Back on Track – A New Online Phase

Hi All,

I had to start a new phase of my online communication or – in other words – get back to the plan in which this blog and other activities started.

Getting connected to online groups for a long time or investing emotional energy within it proved to be the easiest way to waste your time, value, dignity and emotional energy.

I stood in amazement of the reactions and implications had been directed to me within an online community on Twitter after expressing who am I and even after some agrees to what I said. Giving no reactions to offenses directed to their “brother” but involving in it and making fun of him with whatever way possible; could never be an acceptable behavior – at least not for me.

While the internet provides a valuable platform to initiate valuable friendships and build interesting communities, its tools give a wide spectrum of possibilities to cover behind it and stab people from behind in an extremely unethical way and still – no one will know, we’re just having fun!

Seeing how a tiny situation can expose the substance of some people, was extremely clear to me the last few days. I must always remember the talk I had with Adel Nada about classifications of ethics: essential ethics, social ethics and religious ethics and how evaluating our relationships with people should be based on the understanding of the difference between them. Lived it and saw it in absolute details!

Religious ethics is presenting ourselves as religious individuals using some phrases, expressions and models of behavior that’s known within a community to express a religious belief/belonging/habits. Just like using “alhamdulillah”, “God bless you brother”, “Pray for me” and such.

How easily could such patterns of behavior be faked? Or not faked, but not to be a true expression of who that person truly is. While doubting people’s intentions is a red line should never be crossed at any case, we proceed in our relationships with people according to the behavior we see. Religious ethics is not the basis in which you should build your relationships offline or online.

Social ethics is adhering to the standard, acceptable behavior within a community and care about your “persona” or how you look to people, how you position yourself within a community and accordingly adhering to the community’s behavior, if people are talking about football, how much of a football fan you look, will give you more acceptance within that community.

I remember drafting some thoughts about Gomaa preachers and the idea of how hard they attack some people or pray (Make Doa’ ) against others – make them look so righteous to the audience, I remember a simple man I knew – asking me for my opinion about how great the (Khotba) had been today and how great the sheick giving it, I nodded my head and smiled, avoiding a pointless discussion about how great isn’t a matter of how hard I attack people I don’t know about or present ideas and information that I didn’t verify or even double-checked.

The social ethics that makes you acceptable within a community – isn’t what makes you a good friend or a good person. May be sometimes it’s the absolute opposite.

Looking to the life of prophets including prophet Mohamed PBUH, look how they had been regarded as socially unethical in their corrupt communities.

Even look to prophet Lot – when he expressed his refusal to people’s behavior which had been up to gay sex – they doomed him as socially unethical person! And what they said:

And the answer of his people was no other than that they said: Turn them out of your town, surely they are a people who seek to purify (themselves). [07:82 Holy Qur’an]

So, evaluating your relationships based on how socially ethical the person you’re dealing with; will put you on a great error if the acceptable behavior within that community is unacceptable itself.

But when we come down to essential ethics, it’s the true basis in which we should build our relationships, essential ethics is honesty, straightforwardness, keeping promises never to betray, back-bit, back-stab, deceive or manipulate the person you’re communicating with.

Islamically speaking, does our religion gave an extensive care to religious ethics, ignoring social and essential ethics. Absolutely the opposite.

Prophet said the best of among you in Gahiliah – before Islam – are the best among you in Islam. Why because these people do have the essential ethics very clear so as to altering their religious ethics and social ethics would be an easy process after which their goodness as human beings will keep putting them above those who just took care of their religious ethics.

The holy Qur’an put so much emphasis on the essential ethics saying in Surat Al-Hujraat:

6: O you who believe! if an evil-doer comes to you with a report, look carefully into it, lest you harm a people in ignorance, then be sorry for what you have done.

Meaning: Beautifully saying to verify, ensure and double check the information we get from others to avoid hurting some innocent people and get sorry for believing those who told us afterward.

11: O you who believe! let not (one) people laugh at (another) people perchance they may be better than they, nor let women (laugh) at (other) women, perchance they may be better than they; and do not find fault with your own people nor call one another by nicknames; evil is a bad name after faith, and whoever does not turn, these it is that are the unjust.

