Acumen Advertising LLC, based in Dubai has a 16 year history of trading in a wide range of “thru-the-line” advertising, marketing and promotional disciplines. A real need was identified to be able to offer a quality web and digital service to existing and new clients. The client base is predominantly drinks, retail and tourism related – disciplines that Acumen Interactive, director, Peter Riches, can easily relate to with more than 16 years as MD to a full service ad agency in the UK.

BeVivid has been trading for 7 years and prior to that Peter ran the full service ad agency in the UK with a team of 20. The agency client base was sold to a larger ad agency based in Birmingham in 2004 where Peter was employed as a consultant to maintain consistency. At the same time, in agreement with the new “owners”, Peter retained his existing web clients and has built BeVivid into the region’s leading marketing focussed web design, build and hosting company – currently looking after over 180 websites on dedicated servers.

Apart from brain in gear web strategy, Acumen Interactive will specialise in hi-end search engine optimisation (SEO). Core mission statements are marketing focussed and builders of eye traffic (basically using our tried and tested ad agency analogy of building footfall to destinations and venues – with the internet we simply build traffic to the websites).

David Tobias, a veteran of the UAE for more than 20 years and Managing Director of Acumen Advertising LLC is delighted with the joint venture. “The advertising market in the UAE, as throughout the world, has taken a few knocks to say the least over the past 2 years. Our traditional above and below the line advertising decline has now stabilised – in fact, thankfully we are 20% up on last year”.

“We can see clients’ budgets increasing and more being allocated into interactive, digital and web. Our joint venture increases our team and allows our clients to have a single point of briefing and means Acumen Advertising can now offer a fully integrated “thru-the-line” service to our Middle East clients with our in-house digital partners”.

Acumen Advertising LLC recently moved to new office accommodation in Jumeira Lake Towers to accommodate a larger team.

Further comment is available from David or Peter on +9714 3644646 or david@acumeninteractive.ae orpeter@acumeninteractive.ae.

So what is twitter all about? Simply put Twitter is social networking tool. In 140 characters you can post little snippets about your life, what you are doing, where you are or even what you had for breakfast.

2 years ago it was just another micro blogging service, a fun, but irrelevant tool mainly used by computer geeks (like me). Nobody could have predicted its growing popularity and the massive success of Twitter has now made it an exceptional marketing tool.

Anybody that uses Facebook will be familiar with the status update feature. This is essentially what Twitter is with one fundamental difference….

When you add people as friends to your page on facebook they also have to add you as their friend. Therefore only allowing people you have agreed to see your status updates, this is a symmetric relationship model. Twitter on the other hand, uses an asymmetric relationship model. You can ‘follow’ somebody on twitter without them having to ‘follow’ you back. This allows for four types of relationship….

1. People who follow you but you don’t follow back
2. People who don’t follow you, but you follow
3. You both follow each other
4. Neither of you follow each other

This relationship model is what makes twitter such an exceptional tool. Because people don’t have to follow you, its up to you to create a relationship with other twitterers (I will go over a few ways you can do this in the next article). Over the last 6 months or so, there has been a significant increase in Shropshire businesses that have now adopted twitter into their marketing strategy. Used correctly, it can increase traffic to your site, promote new products for sale, encourage people to signup for your enews, complete mini polls to gain more information about target markets, demographics etc and much much more.

This is the first part of an ongoing series of blog posts about the importance of social marketing, if you have had any any experience (good or bad) please tell us about it.