Advocacy Through Social Media

I love talking about Digital Marketing. I had another opportunity to work with a group of Professionals through the World Affairs Council – this time from the Middle East: Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Palestinian Territories, Iraq (previous I’ve worked with teams from Peru and Kyrgyz Republic). Most of the participants were visiting the U.S. for the first time. I always learn a lot from these sessions. This group included journalists, social media professionals, influencers and advocates. Topic was Advocacy through Social Media.

What struck me most were the topics they wanted to dig into and the questions they had. We started with a “what do you want to learn” and the topics are very similar to what we deal with in the West: advocacy strategies, specific tactics, how to discuss difficult topics, measurement/effectiveness, tools/technologies and yes – AI.

The reality is that their “difficult topics” are so different from what we see. One question from a woman who works with restaurants in Palestinian Territory was “how can I share the food from a restaurant on social media, when there is famine next door.” It’s a much different context.

We talked about audience research (I introduced them to Spark Toro), creating lasting change (I highly recommend Switch – Change when Change is Hard book) and focusing on building strategy that is supported by tools and technology vs other way around.

The questions were MBA level quality, the engagement was phenomenal, the group was gracious. I had prepared materials for a three hour session not really knowing which direction it was going to take (here is a link to the deck) and I got to use maybe 20% of the slides. So many, really good questions – they definitely kept me on my toes.

Thank you Point B for hosting, @wacamerica for creating the opportunity, the interpreter (Arabic) for keeping up with my fast talking and the participants for visiting Seattle. #smallworld #weareallhuman

Side note. I tried rewriting this post with AI and it was platitude blather. So, not written with AI…