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Tag: turkey

4 lessons learned about networking being an expat

Moving to a foreign country is a deep change of life; not only because you’re leaving your relatives and friends (skype and social media are good tools to maintain such relationships)  but also because you have planned to set your entire social and professional life in an “unknown” environment where you don’t know people and people don’t know you. As in any situation where you’re going to reinvent yourself, you have to analyze you starting point and, hereby, to develop your “strategy”. When I moved to Turkey, I had no real job opportunity or contracts. Also, in the private sphere, I had just few connections with just a couple of my wife’s friends. Here there are some lessons I learned from my experience Attend a language school To know the language of the country where you live, obviously, It’s the first step to improve the possibility to establish personal and professional relations. Attending a language school (even if you already know the language, it wasn’t my situation :)) is for sure the first step to do. Going to the school language was my first opportunity to start to networking. The main advantage is that many foreign people like you don’t know the language, so if you know at least English (that is the most common language worldwide) you can start to make your connections. During the four months I attended at the school I met a lot of persons, even others Italian that temporary or permanently moved to Turkey. I met my firends “Paolos” (yes, it was the most common name among Italians :)) and German, American, English,  and other persons from different nationalities. In the very first month I got a network of 20-30 local connections composed by foreign people living in Izmir. Most of them were married with turkish people so, my “second degree” connection reached about 40-60 people. How to get value from these connections? People moving abroad have almost the same problems: how to get resident permit and how to find a job are the most popular and urgent questions. So, if you are able to help them they will help you. Try to be valuable in giving the information they need. Be open and listen to their problem and always try to help to solve. When you’ll need, they will help you back. Connect with institutions of your Country If you live in a main city, probably there is at least a Consulate. Usually Consulate’s employees are both “diplomatic” (sent to the country from the Foreign Ministry) and “administrative”, usually local people employed. So Consulate has a deep knowledge of the local environment and can help you in understanding how to approach a business or…

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Social media war in Turkey*

The events of Gezi Parki last June saw the Turkish government to take hard line positions against the “anti-government propaganda” on social media, leading to multiple arrests in several cities  in addition to Istanbul, the center of the protests. The Government tried also to obtain, with little success , information from Twitter and Facebook users’ profiles (see “Twitter says NO to the turkish government ” ) and proposed draft legislation aimed at implementing a greater control over the social channels usage. Something , however, has changed in recent months . In September, the Turkish media broke the news that the ruling  moderate Islamic party  (AKP) has created a team of 6,000 experts in order to set the agenda, lead the trending topic and check the criticism on social media. In his article for Al -Monitor , the Turkish journalist Emre Kizilkaya , who is also the chairman at the Turkish National Committee of the International Press Institute in Vienna, reports the results of the investigation he conducted  (see AKP ‘s social meda wars ). As measured by Kizilkaya , at present the task force commissioned by the AKP would actually moving only in its infancy and the numbers of the “experts ” would be much lower than stated . Despite the Anatolian Agency overs the presence of 4 groups of pro -government activists , there are few true influencer pro-government . One of these is the group Wake Up Attack who runs a Facebook page with 5,000 fans and four Twitter accounts in four different languages  with more than 12,000 followers . Through their own accounts, Wake Up Attack spreads infographics that “(target) those who criticize the government labeling them as (foreign) agents  or terrorists.” From an operational point of view , the groups use the hashtag # AK ( abbreviation of the party) and # ekip (a turkish term to indicate team) to aggregate and connect the tweet. The investigation shows also a close relationship between the account and the party organs which , although not confirmed , it seems to be the direct promoter of these initiatives. It seems, therefore , that Erdoğan and the AKP are preparing to occupy not only the traditional media , but also social media on which , in view of the elections of 2014 , could play a leading role. *originally edited in Italian and published on Pionero.it

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Turkey reaches about 31 million Facebook Users

Socialbakers released the “Socialbakers social media report Facebook Pages in Turkey – April 2012“. The country – with 35 million internet users (44% of population) according to InternetWordStats – registers 31 million of Facebook users gaining 88.5% of penetration and positioning itself as one of the highest country for Facebook usage – the European penetration average is about 46,4%. As highlighted by the Report, the largest Brand Page for number of Fan is Avea, the mobile operator, with 1.7 million followers. For media category, Izlesene.com – a sort of Youtube with an organized collection of user generated video – has more tha 2 million fans. What it can be guessed, furthermore, the engagement level is low. The best performer is Erikli, a famous brand selling water. Having only 12.000 fans, the Erikli engage the 2,23% of fans. The last important evidence is the response rate value. We can observe a general attitude from community managers to interact a lot with followers. Administrators at Trendyol – a fashion firm – reply at the 88% of user contents. In the first top 10 response rate, it’s meaningful that the lowest value is 59% from Money Kart. Comparing the data we can guess that brands usually are ready for social customer relationship management more than users. Generally, we can guess that: the prestige of a brand is not related to the ability to engage brands are more social addicted than users users has a passive approach to the fanpage

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Turkish LinkedIN Network Report April 2012

Incresed younger (+65%) and older (+83%) professionals. Members are Enterpreneur, Sales Persons and Engineeres working in Manufactory, High Tech and Education. The penetration rate of professionals in Education Industry are above the Global Distribution Average. 7816 companies have a Company Page and the first 10 industries absorbe 38% of them.

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Two Turkish Newspaper sites in the Top 10 European Internet Information

Hurriyet.com.tr and Milliyet.com.tr are respectively the 3rd (with 10,4 million users) and 5th (with 9,6 Million users) most visited newspaper websites in Europe, according the recent overview on Internet Usage in Europe released by comScore. Going deep in analysis of sites visited prior to visiting the newspaper websites, It emerges that Google sites preceded at least the 12 percent of visits to the top 5 Newspaper sites. At least 10 percent of visits are preceded by a visit to Facebook, second only to Google Sites. (This data includes both direct referrals from Facebook links and visits initiated by direct user navigation following a visit to Facebook.) Facebook plays a keyrole to drive traffic to the two turkish newspaper websites.The percentage of inbound site traffic preceded by a Facebook visit was highest at Turkish site Milliyet, where it accounted for nearly a fifth of traffic (18.9 percent), whereas Facebook visitation also preceded a 10% of inbound traffic to the Hurriyet. Also in this report, as previously highlighted, Turkey is the 5th largest country in Europe for internet the amount of Unique Visitors (23,3 Million of Unique Visitors), the first in the average of Page Views per visitor (3.845) and the second in hour spent per visitor (32,2 hours) , following the 38 hours of UK.

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