The Washington Post reports on the curious case of The New York Times reporter, Jodi Rudoren, who has been given her own social media minder who will be looking at every Tweet and Facebook status update that she writes to check and edit them before sending.

We all know that social media can be tricky and that its instantaneous nature can cause huge issues for us all, which is a problem considering how essential Twitter has become to most working journalists today. There have been cases of journalists Tweeting in haste and suffering Twitter storms at length. It has in the worst cases proved the undoing of some journalists. Read More »

There have been a few posts cropping up these last few months on how social media sites are dealing with controversial content that is coming out of the uprisings in the Middle East be it graphic in nature or highly partisan. It is a tricky issue.

Of all the topics in the Middle East right now there has never been one that is more combustible than Israel. Now Facebook has bowed to complaints from Israeli government officials and Jewish groups in the US and taken down a group run by Palestinian supporters. Read More »

There is a lot of this going around. Reporters sacked for making comments on blogs and social networks. The latest is CNN, following The Washington Post and The Age, which has parted company with Middle Eastern affairs editor, Octavia Nasr, after she tweeted a controversial message of support for Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. Read More »

Think you have a marketing challenge?  Consider then the task of marketing lingerie in Saudi Arabia.  Not only is it strictest state in the Middle East when it comes to ‘morality’ laws, you have the odd situation of only men being allowed to sell underwear to women – something that has prompted a boycott campaign.

As reported in the latest edition of Middle East marketing trade magazine Communicate, the solution for brands has been to publish their ads online and have them forwarded virally.   

For example, one creative put forward last year by Ogilvy on behalf of Danish lingerie and swimwear brand Change
poked fun at the censorship laws in the region, which results in
Western magazines arriving with black felt tip marks over images
considered too revealing.

Using taglines such as ‘censor anything but the bikini’ and ‘edit
anything but the bra’, the whole body of a model was covered up with
marker pens except the hands and face.

The campaign was deemed too close to the bone to run as an above the
line campaign, but it did appear as in-store POS material, and went
online.

According to Mazen Hassan, creative director of Ogilvy Jeddah, “We submitted it to several local and international blogs,
and it was a huge success. Ladies used to e-mail me telling me they
really liked it and that they thought it was really smart, because it
bends the rules in an acceptable way.”

Essentially the digital arena is one of the few areas where women can get up close to brands with relative freedom.

According to Milos Illic of TBWA / Raad Dubai, which also covers the
Saudi market and handles rival lingerie brand Nayomi, digital is a “fantastic
opportunity…customers could interact with the brand, immerse
themselves in it. They could do wonders in Saudi with digital.”

Working in the Saudi market as a marketing creative is obviously
challenging especially if you come from a Western ‘anything goes’
environment, but I imagine it’s one that forces you to think harder of
ways to get around the various barriers, with online being key to that.

As the Communicate article says: “With
the Internet allowing for more creative freedom, digital could prove a
highly effective bypass route for the Saudi advertising market”, and slowly push the boundaries.