October 6th, 2008 elitani
By Vineetha Menon
The United Arab Emirates has been identified as one of the countries that extensively filters content online in a global survey by the OpenNet Initiative.
The UAE not only blocks content that is religiously, culturally and socially inappropriate, but also filters political content. The report pointed out that internet users in the country were also prevented from legitimately using privacy and anonymizing tools and online translation services as they could be used to bypass filtering systems.
The software SmartFilter, from the US-based firm Secure Computing, is used to filter content from specified categories outside the free zones in the UAE.
According to the report, the UAE does not just “…extensively block targeted content but they also unnecessarily overblock unrelated content. For instance, Iran and the United Arab Emirates block flickr.com entirely because they have deemed some of the photographs posted on the site objectionable.”
The country was given a rank of ‘low’ for its consistency in filtering content.
Based on the global survey, 25 out of 40 countries were found to prohibit access to certain content online. 11 out of those 25 countries are from the Middle East and North Africa region - Bahrain, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, UAE and Yemen.
Interestingly, broadband internet access is growing faster in the MEA region than any other region in the world.
Posted in Online Marketing- Middle East | No Comments »
October 6th, 2008 elitani
Google has launched a new revolutionary technology that searches for any word within sounds and audio tapes!
This new search engine name is “Gaudi” where “G” stands for “Google” as “Audi” stands for “Audio”.
This service will be useful for TV and radio channels workers as they can search for a specific word or even knowing how many times is it repeated.
YouTube provides a similar service but with few number of political tapes.
This service distinguishes with its efficiency as well as facilitating the process of getting what you are looking for.
Google witnesses nowadays a huge dash as it announced releasing of a new smart phone soon. This phone will compete the iPhone as it will be available for $199 in retail stores.
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October 3rd, 2008 elitani
ScienceDaily (Oct. 2, 2008)
It’s all fun and games when it comes to the current trend in online advertising. Advergames, online video games used to advertise a product or brand, increasingly are being used by advertisers to attract and engage consumers. In a new study, University of Missouri researchers examined the impact of advergame themes on consumers’ attitudes toward advergames and brands.
The study revealed that consumers expressed strong positive relationships toward brands when they played advergames with strong thematic connections to the brands.In the study, participants played two advergames, both with either high or low thematic connection to the brand. Thematic connection refers to the degree that the object of the advergame relates to the brand’s product or services. For example, the travel company Orbitz designed a game, “Find Your Hotel,” that has a theme related to the company’s travel services. Another Orbitz game, “Paper Football,” does not have a thematic connection to the company’s services.“While games that related to the brand were not inherently more enjoyable than unrelated games, the transfer of enjoyment from the game to a positive attitude toward the brand was stronger when the game and brand were thematically related,” said Kevin Wise, assistant professor of strategic communication in the MU School of Journalism. “Game enjoyment led to positive attitude toward the brand when a high thematic connection existed between the game and the brand. This was not the case when the participants played games with a low thematic connection.”
According to Wise, previous research has focused on content analysis, effects on children and social policy implications. This is one of only a few studies that examined the effectiveness of specific features of advergames in producing desired results with consumers.
“A great deal of previous research has been devoted to the relationship between attitude towards an ad and attitude towards the brand in traditional media. In this study, we tried to extend that research to the world of online games,” Wise said. “We found that brand-related advergames facilitated the transfer of enjoyment to the brand, compared to unrelated games. Brand-related advergames are not inherently more expensive to produce, so these findings suggest that they might be more effective as a way of developing positive consumer attitudes towards a particular brand.”
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October 3rd, 2008 elitani
by Tameka Kee
Just over 40% of companies are spending at least a quarter of their online ad budgets on geotargeted campaigns, according to new research from Sterling Market Intelligence. But brands and their agencies are still stumped when it comes to figuring out how to use those local online advertising dollars most effectively.
