Arif asks,

What is the best platform for having a continuing conversation – would it be Facebook?

.

The short answer: It depends. It depends on what your trying to do, who you’re trying to do it for, and on what platform they’re on.

A better question to ask is, “What’s my reason behind having a continuing conversation?”

Will having a continuing conversation help you  create opportunities that you can seize to help others reach a goal, all the while, establishing and maintaining a reputation of being the best in doing just that? If so, then you should ask, “what platform is best for creating those opportunities?

Lets take an example of three known names and how they’ve approached communication platforms to create opportunities to accomplish business goals.
Read the rest of this post »

As you may have noticed, I’ve done some redecorating.

I took away some of the clutter, made the design into a full width layout allowing more content visibility and moved links to recent blog posts to the bottom. I’ve also added a nifty Easing Slider to feature my latest work, which tends to get buried in all the blog posts.

In the process of redecoration, I discovered Dynamic WordPress widgets which allowed me to feature some plugins and widgets on specific pages while not on others. This made it easy for me to feature the slider on the homepage only while not on the other pages.

Those who visit this site often, will notice that the pop-up for email subscription that used to come up after 1 min of browsing now appears only in the beginning and will not appear again if you click it to go away.

As progress is made, I’ll be making some more tweaks here and there as we move along. If you have any suggestions or usability issues, feel free to post in the comments section below

I’m considering starting a web video series that would start off covering some of the content taught in the seminar in video form over the coming weeks on MessageMastery.com. To make this interesting, in the comments below, go ahead post what you’d like me to cover specifically.

–

“I guess extremest have rights too.”

- Seminar Attendee

–

This statement explains why its not that easy combating “recruitment” from extremists.

About a month ago Farhad Chowdhury from M100 Foundation sent me an invite to attend a seminar organized by New America Foundation in Washington D.C. hosted at Google’s office

The intent of the seminar was to train leading Muslim non-profits in the tools and processes of online marketing, covering tools provided by Google, YouTube and Facebook as a means of combating increased extremist online activity.

A big part of being effective in marketing online and building a loyal following has to do with continuously giving value to the community you’re targeting.

The challenge with combating content posted/uploaded by post-prison Anwar Alawlaki fans is that they have the same rights and privileges and access that we all have.

Anwar Alawlaki is one of those individuals who has plenty of beneficial content from his pre-prison days that continuously builds social capital. So if someone were to post a video of him saying attack certain people and how its an obligation for all Muslims, it has potential of pulling some people in the wrong direction.

Muslims here in the west have the interesting challenge of not only having to combat religious extremists, but also combat extremists on the other side of the spectrum too. The likes such as Robert Spencer, Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji, Daniel Pipes, Newt Gingrich, Pamela Geller and others.

People on both sides of the spectrum are using online marketing practices to get their message across quite effectively.

The thing with Muslims in the middle is that they have a lot of beneficial content to share but don’t understand technical tools or practices of getting their message out and its for that reason this seminar was held.

One of the prime examples that a Google instructor presented was MPAC. When you type “MPAC” into Google, you don’t find MPAC. Instead you find either a “performing arts center” in some city or you find content written by right wing extremists. If you’re going to search for your name on Google, YOU should come up. If you don’t then you’re not marketing yourself appropriately.

MPAC also has a decent YouTube page with over 100 videos, but due to bad SEO, no one gets to see it.

The following is an outline of what Google presented to the seminar attendees.

Some of these tools are quite powerful if you know how to use them. I was intrigued to find out that Google has a program called “Google Grants” where if you’re a tax excempt 501(c)3 while not being either a political party or a religious institution such as a church or mosque, then you can be eligible for free Ad Words credits between $100 – $10,000 a month.

In addition to Google, YouTube and Facebook were there presenting their systems too and how to effectively read the metrics they publish for their users to reach out to specific target audiences. Below is the YouTube insights view.

Personally, while most of the stuff was a refresher, some of the Google content was new.

I personally don’t like to get into the politics of extremeism. However, I do find that the content presented in the seminar can be useful in dawah and depolarization of views on Islam.