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The official announcement was made on April 22, 2012 in the Four Seasons Nile Plaza hotel with tens of attendees of technology reporters and journalists from major news papers and online news and technology portals in Egypt.

The event was held by: Marc Lambert – Managing Director of Yellow Media, Ahmed Hafez – Head of Sales in Google Egypt and North Africa, Lars Mourey – Director of Sales & Marketing in Yellow Media, and Mohamed Salah – Director of Digital Media in Yellow Media.

Marc Lambert, Ahmed Hafez and Mohamed Salah

Keynote of Ahmed Hafez - Head of Sales - Google Egypt and North Africa

Following the official launch event, a 2 day intensive training course was given to 200+ Yellow Media sales professionals by the Google Egypt team. Wael Fakharany - Regional Manager Egypt, and North Africa – Google gave a very insightful keynote speech about the success story of how he managed to transform Google Egypt from a country office that only had one individual (Wael Himself) to tens of millions of dollars in a few years.

Wael Fakharany - Regional Manager Egypt, and North Africa - Google: Keynote Speech to Yellow Media Sales Force

Yellow Media 200+ Media Solutions sales consultants attending Google AdWords training

To get a free consultation now, or to sign up for Google AdWords fully managed service by Yellow Media.

Karen Plumb, Commercial Director Business Listings EMEA, TripAdvisor

Travel review web sites and hotel reviews on online travel agencies are among the most influential forces most frequently cited by travelers when shopping. User generated content is so important and it is here to stay, it helps people to make their decisions,  TripAdvisor definitely takes the lead with more than 50 million unique monthly visitors, 20 million members, and over 50 million reviews and opinions. The sites operate in 30 countries worldwide containing 1 million+ hotel, restaurants and attractions in 90,000 destinations.

In this interview Karen Plumb shares with us in the power of TripAdvisor and the value it can bring  to businesses. Also Karen gives us insights about the new partnerships TripAdvisor is having with local search sites and directories to empower businesses.

Mohamed: Tell us a little bit about yourself?

Karen: I have a background in hotel marketing, having worked at both InterContinental and Thistle Hotels, where I held a variety of international eMarketing and International Marketing roles. I have also worked before in an online company at CheapFlights running the consumer email product and the hotel website, CheapAccommodation.com. I love working in the online travel environment and TripAdvisor is a great place to be.

Mohamed: How do you encourage users to post reviews? Do you run any sort of incentive programs that strengthen customer loyalty?

Karen: TripAdvisor has added badging to the site to recognize and acknowledge the contributions of our active community of reviewers. These badges serve as just one more way users can determine which reviews are most relevant to their trip-planning experience.

The first badge is given after three reviews and users that have contributed over 50 reviews receive a gold badge and a Top Contributor designation.

In our management centre, we provide owners with tools and widgets to encourage guests to write reviews following their stay.

Mohamed: Independent travelers value TripAdvisor as a research tool to find the best hotels that fit their needs and meet their budgets. Are you thinking about building a tool that would allow users to compare hotels to help them in the decision making?

 Karen: TripAdvisor is constantly searching for new ways to improve its websites to continue to help travellers plan and have the perfect trip. Users can search for hotels by relevant categories and read reviews by like-minded travellers to find the right hotel to suit their needs. Each review is also broken down into detail with travellers rating hospitality businesses on a number of factors, allowing users to make an informed decision during their holiday planning.

Mohamed: What’s your value proposition for the hotel owners? What types of hotels would benefit most by having a commercial business listing on TripAdvisor?

Karen: Whilst being listed on TripAdvisor is free for properties we offer the  Business Listings product to enables accommodation providers to add direct contact details on all TripAdvisor website domains as well as TripAdvisor’s mobile website to convert our highly qualified traffic into direct bookings.  . Accommodation providers can add their phone number, email address and website homepage to their listing as well as posting a special offer to gain additional attention

The benefit of a TripAdvisor Business Listing is that it is on a page where viewers come to look at guest ratings, reviews and photos of a specific property. According to a Forrester survey in 2007, 87% of consumers looking for hotels are influenced by reviews and want to read them before they book. If a hotel has put in the hard work to earn good reviews from their guests, a Business Listing will allow the hotel to capitalise on them.

