tweets
• Try making all your tweets informative, useful, or funny.
• Do not post mundane posts, e.g. eating a bowl of cereal.
• Add hastags to your tweets. For example, if your tweet is about computers, consider adding #computer in the tweet.
• Tweet frequently. No one is going to follow someone they do not know who has not tweeted in months. Try at the very least to tweet a few times a week or daily if you can manage.
• Do not whine or complain. Everyone will unfollow anyone who constantly whines or complains.
• Try making your valuable tweets during the times people will most likely see them.
• Keep some space available in your tweet in case someone retweets your post.
• Use special characters in your tweets.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online service that enables you to broadcast short messages to your friends or "followers." It also lets you specify which Twitter users you want to follow so you can read their messages in one place.
Twitter is designed to work on a mobile phone as well as on a computer. All Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters, so each message can be sent as a single SMS alert.
Twitter is useful for close-knit groups (although there also are some fairly large mobs on Twitter). If you follow your friends, and they follow each other, you can quickly communicate group-related items." Twitter is conceptually similar to Dodgeball but is simpler to use.
If you enter items into Twitter, they can be private, so only friends you've authorized can see them. Items can also be made public, which means anyone who knows your Twitter ID can read and subscribe to them.

How to get started Twitter is free.
Go to Twitter.com and click "Join for free." For best results, use your real name when signing up; otherwise your friends won't be able to find you easily. It's also helpful to upload a picture. If you select the "Protect my updates" box, people won't be able to read your Twitters unless you authorize them. You'll have more fun if you leave this box unchecked. Just be sure not to Twitter, "Leaving house open and unlocked for the weekend: 1520 Main Street."
Now that you have a Twitter account, tell your friends your username or send them the link to your Twitter page.

More & more in Workshop3

Emedait workshop3: Social Networks (Facebook & Twitter )

In workshop3, participants will learn how to use Facebook and Twitter & link to their social media strategy plan.

- Facebook Strategies for NGOs
- Facebook Engagement & Twitter Strategies for NGOs

Training Session about the use of Webex for webinars

We joined a training session about designing and delivering webinars. A webinar allows us to give and receive remote training from great experts in the field.
It was really great to know importance of webinar in bringing people together on an online training in which everybody can see the same thing on the screen and share the information together.
In some cases, it is similar to the regular training in setting the plan for the seminar (title of the seminar, target people, goals, evaluation,…)
At Emediat we are thinking of ways to apply this recently acquired knowledge as part of the upcoming training programs we have scheduled over the coming few months.

We will keep you posted

How to Promote your BLOG & Make it Successful

Tips For Making Your Blog Successful

1- Talk about your destination – Local area attractions and exciting information – rather than about your hotel.
2- Commit time to manage your blog – Unlike your website, your blog does require commitment of your time. Moderate your blog carefully on a weekly basis. Socialize with bloggers who are blogging about your area and request that they review your blog.
3- Convert readers by offering time sensitive offers, discount tickets to attractions, and information about local deals, etc.
4- Offer local videos and podcasts about your area on your blog.
5- Under a dining category, add a post about your hotel’s restaurant and add a personal touch by offering a great recipe from your hotel chef.

Promoting Blogs

The journey of blog promotion is never ending. Here are 10 steps you can take to promote your blog. The more action steps you will take, the more successful you will be and the more ROI you will gain.
1. Create a step by step marketing plan for promoting your blog.
2. Enroll your blog in to blog search engines.
3. Enroll your blog RSS in to RSS search engines.
4. Inform your customers about your blog and the flexibility of adding comments. Make sure to moderate your comments.
5. Offer online functionality for surveys and polls, etc.
6. Offer time sensitive offers, such as coupons, local specials, etc. at least two to three times a month. Send an email campaign to let people know that they can find offers only on your blog.
7. Let your visiting hotel guests know about the blog and ask them to post comments about their experiences with your hotel and the destination. You may want to check first that the guests had a great time.
8. Socialize your blog – this is a very important step towards promoting your blog. You have to seek out bloggers who are blogging about your area and your topics. It is easy to find bloggers specific to your industry by using blog search engines such as Technorati. Make a list of relevant bloggers and write about their blog on your blog. Ask these bloggers to review your blog. If they find your blog relevant and informational, they will post positive reviews on their blog about your blog and will give your blog a very qualitative link.
9. Offer periodic podcasts about local events, attractions, and things to do, etc.
10. Inform and train your employees to be aware of the blog and be a part of the promotional strategy. When they answer a call, they should be able to provide additional information about the blog.