12: O you who believe! avoid most of suspicion, for surely suspicion in some cases is a sin, and do not spy nor let some of you backbite others. Does one of you like to eat the flesh of his dead brother? But you abhor it; and be careful of (your duty to) Allah, surely Allah is Oft-returning (to mercy), Merciful. [49:12 Holy Qur’an]

In this single chapter of the holy Qur’an emphasis had been put of on behavior within interpersonal relationships, that makes what we labeled as essential ethics in this post.

That had been the logic behind me leaving the online community I was happily sharing with throughout the last 3 months, starting from the #MuslimUnity campaign (Link: https://www.abdomagdy.com/unity ) and relying on them as a support group afterward, sharing personal information, worries and goals and supporting anyone might need help.

To be continued …

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Reaching Out – Online Networking

Hi Everyone,

This is a speech I delivered at Cairo ToastMasters club June, 23. The speech title had been “reaching out” and it was my 3rd speech at the competent communicator track, where the speech’s objective is “get to the point”.

So getting to the point here, the general purpose of the speech had been to make the audience aware of the fundamentals of networking and internet marketing. The specific purpose was to encourage the audience to effectively utilize social networks in their daily life, whether for expressing their political opinions, marketing their businesses or positioning themselves as competent professionals in their fields.

Notice that writing for a speech is different that writing an article and the style – in my case – is going according to the requirements in the project’s manual.

Introduction

Since the beginning of mankind and formation of communities, people were seeking to reach out to others. The criteria that made some people more powerful than the rest was their ability to reach out to the public and spread their ideas, winning people’s trust and taking the lead in forming the identity of their communities.

No one can deny that the internet is the largest community ever known to mankind, and these principles does apply to the internet. Let’s take a look to some practical incidents that recently proved that. The Iranian elections, wasn’t the protests first reported on Twitter before even the mainstream media know about it.

War on Gaza, when the Israeli Army denied the western media from entering Gaza during the massacres, wasn’t these massacres reported Live! on YouTube, Facebook and other social networks? Not getting so far away from Egypt, the 6th of April movement in Egypt, wasn’t it started on Facebook and created one of the most politically striking movements by the Egyptian youth?

Let me tell you something very recent and I attended it myself, the white house was managing a chat room using Acrobat Connect with average 400 participant during Obama’s speech in Cairo, and that chat room was marketed via Facebook Ads. Plus, during the speech if you were on YouTube, you’d notice that upper banner with a link to the Live! speech.

Let’s see how sxephil a 23 years old guy, was able to have more than 400,000 subscribers on YouTube, and how his content usually reach more than 1 Million viewer per week. Also, through the internet people build their full time freelancing career, and ecommerce businesses is being started everyday.

All these incidents and more prove the importance of the internet as an effective marketing tool, and does prove to us that the investment that we’ll make to explore how to effectively utilize social media for spreading our ideas is really worthy.

We’ll go through 4 main steps we should all do in order to effectively use social media to achieve our goals:

Be There

Being on social networks is free, quick and easy. Creating an account in the networks that’s relevant to the one’s interests is the first step for anyone planning to effectively utilize the power of the internet to pursue his/her goals.

Participate

Joining doesn’t mean a lot, if you’re not planning to participate with quality content that’s relevant to your network’s interests. Since you’re there it’s an investment of time and effort you put to produce quality content, from your own ideas and inspirations.

As content is king; the quality of your content will determine how far you’ll reach within the community.

Engage

Producing your own content, will usually result in being anxious for people to read and interact with your content. That might result in spamming people with content they’re not interested in. So the solution to that is to engage with the community, read their content and interact, your content will be most likely to be noticed.

Example of that, is replying to a popular YouTube video with a relevant reply, commenting on Facebook status messages .etc

Personalize

People will always be touched by genuine individuals and content, so going all the way to marketing might result in being impersonal in communication, while in actuality, you’re supposed to maintain a personal touch in all your content and interactions as people either buy or get convinced by people who they have some kind of emotioal connection with.

Conclusion

The internet provides a valuable framework, if smartly utilized, it can enormously help you achieve your personal, professional or business goals.

Thanks everyone and happy networking.