Mohamed: Recently you have expanded in many new countries in the Middle East and have announced partnership with Yellow Medya in Turkey. How is this going to help both the hotel owners and the end users in Turkey?

Karen: Yellow Medya will be integrating TripAdvisor onto all of its platforms, including online and mobile. By doing so, users of Yellow Medya platforms will have access to TripAdvisor reviews and opinions for accommodations, restaurants, attractions and all hospitality businesses currently listed on TripAdvisor websites.   In addition in the coming months Yellow Medya are helping TripAdvisor populate our database to ensure that every tourism business in Turkey is represented and can benefit from the global coverage TripAdvisor can offer.

Yellow Medya will also be offering a TripAdvisor Business Listings Programme, encouraging accommodation businesses in Turkey to adopt the Business Listings product.

We believe adoption of Business Listings within the Turkish hospitality industry will help businesses gain more visibility in front of our large community of travellers.

Mohamed: What is the most requested feature by the users that is not ready yet on TripAdvisor? What are the new things that you are introducing to TripAdvisor in 2012?

Karen: Earlier this year, TripAdvisor launched a new integration with Facebook that instantly personalizes the site for each person who visits, surfacing trusted reviews from friends, most popular destinations among friends, and an interactive social map.

Now when travelers come to TripAdvisor websites, while logged into Facebook, they will see the activities their friends have shared first, helping them to make more informed decisions when planning their own trip.

In addition our award winning mobile site and apps are becoming increasingly popular enabling travelers to research their trip whilst on the move.

Want to learn more about this subject? Visit TripAdvisor for Business Blog where there are lots of information on how accommodation providers can get the most out of TripAdvisor.

About TripAdvisor:

TripAdvisor® is the world’s largest travel site, enabling travelers to plan and have the perfect trip. TripAdvisor offers trusted advice from real travelers and a wide variety of travel choices and planning features (including Flights search, TripAdvisor Mobile and TripAdvisor Trip Friends) with seamless links to booking tools.

Think about the effort and cost needed to maintain your own database. Thousands of businesses open, close, or relocate every month. This is the opportunity where what is offered by Yellow Pages is exactly the need of all these applications and services.

Egypt Yellow Pages is no exception, the integration between Egypt Yellow Pages database and their partners is becoming a key strength for many of these applications making use of the most complete business database in Egypt covering over 220,000 listings and 170,000 map locations.

Here is the ECO-SYSTEM of Egypt Yellow Pages

I’ll go through the details of each of these systems and partnerships in future posts.

6,393,080 people

How did i know these stats? There is a very simple trick to know this number yourself… Go to the advertising link at the bottom of the FB page, click on create ad button, then you will get a page at which you can specify your targeting options…

Make sure to select the date Any-to-Any and the country Egypt, which should be selected by default if you live there. Wait for a few seconds and then you will see on the right side of the page the up to date total number of Facebook users in Egypt. The total number of users is now:

I knew nothing about insurance so i contacted one insurance agent, his name is Mahmoud, who can give me an advice on which kind insurance fits me, there are basically 3 kinds of  insurance companies in Egypt: governmental, private and banks… Well, Mahmoud did a great job on teaching me the pros and cons of each kind of these companies, he got me offers with numbers from a bunch of them…. and he made his recommendation to me… of course i haven’t taken his words for granted but i did some more research by myself to reach the same conclusion that he recommended to me…

My final decision was to go with governmental insurance for a company that Mahmoud works for. Paying a yearly installment for the next 20 years… having chosen this installment to be small enough not to affect me under bad economy or whatsoever was a wise decision.

I have to pay my next installment on May, i only have 30 days to pay, if i’m late for 15 more days i pay a penalty, if i’m still late i my insurance is dropped and i have to re-active it again… Having know this i asked Mahmoud last year that i would like to pay my yearly installment on March of every year rather than May… why would i wait and put myself in this situation.

