In a session entitled Research And Case Studies in Social Media, ArabNet brought together representatives from four different regional social media agencies to present case studies resulting from their works with their clients. Here is what we have to keep in mind from those presentations:

In a presentation entitled “Tweeting Falafel”, Fadi Malas (CEO of Just Falafel) claimed that his food chain was doing really well on Facebook to the point that their activity on the social network allowed them to sell 700 franchises around the world rolling out over the next five years. It was thus time to start a new step and start a Twitter presence. Fadi Khater, representing the digital agency of JF Netizency, said that the main goal of the Twitter activity was to make people “socially hungry”. Khater offered a quite interesting figure: 10% of sales fluctuation of falafels in January 2013 is accounted for by Twitter ad spend variation. It would be interesting to know how they did the calculations.

After presenting case studies showing the latest digital campaigns of Axe Middle East by Digital Republic, the agency founder and CEO Karim Khalifa talked about three important factors to drive engagement:

1. Being part of a community.
2. Having a platform where your community can compete.
3. Keeping it simple – “Simple is the new wow” said Khalifa.

In a case study about the social media presence of Touch Lebanon handled by the Cleartag digital agency, Nadim Khater CCO of the telecom operator and Omar Abou Ezzedine deputy general manager of the agency presented a series of 11 lessons:

1. Create a brand that empowers consumers.
2. Turn social media into a channel.
3. Co-create through social media.
4. Encourage innovation through social media.
5. Build the proper digital team.
6. Build the digital brand pyramid. (Tone of Voice, Attitude, Values and  Promise)*
7. Build the digital guidelines.
8. Build the content strategy.
9. Evaluate yourself.
10. Compare.
11. Know the don’ts

*In the case of Touch Lebanon, Cleartag presented the following brand pyramid: Tone of Voice – Transparent, Friendly, Solution Oriented, Straightforward, Entertaining / Attitude – Professional, Swift, Innovative / Values – Customer-Centric, Available / Promise – A New World.)

Marc Dfouni, co-founder and CEO of Eastline Marketing, gave a presentation about social media for retails in which he presented six learnings:

1. Online, brand owners do not own the brand. The fans own the brand.
2. You should care less about the brand’s needs and follow consumer needs.
3. To increase your digital campaign’s success, your strategy should cater to the brand’s online community.
4. An online strategy can only be optimized by analyzing the data generated by the fans online behavior.
5. Use this data to decide about new channels, type of activations, communication and targeted ads that your fans will engage with.
6. They claim: Social Media does not drive direct sales. While 75% of marketers consider measurement of social media impact important, 70% say that measuring those results is difficult.