Blogs - Social Media

So you're a geek, and you live in your own bubble world where Google is your religion, and Steve Jobs is God, huh ? Well there's both good news and bad news for ya. Bad news first - your bubble is about to burst. Good news - you've got company... of fellow nerds, and it’s one big crowd.

Social Media is here to stay and not just that, its going to drive us nuts. That's what's in.

Social media was about social networks and communities online, until now. The whole damn thing is moving offline, making sure you burst your bubble (no wrong ideas please). Doesn't make sense ? Let's put things in to perspective.

Twitter, Facebook is cool, but not cool enough. This time around the cool quotient requires you to take it offline, make friends with real people (yeah, real people) like you did on the networks. Not easy that one (or may be not), but that's where it’s headed.

For example, the new thing in town is something called foursquare, that sits in your mobile device, tracks where you go and requires you to check in to food joints and hotels to earn “points”. Points - did you hear that? Points, like in video games, yeah. And you were busy playing farmville huh ?

And there are more apps coming our way and they're bound to pull you from online to the offline world. Hollrr - a new app that lets you show off your favorite brands on your social networks is a signal that the "real world" is finding a bite somewhere in your social presence. Check it out !

Gowalla, another social networking site is already making the buzz, with its unique and fun way that lets you "play" gowalla, by marking places you go, things you carry, things you do etc and earning you points for each. Crazy it is but what's crazier is that people are already using it big time. It’s like they're gauging your offline presence, making it cool and taking a bite out of it for a trade off.

This should go on as long as it’s fun, and that's the crux of it all - fun. So long as any dumb idea is wrapped into a cool, enjoyable, simple, fun-like product, people are going to devour it. Well, "dumb" may be a strong word, but the reality is that they're all unique ideas executed well. Wait, we're getting carried away.

The thing I was trying to explain is that social media is not any longer about online networking alone. It’s a base where from many cool stuff is gonna start off, right from your cell phone. They call it “location based services” (as if we needed another fancy term, but that's web 3.0 for ya !). These apps are going to make you build your life around it, it’s going to be your social security number. It’s going to be you.

What you got to do is get a good mobile (or wait for the all new iPhone 4 a few more months), install all these apps in there, and start using it like crazy. Because, that's the new buzz, that's what's cool this season. Remember, the first guy to move in, always get the advantage. BTW, get out of farmville, 'cos its a losers game kid.

In an interview with digital marketing website Click Dubai, Flip Media's CEO Yousef Tuqan Tuqan discusses his career, managing growth at Flip Media, and how the marketing industry has shaped up in 2009 in the wake of the credit crunch.

“ The complete collapse of the real estate sector left many of us without some of our largest clients (and their unpaid invoices), and we’ve all had to work harder than ever to win new business, drive growth from our existing clients and seriously rethink how we do business. It’s been a very hard year for everyone, and no one in our sector has been untouched. We’ve seen some of the best agencies in our sector either fold or significantly downsize.

Thankfully, we have been able to retain over 90% of our staff this year, and have grown our client portfolio to include some of the most exciting new brands in the region. As a digital agency in the Middle East, we’ve always had to work with small budgets and do “more with less,” so I’d like to think that we were better prepared for this than some of the more traditional regional agencies."

You can read the full article on Click Dubai here.