“Today’s world economy has shifted toward the technological changes which magnify social media and other digital communication. Entire companies have brought out technologies that simply didn’t exist 10 years ago and innovation has become the engine of economic growth and when we have economic security we have the security of families and that of our communities,” said Mike Harker, a public diplomacy officer at the United States embassy in Cairo, said during celebrating the Social Media Day.
The 7th Social Media Day took place on 12-14 July. The event is organised by Oventure and is sponsored by the US embassy in Cairo.
The summit is a large gathering for MENA’s digital media professionals involving panel discussions.
Harker stated that all of the US embassy officers share a passion to have innovative and connected societies. “Despite the different countries and cultures that celebrate the Social Media Day, the US embassy continued to participate in this event in all countries around the world.”
“The US government is committed to help entrepreneurs manage the skills they need to be successful, and also to promote entrepreneurship by providing jobs and setting up fairs, technology training, and basic skills seminars,” he added.
The summit’s first session tackled the steps of turning one’s dream into a business. Amna Elshandaweely, a young successful fashion designer, told the audience about her designing journey from the beginning until she received international accreditation for her designs.
In Elshandaweely’s session, she explained that her designs always have a story and a message to promote: these designs are always against the society’s norms.
“My first collection ‘The way to Fayoum’ was a revolution about the aesthetic concepts in society, the designs were inspired from Islamic architecture” Elshandaweely said.
“When I was 10 years old, I found that the available clothes in local markets do not represent me and my community, even the Arab models in magazines are different than the normal girls I saw, and so from that time I started to design my own clothes, and my designs always represent the Egyptian or the African culture.”
Elshandaweely’s second collection was inspired from the clothes of Kenyans. “My second collection has a funny story. My friend told me that he wanted to visit Africa, I was surprised and asked him what do you mean you are already in Africa, then the idea surprised me that Egyptians do not consider themselves as Africans, only in the Africa Cup of Nations, we remember that we are actually Africans.”
“You do not have to be the one changing the world, but you can tickle minds to do so.”
The second session was an informative talk about thinking inside the box, by Nour El-Din, head of content marketing in Eventtus, an online ticketing platform.
El-Din’s session was a counter approach to creativity. “You should not think out of the box, but in the box where you find the problem, then you can find its solution.”
El-Din explained how to reach creativity by using a core concept of systematic invented thinking. The concept provides principles many companies use to innovate. The five principles are subtraction, multiplication, divide and conquer, task unification, and attribute dependency.
He further added that many innovations were created using these five principles, if you remove the essential component of the iPhone which calls you get the iPad and this is the subtraction principle, while adding the essential component to an existing product, such as cinema being the multiplication of photography.
He explained that 2 in-1 shampoo is the implementation of task unification, one product having many attributes; split AC is to divide and conquer: the product to divide the product into an indoor machine and the outdoor refrigeration machine, and ice tea in summer is the attribute dependency of winter’s hot tea which means to change the attributes of the product.
The three-day summit had many sessions which tackled developing companies’ strategies by Salah El Din, the chairperson of Jupiter Commz, a PR Agency, as well as methods to grow ones own’s e-commerce business, by Hadeer Hameed the social influencer and Sherry William the rising marketing leader. The summit also provided sessions to stay safe while using social media by specialists from the US embassy, and how not to waste money in influencer marketing by Kawthar Ahmed, the planning strategist in ArabyAds