– Abdo

Sharing Link: https://www.abdomagdy.com/pphpg8

Reaching Out (2) – Starting an Online Business

Hi All,

This speech had been delivered by myself July, 21, at Cairo ToastMasters club.It was my 4th speech at the competent communicator track where my objective was “How To Say It” so while preparing this speech my main emphasis was picking the right words and forming the right phases and getting away from using jargon or difficult words. This speech is supposed to be from five to seven minutes.

By the way, I’ll rewrite the content in more details and publish it and make Vlogs about it in the future, really delivering these speeches inspired me with some business ideas that I’ll be executing in the coming few months. here, on DeveloperMan and Al-Adham Web Solutions.

Introduction

Last time we stated general points in reaching out to people on the internet and gave basic steps you had to follow in order to be successful in your online communication using different social networks. Let’s remember, it was “Be there, participate, engage and then personalize” Last Speech

This time, we’ll explore a new model of what’s called online businesses, where there is no physical office and business is totally being ran online by a freelancer or a team of freelancers. The same ideas apply to a company trying to expand its client-base through the internet.

This business model is found to be convenient by designers, programmers, IT professionals, writers and consultants.

There is 4 major steps that you should follow to run a successful online business.

Present

The first obvious step in running a successful online business is to have a strong online presence, that’s a website; the idea about your business is being reflected through your website, putting a small investment on getting your website done professionally will save a lot of troubles on the long run.

Having your own domain name is essential; it’s strange seeing some people still seeking to run online businesses using a freely hosted blogs or websites, investing $10 and getting your own domain name and email, is an essential step to run a successful online business. So, present yourself professionally, chose the right domains and create the right email addresses.

I remember when I was having a “computer networks” course with participants who were elder than me, I was eighteen at this time and most of them were at their mid or late twenties. We exchanged our contact information, and I gave them my fancy email at this time which was abdo37_sk3, the next session I accidentally heard a discussion where someone was asking have you added them, not all, look at that email, what an idiot! Why should I add him!

After that, I got my emails sorted out professionally, so having your own domain and emails will not only give your audience the smell of professionalism, but will save you from being labeled as an idiot too.

Seek

It’s not hard to get a professional online presence, it’s usually very quick and affordable, the difference is made by the marketing plan this online business will utilize to reach out to people.

Having a few pages about your business, won’t be more than getting some other pages stuck on the already dense internet, if it’s not backed by a strong marketing plan. The ultimate goal from marketing an online business should be putting your website in front of interested prospects’ eyes. The most famous techniques are:

The regular PR work: building relations with other already popular sites, adding the site to business directories

Paid advertising: where you can seek to show your website to a specific group of people filtered by age, gender or location interested in something specific.

SEO or search engines optimization: is helping your website being found by prospects searching for a certain keyword that you chose to optimize the website for.

Involve

The next step would be getting the visitors involved with the site the moment they see it to ensure it won’t be just a onetime visit. The repetition of the marketing message is what will convince those visitors to become interested and finally use your services. Some tools that are being used to involve visitors with the site are:

Newsletter: Is collecting visitors’ emails and sending them regular Email updates about your business, which is being considerably replaced by the next point.

Business blogs: Where articles and updates are being posted regularly on a part of the website and the audiences get involved with that content, by commenting and interacting.

Widgets: Involving people would be by finding where they frequently are, for example if they’re using Facebook regularly why not to make a Facebook page to your business and interact with them on it, you’ll find these widget things that will help you connect your site or blog with other famous networks where it’ll be much more easier for people to involve with you.

Manage

Congratulations, you’re now winning projects, and people are asking you to get their projects done. There is a lot of online communication and project management tools that will help you manage your projects effectively, starting from an IM and VoIP service like Skype, through which you can chat and talk with your clients to full project management tools and client management applications, where the client can check all the information about his project on a certain part of your website.

Conclusion

Through these four steps professional presentation, seeking the right audience, involving and engaging visitors and getting them interested in your service and finally managing the projects and the client communication the right way.

We could now, congratulate you on joining the league of successful online entrepreneurs.

Thanks

– Abdo

Sharing Link: https://www.abdomagdy.com/dzv9gb