But now things are different right? the economy is not so good and people are afraid to spend money, so it is better to keep my cash until next May, perhaps until the end of may to utilize my time allowance until its end… Why would i pay now early 2 month in these current conditions? That’s probably what a typical sales guy would think. Right? Would he have the nerves to call me now and ask me to make my installment payment 2 month earlier? but guess what he did…

One day i came to the office and found that Mahmoud has left me his business card a couple of days ago when i was out of town and asked me to call him. When i called him he told me that he has lost all his contacts and he is trying to reach them by dropping off his business card to their work places… and he asked me whether i am still willing to pay my installment 2 months earlier as agreed… and guess what? i told him yes i am willing… there is no point in waiting, since i will have to make the payment anyway. He was a bit surprised himself… and he was happy of course, collections means bonus for him…

did he say “Why would i bother and call him now? the situation is not clear now… let’s wait until May” or “I lost his number, i am sure he is gonna call me back to pay at may or to cancel, i won’t bother myself finding his number again”

It is really small things that does matter… and in our struggling economy, good salesmen can have their companies economy rolling back again and in turn help the economy of their countries… People can just choose sit and assume and do the “WHAT-IF” analysis and do nothing… or they move and work hard to achieve their goals… Assumption is the mother of all screwups

This is one thing that makes the difference between a salesman and a good salesman…

Hosted in the Four Seasons Nile Plaza in garden city, more than 40 communications media specialists, editors and journalists covered the event that was attended by Egypt Yellow Pages strategic partners: Ministry of state of administrative development – e-Government, Nokia/Navteq, Al Masry Al Youm and Akhbarak.net

The event started with the keynote from Marc Lambert, managing director of Egypt Yellow Pages. The speech was so insightful, Marc explained how our strategic partners will help us enhance the local search services on more platforms by making it available through our partners sites and in the same time focusing on offering location based services which is the future of the local search…

Marc Lambert giving his keynote in the event

I had the opportunity then to present some figures and insights about our achievements in 2010, which ended up with us having more than 175,000 business listing in our database out of which 115,000 are geocoded. At the time i am writing this blog post, we have about 180,000 listings and approaching 120,000 geocoded listings… 2010 was also a year that witnesses tripling our website traffic from 400,000 visits per month to over 1.2 million visits, a truly new milestone for local search in Egypt.

Mohamed Salah, Director Digital Media, Egypt Yellow Pages presentation about insights and search trends in Egypt for 2010

Our partners were the ones who presented our strategic partnership details to the media, the following were representatives of  our partners:

Mathia Nalappan, General Manager – North Africa, Nokia
Phil McKinnon, Head Of Marketing – North Africa, Nokia
Mohamed Abd El-Jalil, Head Of Solutions Sales – North Africa, Nokia
Sahar Afia, Project Manager – Government Services Development Program, Ministry Of State For Administrative Development
Kismet EL-Sayed, Shareholder / Business Development Director, Al-Masry Al-Youm
Osman Ahmed Osman, Founder, Akhbarak.Net

Here are more photos from the event

Osman Ahmed Osman, Sahar Afia, Marc Lambert, Mohamed Abd El-Jalil, and Kismet El-Sayed

Lars Morey (Director Of Sales, Yellow Pages Egypt), Phil McKinnon (Head Of Marketing – North Africa, Nokia) and Mathia Nalappan (General Manager – North Africa, Nokia)

Journalists and reporters attending the Yellow Pages event

Kismet El-Sayed, Shareholder / Business Development Director, Al-Masry Al-Youm

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who attended the event and made it successful

A world of tweets is a a twitter heat map developed based on sampling from Twitter API, according to the geographical area. So i tried to monitor Egypt, at a time that is expected to be a high peak, it’s 8:45 PM, and Egypt has just beaten Australia 3:0, so i guess many people would like to tweet about the big win of Egyptian national team and the goals of Zidan and Gedo!

I kept the page open for 10 minutes and i was surprised that there was no activity on Egypt area, even though there is activity in some gulf and middle east countries (i wouldn’t say MENA region, since there is no activity in North Africa) like Saudi Arabia and UAE, some African countries like Nigeria, South Africa and Even Liberia!

