The Middle East Media Guide book compiled by Ben Smalley lists 100 PR shops based in the UAE alone for 2009! This ofcourse excludes a few advertising agencies who are more and more intruding into the PR business!

There are more "bad people" in PR than good and they are hindering the progress of the profession and diffusing its power.

Sadly, this makes the sailing really rocky to raise the bar of the PR industry in the region and it harms all efforts made in this aspect.

The question that arises here is how many of these agencies are practicing an effective PR exercise as an integral discipline to other marketing communications vehicles?

Also, another key point here, I think advertising agencies should admit it that they can’t deliver PR as a minor activity in their marketing campaigns.

I don't recommend marketing budgets which horrifyingly buy all sorts of bells and whistles. Our major marketing successes as PR agencies should merely come from engaging public relations to drive desired business outcomes.

Agencies should shape up or ship out. The key success factors to lead in the PR industry are transparency, credibility, responsibility, measurability and most significantly quality and professionalism. While there is a huge demand for strategic corporate communications counsel, the majority of the PR agencies are still offering shallow PR tactics.

Facebook Patent: Facebook awarded major patent by US Patent and Trademark Office

Facebook filed a patent claim on August 11, 2006 for what is now called the newsfeed patent, which was awarded on February 23, 2010. Commentators are calling this the single-most significant patent since the Six Degrees patent, which had its fair share of drama. So, what is so significant in this patent? It is vastly broad and open to interpretation. Twitter's future comes to mind and according to Nick O'Neill Facebook are claiming that this does not apply to status updates, instead it is about implicit actions and stories that a user is engaged in. Implicit actions?

I have seen many Twitter HOWTO's and Guides, but I have yet to come across one that shows consumers how they can get the attention of brands/products. We have all been busy talking about how we can talk to consumers, how we can engage with them.. which is all great, but we seem to forget that just like marketers, a lot of these social media tools are new to consumers as well. After all, we are all consumers.

Being on the monitoring end of things, I hope that I can give some insights to how brands see the world and how you, the consumer, can make your voice better heard. The most important thing you need to know is this: good brands are really trying to listen.

Give your opinion weight

Yahoo's acquisition of Maktoob posed an interesting challenge to Google, whose approach has been slow and calculated. The truth of the matter is, there are millions of Arabic-speaking Internet users who are not interested in English-based content. So, Yahoo bought their way in.

Google appears to have gone their own way and decided to build their own base. The Egyptian Egabat (egabat.google.com) is the answer. As a product, it is completely uninteresting. It offers nothing that is new or exciting, except that it is an Arabic-only product. In fact, it's so Arabic it's Egyptian.

Now I understand that Google recruits a lot of their Middle East staff from Egypt, but the Egyptian branding of their first Arabic-only product is curious, to put it mildly. It is either Google doesn't understand the region or that their staff are taking this as an opportunity to highlight Egypt's importance in the region.

The Yahoo! acquisition of Maktoob.com has been hailed as a new dawn for the IT sector. A new dot-com boom set to explode in the Middle East! Some are even perplexed by the media's rather uncaring take on the deal (the amount of coverage received not as much as they would like to think). While it is always good to see money pumping in the Middle East for any sector, I just don't see everyone in the world coming down here and buying out companies.

Yahoo! has no interest in, perhaps, Maktoob's most innovative product, araby.com. The only thing that interested Yahoo! is the overwhelming number of eyeballs Maktoob managed to amass throughout the region. While it is a clever way to make yourself attractive for an acquisition, it isn't exactly the pinnacle of innovation.

So, let us please not go overboard with self-congratulations that is so typical of the region without actually looking at what is happening around us.