Workshop2 @ITLebanon-Tripoli –7&8 July

HTML

- Basics of HTML & create front page
- practicing on HTML (http://t.co/ZFfhHzg )
- Blogging on Word press

Web design- Web design depends on creativity
- learning how to choose colors of our website: http://t.co/HLfK8ZD
- Latest Website Templates, http://t.co/vTv9nSa

Online Safety & Privacy
-Importance of online safety to get out of panic: The internet is not dangerous it is a place to get info
-How to help our children to work online in a safety way
-Ways to help protect our computers: Backup, read privacy statements

Listening
Listening tools: google alerts, RSS, Twitter search, blog search, social mention & igoogle

A Participant’s Experience

Knowledge becomes a must in our daily life!

Social Media is rocking and is making a difference in many businesses around the world. Marketers consider it the most important Weapon to Face new edge requirements, that’s why I joined E-mediat for Social media Training. I realized how important is this training for my business and for my NGO’s Strategic planning. My business is growing better every day with my vision to networking & planning & using Social media tools.

The first workshop of E-mediat was very helpful to prioritize social media in all kind of business we are dealing it, Thanks E-mediat and special Thanks for Beth kanter. Finally, the message will not be well delivered without Good Messengers: Nada & Mona
Looking forward to the coming workshops!

Nahi Al Jawad
ICSM (Islah Charitable & Social Movement)

Difference between Blog and Website

A website is a group of pages that are placed in a server meant to deliver or gather information. It is organized in such a manner that you can navigate from one page to another with the links that are provided. There are many types of websites that exist. There are websites for selling products, for providing after sales support, and there are even websites that operate just on information. A blog is a type of website that is maintained solely to provide information to people. It is just one subcategory of websites that can be built. A blog is an informal media for sharing news, information, views, and ideas about a niche topic. It doesn’t have to be as formal as a book, or even as a newspaper article. Sometimes, an eclectic collection of information on a given subject is the best way to go. Usually the posts in the blog is in reverse chronological order.

A blog can be built on a variety of topics available; there are blogs about current events, fashion, religion, and so much more. The proliferation of blogs is due in part to the simplicity in creating one. You wouldn’t need to have in depth skills in making your own webpage just as long as you can follow the basic format that some of the CMS for blogging offers. There are even preloaded themes that can take care of the majority of the tasks you need to do in setting up a blog. The only real job that bloggers need to take care of is the content that they input. It should be attention grabbing in order to entice a great number of readers. And the blogger should maintain the quality of his content so that the readers would keep coming back.

Building a website could be as easy or as difficult as you would want it to be. You could stick to static html pages that offer the barest of essentials or go all out with dynamic and interactive pages that employ multiple technologies like PHP, AJAX, Java, and many more. Having a website could be a lot more difficult since you don’t have the templates that are provided to you in blogs, you would need to build the necessary structure and links that would lead to your various pages. But building a website provides you with a great amount of flexibility than with blogs.
If you want to create something that would fit in a blog format and you don’t really want to delve into the inner workings of website building then blogging is the best option for you. It is hassle free and you could get started in as short as a day. But if you want to build a website that would require adding a lot of content, menus, and other navigation aids, then you would need to create your own website because that is beyond a blogs capabilities.

Revolutions via Facebook?