Twitter heat map just after Egypt Match – No activity in Egypt

3 minutes later i was able to barely spot Egypt, with very little traffic apparently.

Twitter Activity 3 minutes later – Egypt can be seen

Twitter in Egypt is not yet a big thing, i am not saying it is not magnificent, it is indeed a mean of communication used by the blogger and activists, some politician and some major companies and brands in Egypt. However, it has not reached the point where you would find3 or 4 of your 300 or 400 Facebook friends have an account on twitter.

Well, that make my estimate, twitter has 1/100 or less of the number of users Facebook has, Facebook has in Egypt about 4 million users, that makes roughly 40,000 twitter users, …. wonder how of them are active and how much created a twitter account and said: “This is my first tweet” or said something like “I am having Pizza for lunch” and then never used their account again because they didn’t get the idea of it.

Let’s wait and see how things go, but i don’t think twitter in Egypt is taking off any soon. Though i am very proud of the 1,250 twitter follower that Egypt Yellow Pages have today. Putting in mind that our activity is relatively low on twitter, sending tweets a couple of times a week.

Egypt Yellow Pages Twitter Followers

That said, all respects goes to the the active twitter user base who where able to do positive changes, like the pressure that was done on Vodafone Egypt to remove their Abbas Ibn Fernas Ad, which was removed from Vodafone Egypt Official YouTube channel recently. If you want to read more about this topic just login to twitter and search for #VodaFly.

Do you think my estimates are accurate? More or less than the reality? Do you have the real numbers for twitter number of users in Egypt? if you do please share your opinion here.

Update:

One more argument that supports my estimate, is that Vodafone Egypt has about 467,000 fans on Facebook opposed to 6,139 on Twitter (who remained after the #VodaFly incident of course), 1/76, close to my estimate. probably the number of twitter users in Egypt is  50,000 users after all.

Also found a very interesting related article, they assumed that the number of twitter users in Egypt is 2,000 which is wrong,  Vodafone Egypt has more than 6,139 followers!… Here is the part i liked:

However, in Egypt Twitter seems not to have caught on, something that can be explained by an understanding of the special nature of network markets, as discussed in Economics by MIT and Yale professors Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus. In their book, the authors argue that “consumers derive benefits not simply from their own use of a good in a network market, but also from the number of other consumers who adopt the good,” known in economics as “adoption externality”.

Read this article from Al Ahram Weekly

Turkey Yellow Pages Partners with Navteq and Nokia

Turkey Yellow Pages signed a 5 year strategic deal to supply business listing information to NAVTEQ and Nokia global mapping platforms. This is the kind of partnerships that the giant mapping provider Navteq and Nokia are looking for. In these days, the mapping technologies have reached a new level, GPS became a major component in any mobile phone, not less important than a camera. Most new cars are already equipped with in-car navigation systems. Detailed maps are now available for almost anywhere in the planet. Without a detailed map a GPS would be useless.

So the equation that stood for some time was:

GPS + Detailed Maps = Know your way

Now this equation has totally changed, having access to hundreds of thousands of locations for hotels, restaurants, shops, gas stations, hospitals, …. definitely means much more. It means you do not need to worry any more about finding a place you want to go to.. All what you need is to decide what you want to do, and the where or how is not a problem anymore.

The new equations is

GPS + Detailed Maps + Business Listing Locations = Find your destination

It is so exciting now that Turkey Yellow Pages data will power up Nokia OviMaps which were offered for free a few days ago.  Nokia OviMaps is now one of the most convenient mobile maps that you could use, not only because it is free now, it’s technology has changed from raster images into vector maps so the application can be downloaded locally to your mobile from Ovi App Store, and it’s size is no more than 8 MB. This includes all the maps installed on your local mobile, no need to keep downloading images from the internet.

Back in late 2006, when we developed our Nokia Mobile Search plug-in for Egypt, UAE and KSA Yellow Pages we were so delighted about it, it was a breakthrough for the use of the mobiles in our daily life to find a restaurant or a hotel on the move. One and half years later Nokia decided to drop support for their Mobile Search applications. Their insights were toward mobile maps. Now here comes OviMaps, the new amazing free Nokia mobile mapping platform and again powered by Yellow Pages, the most trusted local search provider as always.

