Background:
Desert Dawn is basically an annual Educational Magazine published by the Bachelor Media students in Dubai Women's College. The magazine introduces two different issues, one per semester, and they present several articles written by the students themselves professionally. Those articles mostly revolve around social problems and issues, investigations and persuasive articles that involve several opinions in health, education, economy, IT, media and much more.
Desert Down has witnessed a lot of positive impressions and feedback from its readers for many years on the students’ level of quality in writing, editing and producing printed media pieces. Every issue introduced has its unique identity as different students write in every issue, and it gets widely spread so that it reaches the biggest audiences possible in the UAE.
Therefore, since I’m currently studying a social media course as part of my corporate communication studies, one of the required projects was Desert Dawn 2.0 project. It was one of the most interesting experiences I had ever tried on social media. It’s basically a project where students were supposed to choose, discuss, and raise awareness about one story they are passionate about in one of the Desert Dawn issues. Each student gets to choose a story from the latest 2 issues of our own DD and present it through social media platforms for the purpose of reaching unique community engagement and knowledge. The project was designed to enrich us with Social Responsibility since we are free to choose a topic that is dear to us and discuss it with our own community to make a difference.
Thus, as soon as I got the project brief I decided to look through all the previous DD issues and choose the most favorable article of stories to me. I was confused at that point since there were too many interesting stories, but at final I made my decision, which was the story, written by the students: Wafa Al Marzoqi “Female circumcision in the UAE”. Female circumcision is considered a sensitive topic in the UAE society as people still argue about whether it is recommended Islamic ally or simply practiced because of tribal traditions. A significant number of the UAE Nationals follow the footsteps of their parents and grandparents without questioning the practice of female circumcision.Thus, this online social media project presented the previous addressed issue to the community of social media to discuses the seriousness of its consequences through strategic plans designed carefully.
All the girls were shocked why did I choose this particular article among all the other stories. They anticipated that such topic would make our conservative public angry as its one of the extremely sensitive topics. However, I had my different point of view, as this topic has always gained my attention for its boldness. I wanted to overcome the challenge and the fear of what my classmates were expecting me to face. So, I took a further step and I started the project by creating a discussion group on Face book to introduce the article to the online community. Yes, I have to admit it and say that at first I had some feelings of fear, hesitation and uncertainty do I really want that topic or I should look for something else! But eventually I got highly motivated by my teacher to move on and never lose that chance. I got more confident; I started finalizing the outline of the project, designing a timeline and a strategy to follow.
So the group discussion components on face book revolved around activating the group by inviting the biggest number of targeted audiences possible on face book at the shortest time possible by the following components:
1-Providing the audience with an online copy of DD, and the presented article of females’ circumcision in the UAE.
2-Sharing statements made at DD female circumcision article.
3-Integrating the public opinions in the presented material in the group through sharing real stories and personal experiences, or even insights.
4-Introducing sticky messages like scientific facts, statistics, and studies conducted and prove.
5-Sharing Multi media pieces to support the group goals like videos, photos and posters.
But the matter might be questioned here is why did I choose Face book yet not twitter or any other platform? Well, after deep thinking I insisted on using Face book for several reasons:
1.Its the number one most famous social media platform in the UAE .
2.It’s used by a significant number of UAE females more than any other available platform.
3.The variety of the technical functionality options that Face-book offers matches well the strategy wanted to be applied for supporting the group page, such as the ability of posting links, videos, photos and documents directly to the group page.
4.The ease of driving traffic to the Face-book groups through individuals’ personal account and their friends.
In almost two weeks, the group received a significant amount of participation and engagement from the public. People on Face book were really interested to discuses the seriousness and importance of such topic. Some people got highly motivated to talk, while others felt shy to join such bold debate. The group now has more than 280 members. 27 comments from different active members were posted, and it received 41”like” click button on the posted videos, comments and sticky messages.
And just like any other duties, this project had its difficulties and challenges. Firstly, the task of driving traffic to the group page was one of the main obstacles as the project timeline was 3 weeks only. But I’ve tried to overcome that through inviting people from UAE’s top most influential corporate brands, individuals and events on social media who have a big number of members. In fact, deciding upon the right words to use on social media to avoid double meanings or misunderstanding was also one of the challenges. I had had to reconsider every single word before I post anything. Some people also were discouraged to talk in public about this, especially those who live in a conservative society. So I had to think about how I can break those boundaries and let them share their thoughts and insights.
Overall, I think this project was something valuable to me. I think my topic was definitely worth trying and taking such risk to discuses it on social media .I cherish my Emirati identity to the point where I would accept to do anything just to make a difference even if it counts little.
Feel free to join my discussion group on Face-book, your participation would definitely mean a lot to the society =)
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_114099572005138&ap=1