Leila Nicolas Rahbani
The role of Internet in protests and revolutions has increased in recent years. This was realized especially after what happened in Iran 2009, Tunisia and Egypt 2011. However, an important question should be asked: did the latest developments and incidents in the Arab world reveal that internet can usher in a new wave of democratization around the globe?
In fact, internet proved itself as a useful tool in increasing awareness, promoting democracy and human rights, and facilitating revolutionary groups’ abilities to lower the costs of participation, organization, recruitment and training through the social media networks like facebook, twitter and others. But like any other tool of communication, social media networks have inherent weaknesses and strengths, and their effectiveness depends on how can leaders use them effectively, how accessible they are, and the percentage of people who know how to use them.
Lately, situations in Tunisia and Egypt have both shown an increased use of social networking media such as Facebook and Twitter to help organize, communicate and ultimately initiate civil-disobedience campaigns and street actions. The Iranian “Green Revolution” in 2009, also, was closely followed by the Western media via YouTube and Twitter, and the latter even gave Moldova’s 2009 revolution its name, the “Twitter Revolution.”
In general, The Internet offered revolutionary groups worldwide to widely spread not just their ideological messages but also their training programs and operational plans. The social media, specifically, broadened their exposure, increased its speed, and lowered costs through networks of friends and associates sharing the information instantly and rapidly.
Lowering the costs of communication through usage of internet and social media networks in revolutionary acts seems to be a double edged sword:
a-      With lower organizational and communications costs, a movement can depend less on outside funding, which also allows it to create the perception of being a purely national movement without foreign supporters. But at the same time, it diminishes operational security. Facebook messages can be open for all to see, and even private messages can be viewed by authorities through search warrants in more open countries or pressure on the Internet social media firms in more closed ones. Indeed, social media can quickly turn into a valuable intelligence-collection tool.
b-      A reliance on social media can be exploited by a regime willing to cut the country off from Internet or domestic text messaging networks altogether, as has been the case in Egypt. Even though the shutting down of Internet did not reduce the numbers of Egyptian protesters in the streets. In fact, the protests only grew bigger as websites were shut down and the Internet was turned off.
c-      Regimes can use social media also. One counter-protest tactic may be used by regimes is to spread disinformation, whether to scare protestors or lure them all to one location where the police wait for them.
d-      The most obvious obstacle the revolutions face is the access rate to internet. Eventually, a successful revolutionary movement has to appeal to the middle class, the working class, retirees and rural segments of the population, groups that are unlikely to have Internet access in most developing countries.
In most Arab countries, the access to internet among population is below 35 percent, so if a movement wants to grow large enough to make effective change, it will have to use traditional media like TV and radio. Social media represent only one tool among many for an opposition group to employ. It should use other means for mobilization like face to face communications, phone calls and other means of direct communications, not through social networking only.
No one can deny that social media (facebook) offers advantages in circulating messages quickly and broadly, allowing organizers of protests to involve like-minded people in a movement at a very low cost. However, we should not overestimate the role of social media in breaking up the revolutions. Facebook messages alone did not prove to make Egyptian and Tunisian people move to the streets to protest and join the street actions. Social and economic conditions were the basic motives to revolutions, and social media just facilitated protests. Social media do not create protest movements; they only allow members of such movements to communicate more easily.
Eventually, the role and presence of charismatic leaders in revolutionary groups should not be ignored. Protest movements are rarely successful if led from somebody’s basement in a virtual arena or unknown person communicating with supporters through internet or facebook specifically.
 Any revolutionary group is usually inspired by a leader, who does the most part of mobilization. Besides the internet, it has to use different means for interest aggregation, motivation, recruitment and communication. In this sense, internet or social media networks can be seen as a part of the overall strategy, but it cannot be the sole strategy.

 http://leilanrahbany.blogspot.com
www.leilanrahbany.wordpress.com
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Leila Nicolas Rahbani
Reaseacher in International affairs
Instructor at LIU University
Beirut- Lebanon