So stay tuned for the upcoming updates from OviMaps which Turkey Yellow Pages will power up its data soon…

]]> http://mohamed-salah.com/2010/01/27/turkey-yellow-pages-partners-with-navteq-and-nokia/feed/ 1 mohsalah Turkey Yellow Pages Partners with Navteq and Nokia Nokia Mobile Search Nokia Ovi Maps http://mohamed-salah.com/2009/12/07/online-media-dominates-traditional-media/ http://mohamed-salah.com/2009/12/07/online-media-dominates-traditional-media/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:32:00 +0000 mohsalah http://mohamed-salah.com/?p=82 ]]> Since Q4 2008 it is know that SMB’s use the traditional media and online media equally. Now things has changed. Many SMB’s use electronic media more than the traditional forms.

Very interesting numbers from Kelsey Group

I created a campaign for the Egyptian stock market section that we launched at Yellow Pages, i thought it could use some more traffic. I followed the guidelines and chosen my words and the minimum bidding CPC that google recommends for each word to appear in a good place in the search results page and in the Google partner network websites that are relevant to that topic. After this i specified the daily budget that i want which was 2$ per day that i reduce later to 1$ when i was about to run out of credit later

Here are some words i have chosen that were approved by google as good traffic words: Egyptian stock market, Egyptian stock market news, Egyptian Bursa, EGX30 prices, Talaat Mostafa Stocks, Mobinil Stocks, ….

CPC was pretty cheap, $0.05 for Egyptain Stock Market, some words were cheaper other words were more expensive…. I’m just gonna focus here on this word…

So everything was set and i got around 80 hits on the first day of campaign July 16th 2009.. The larger portion was coming from Google network website not from Google search results page but it doesn’t matter… very nice, i though i just put this to bed… but i was wrong.. look at the below:

On 17 July, hits dropped to 25, so i opened the control panel to see what was wrong, if found that google suggest me to change the CPC bid amount to $0.07 for Egyptain Stock Market instead of $0.05. I did that and here we go again, hits reached 80′s again.

On 21 July and 27 July, I had to re-adjust the CPC again and again until it reached $0.21 which seemed after this that it was not enough… I just started to give up, i can’t keep monitoring this way on aday to day basis… I have other more important stuff to do than adjusting some keywords CPC… I took a look after a while and i found that the CPC recommeneded by google Passed the $1.10 margin!!

I was paying 5 cents for a keyword and getting good traffic. Now i am paying 21 cents and hardly getting any traffic.. Then i was expected to pay one dollar for each click!! All the credit i have (60$) and was planning to use for one month would now evaporate in one day.

I don’t really understand the pattern, what happened during these 2 weeks that raised the bid amount for Egyptain Stock Market from 5 cents to 1 dollar?? is it really people paying more in that word suddenly, does it make any sense that no one was interested in this word at all and all in a sudden everyone wants it?? or was this some way Google AdWords drag their customers to invest more and more by offering words for a little price at the begining and then gradually increasing the value until it reaches the market amount? i don’t really know but i know 2 things for sure:

1.  I don’t like PPC model, too much complicated.
2. Normal end users and SME would find it extremely difficult to manage this on their own unless provided to them by an advertising agency that manages their account. Putting in mind also the special needs of customers in the middle east and that they would rather have someone do these things for them instead of doing it themselves because it is too “technical”. Self provisioning and PPC model might not be the best advertising solution for MEA region.

The Yellow Pages time-based contractual model is simple, efficient and easy. If you compare it to PPC model it is also much more cost-effective.

The advertising services that we offer are based on the contract time, which is one year. It does not depend on the number of impression or hits the investors get. This issue whether we should move to the model of Pay Per Click (PPC), Cost Per Click (CPC), and Pay Per Call (PPCall) are always under consideration.

So which model is better? which model suits the customers in our middle east region? what model would suit SME’s better which makes the greater proportion of the Yellow Pages advertisers in middle east and worldwide?

I will try to answer these questions..