Social Media, the tool to solving Tourism Crisis in Egypt

Last week, in a cozy meeting room in an awesome small villa, in Nasr City, the luxurious Hotels’ Group Team got our E-marketing Workshop.

Over the past year, thanks to the 25 Jan. revolution, the importance of Social Media Networks and their role in Marketing has been highly recognized. So, the professional Egyptian corporates and their elegant clientele began to accept the idea of “Professional Marketing Campaigns” over social media networks.

On the other hand, after the revolution, Tourism in Egypt has been harshly affected, especially due to the spread in the perception of danger and insecurity that propagated in foreign News Coverage. Therefore, a twist in that impression wanted to be targeted. Social Media is considered to be the most suitable Marketing tool, applicable in such case; not only for its global reach, but also for the true engagement with customers.

Savoy management quickly recognized the key to New-Generation Marketing and the necessity for utilization of Social Media to serve Savoy’s Marketing objectives and contacted Interact for a professional E-marketing Training Workshop to be given to its marketing Team to maintain its international standard.

Savoy Hotels Group, the holding company of Royal Savoy, Savoy Sharm El-Sheikh, Savoy Club, Sierra and Soho Square, the 2011 World’s Leading Dive Resort according to World Travel Awards and the Middle East’s Top Relaxation/Spa Resort according to tripadvisor.

The Workshop started with a day of E-marketing concepts and strategies. Then, a day focusing on Savoy’s online identity in terms of the website and social networks to analyze the current situation and set the required goals. This day was also devoted to practical training on each social network on its own; especially facebook & twitter.

Lastly, a session about E-mail marketing, followed by case studies for hotels that utilized E-marketing in their business and that boomed their sales. Finally, we had a contest and the winner, Nevine Adel (@Floofella) was handed an Interact gift and all participants were handed their training certificates.

This workshop got a very positive feedback specially over the #SharmOnline Hashtag that the team created and managed to interact on it themselves. That’s really FUN!!!

 

Entrepreneurship is not difficult as long as you are able to meet your challenges!

In a casual setting at Innoventures’ Office, we had our first and long awaited meetup for Egypt Startups, technology entrepreneurs (anybody with vision or product for web or mobile), online experts, gurus as well as entrepreneurship supporters like mentors & consultants to discuss the current entrepreneurial challenges in Egypt that slows down entrepreneurial inventions.

Therefore, to meet your challenges event started with successful entrepreneurial cases through inspirational mini-speeches by 3 entrepreneurs who managed their way through those challenges. Those mentors were Abdellatif Olama, CEO of Dear’n’Deal, Abdelrahman Wahba, CEO of Iqraaly and Hady Ahmed, CEO of Tabshoura that are three successful businesses in the Egyptian market that started with an entrepreneurial initiativve.Then, we had a group game for identifying the challenges, announced a mini-contest of “Meetup tweetmaster” and finally had Q&A session with open discussion.

Every small Business meets some obstacles at their Baby-phase, where you are now. That’s not because you lack experience but may be because you miss the know-how. Sometimes you waste your time trying start the whole business from scratch while you can save your time, energy, resources and creativity to adding10% to a 90% that already exists out there. This 90/10 rule was explained by Olama who said that the asset is where you end not where you start. So, one can borrow 90% from an already-existing idea and add to it his/her 10% that take already to a completely different level.

Peer and family pressures telling you, “you are young, you can’t do it”, shan’t be listened to. For, Hady all surrounders weren’t supportive but weren’t believing his young age, 21 years, can do him any help. However, he didn’t give attention to that and established his successful “Tabshoura”, middle-man market linking designers to designers’ hiring agencies.

The main 5 challenges discussed were the funding, business planning, marketing activities, sales management, and lack of resources. To reach a fair focus for the meetup, a game was run to indicate the main common challenge that met the majority of Startups. The game was as follows; 5 boards were hung on the wall with a challenge written on each, sticky notes were distributed on participants to stick their problem to the problem-related challenge.  The conclusion was that funding and business planning contributed to the majority of challenges.

To guarantee broader reach of coach-needy entrepreneurs, the meetup was also live streamed and live tweeted by Interact, attendees and online followers, who asked questions and interact shared their questions within the meetup and tweeted them back the answers. By the end of the meetup, we announced 3 winners for our mini-contest “Meetup Tweetmaster”, who won an exclusive training session for entrepreneurial skills. To gain more benefit and broader vision over entrepreneurs in Egypt, you can see the event’s pictures and watch interviews with the speakers.