Greg Sterling, founder of Sterling Market Intelligence, and Ed O’Keefe, vice president of performance marketplaces at Marchex, offered some best practices and case studies for how to capitalize on this growing trend during a webinar on Wednesday.
Marchex and Search Marketing Now (a division of Third Door Media), commissioned Sterling Market Intelligence to survey more than 150 companies in verticals ranging from travel and transportation to personal care services. Participants, who were polled in September, included national and regional advertisers, with marketing budgets ranging from less than $1 million to more than $100 million annually.
Nearly half of the marketers said they knew at least a quarter of their in-store sales could be attributed to their online marketing efforts. But while companies understand the correlation between their online campaigns and in-store sales, they are having problems deciding which traffic sources to use, how to best track their efforts, and even which metrics they should be tracking.
For example, almost 60% of marketers are using core search engines for their local campaigns, while about half are tapping into business directories. Around 40% of respondents said they were using localized search engines (such as local.com) and city guides or local review sites like Yelp and Citysearch. Roughly a third said they were using Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs), and a quarter said they were geotargeting their ads across various ad networks.
According to O’Keefe, the smorgasbord of tactics is a good thing, because marketers should not send all of their local online ad dollars to one channel. “You have to diversify your traffic beyond paid search,” he said. “Online campaigns are not just about search engines. There’s about 40% more high-quality, lead-generating inventory out there, and you’re missing out on it if you stick to just Google, Yahoo and MSN.”
O’Keefe said that marketers in search of local online advertising success should shift a percentage of their budgets to on-site SEO efforts and submissions to local search services, directory assistance and even the increasingly available swath of mobile inventory. “You can reduce your media spend by double digits, and increase leads exponentially,” he said.
In terms of gauging the success of those local campaigns, the primary metric is sales. Almost half of the respondents said they were using sales by location as an effectiveness barometer. But about 43% also said they were using visits to the corporate Web site as a success metric, and over a third of marketers said they were measuring calls to a local number, or visits to a local store. “Most companies are using a range of things to indicate whether or not a campaign is successful,” Sterling said. “And in a sense, that’s because there’s no single best metric.”
Marketers are also using a variety of ways to track those metrics, as roughly half of the respondents said they were using Web site analytics, call tracking or email programs. Meanwhile, a third of companies were using online forms or online appointments to track their online campaigns, and about 20% said they were using coupons.
“From traffic sources to metrics to tracking, companies are experimenting with a lot of things to see what works,” Sterling said. “Strategies and tactics are all over the place, because there’s a general absence of best practices.”
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October 2nd, 2008 elitani
by Vineetha Menon
A survey has revealed that UAE internet users have the second highest rate of membership of social networking sites in the world.
Research by market intelligence firm, Synovate - involving 13,000 people between the ages of 18 and 65 - showed the Gulf country was second only to the Netherlands, where 49 percent said they were members of sites like Facebook.
The UAE came second with 46 percent, ahead of Canada with 44 percent and the US on 40 percent, compared to a global average rate of 26 percent.
UAE social networkers also ranked among the most prolific, in terms of the amount of users who sign up for multiple social networks, and 37 percent of respondents in the UAE also said they have more friends online than in the real world.
Commenting on the figures, Synovate’s managing director for the UAE, George Christodoulides, said that the popularity of social networking in the country made sense. “It is a place that’s very connected to the world; a hub for cultures, business and people.
“These sites also offer a way for people to meet - online - in a society where traditionally men and women don’t always mix freely.”
Meanwhile, despite reports to the contrary, YouTube is still available online in Kuwait, although new instructions on blocking the site have been issued by authorities.
According to reports, the popular video sharing website was banned last week by the Ministry of Communications, although the site appeared to have been given a reprieve when the Minister was said to have rescinded the order after internal discussions.
Now, it is understood that the Ministry has issued a new order to “block certain specific links within Youtube.com”.
The official paper which has been circulated to ISPs, gives a five page list of specific URLs and key words that are to be blocked, mostly concerning sexual content.
Posted in Online Marketing- Middle East | No Comments »