Twitter helping people find their voice, one tweet at a time

Six years ago tweeting was done by birds in the garden. Now millions of people all over the world, and 175,000 in the UAE - including Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid - are avid tweeters and followers.

If you happen to notice a man in a blue kandura tweeting incessantly on his iPhone, then you may have stumbled upon Mohamed.

Sending 200 tweets a day, Mohamed, aka @DubaiNameShame, has become one of the UAE's most popular Twitter personalities.

In just 15 months of being on the site, he has sent more than 50,000 tweets, gaining him almost 4,000 followers and a regular spot as the leader on the top #FF (Follow Friday) list - a hashtag used by tweeters to recommend worthwhile "tweeps" to follow.

Such is his popularity that Mohamed, a legal counsel and married father-of-two, is regularly offered expensive electronic goods, restaurant invitations and designer clothes to trial by companies eager to cash in on his celebrity Twitter status - offers he turns down.

Why this 44-year-old half Emirati/ half Pakistani who grew up in Manchester in the UK and has lived in Dubai for the past 11 years, has become such a renowned figure is one of the mysteries of Twitter and a testament to its power.

"I don't have any illusions of grandeur," says Mohamed, who prefers to stay anonymous because family members and colleagues following him do not know who he is.

"As my bio says I'm just a normal bloke in a kandura living a normal life. Yet I have people from all over the world saying they follow me because I tell them what life is like in the UAE. They enjoy seeing my tweets and pictures, such as the car thermometer at 52°C, with a bit of humour thrown in."

Mohamed's journey from ordinary man on the street to local Twitterati legend is just one of many in the UAE that has seen lives changed, businesses soar, friendships made and news relayed to the world at breakneck speed. Not bad for a concept set to celebrate its sixth birthday on Sunday.

Yet when Twitter launched to the public in July 2006, many said it would never work.

Today, those same commentators are probably eating their words.

Because with 140 million users worldwide, sending more than 400 million tweets a day, Twitter - defined in the dictionary as a short burst of inconsequential information - has changed the way we communicate online.

Conceived as a social-networking tool, it has mushroomed into an information platform that allows users to catch up on the latest news, political movements, popular dialogue or interact with friends.

And there is no better example of the Twitter phenomenon than here in the UAE.

According to Spot On PR, there were only 510 users on Twitter in the UAE in February 2009; today there are more than 175,000.

It is phenomenal figure considering the site only became available here in August 2008 after the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority lifted the ban on the site.

So what is the appeal of Twitter for a society traditionally considered closed and conservative?

"It gives you instant interaction; you can be chatting to somebody who is unemployed, a cashier in a supermarket and a company CEO all at the same time," explains Mohamed. "And the amazing thing is that it has brought all the different cultures in the UAE together.

"When you have Sheikh Mohamed bin Rashid, the chief of police and a number of government organisations, ministers and regional celebrities on there, then you know it is a good thing for the UAE."

According to the Dubai School of Government's Arab Social Media Report, the change in the number of active Twitter users between September last year and March was 93 per cent, which begs the question - why the sudden jump?

"In 2009, Twitter was still a minority sport and the people using it were really a hard core of enthusiasts. But the events of the Arab Spring in 2011 thrust Twitter into the headlines and thousands of people started to use it who hadn't even considered it as a platform before," says Carrington Malin, the managing director of Spot On PR.

"Before the Arab Spring there were only a handful of journalists on Twitter in the UAE then we saw hundreds in the spring and summer last year."

"It's a real-time stream of information and in a region where the news changes quite quickly and where a lot of people are far from home and want to stay in touch, Twitter keeps you bang up to date."

Mr Malin says there is now a much broader cross-section of users than there was two years ago. Instead of the traditional marketing and media types, Twitter is used increasingly by businesses to communicate with employees and customers, and by government organisations to convey their message. As a result there are now more than 1,000 brands on the platform in the UAE alone.

"Progressive companies and government departments are certainly looking at Twitter to see what people are saying about them and in an increasing number of cases responding to enquiries and complaints," says Mr Malin. "However, there are still many companies and organisations that do not, so we still have a way to go."

Mr Malin says when big brands first sign up to Twitter they receive a wave of negative reaction. But over a few weeks or months, brands can turn that around by hiring the right people to write updates for them.

"That's due to customer service and actually being available to Twitter and showing that the brand cares about the customers," he says. "If your brand is open and engages with its followers and shares on a regular basis things of interest to customers then it's a positive thing."

But it is not just personal and commercial interests that lie at the heart of today's regional Twitter community, because Twitter has also become recognised for its ability to effect societal change.

One such initiative, Taghreedat - Arabic for tweets - was instrumental in ensuring Twitter became available in Arabic in March this year.

Set up by two friends, Sami Mustafa Mubarak, a Sudanese web officer and Mina Nagy Takla, an Egyptian social-media specialist, Taghreedat started out as the Twitter hashtag #letstweetinArabic to encourage more Arabic content.

The response on Twitter was so strong, the duo formalised the organisation by opening an account, @taghreedat, in July last year.

Today Taghreedat has more than 85,000 followers, and the founders, who both live in Doha but receive funding for their projects from Abu Dhabi's TwoFour54, can claim the Arabisation of Twitter as their own.

"Twitter is no longer just a social platform for people to post updates about what they are doing or where they are shopping. The way we are using Twitter now is about social entrepreneurship; it can be a way to energise and form a group of enthusiasts around one topic," says Mr Takla, co-founder of Taghreedat, the fourth most ranked brand on Twitter.

"That cause for us is increasing the amount of Arabic content online. So we are using Twitter to not only create that community but keep them energised."

Since then, the friends have used the power of crowd-sourcing on Twitter to launch other projects such as increasing the number of Wikipedia editors through the Arabic Wikipedia Editors Programme.

"Twitter has changed in the last year into more of an information network rather than a social network, because you can find real-time information on Twitter and that's why a lot of organisations are on there," says Mr Mubarak.

"Also, there are a lot of social constraints in the Arab world and Twitter doesn't apply a relationship between you and the person you are following unlike other social media. It's a very neutral kind of relationship."

While Taghreedat has won the support of the Arabic community on Twitter, not all Twitter initiatives attract such a positive response. The recent Dress Code campaign, to raise awareness of the way expatriates and tourists dress in the UAE, led to a heated war of words, with some finding the tweets posted racist and offensive.

"Twitter is an activity carried out in public and for anybody using Twitter they need to be careful they are not making inflammatory comments that might cause offence or might be deemed illegal under UAE law. Libelling somebody on Twitter is just as much against the law as libelling someone in print," Mr Malin says.

Twitter has given millions of people a voice over the past six years and last night the social media was used to tell followers that a voice had been lost. The British band Florence and The Machine pulled out of two European concerts because the lead singer Florence Welch has lost her voice.

She tweeted her fans: "I cannot sing for a week ... seriously I felt something snap, it was very frightening."

Her silent voice was heard.

arayer@thenational.ae