It was only when I participated in the recently held 2nd Digital Marketing Summit 2017

, I got to know that Sudan was awarded the First Prize at the ITU Telecom World Awards 2016 for the Most Promising Innovative Solutions with Social Impact. 23000 POS and Mobiles have been used for collection in highways used through a mobile and a printer with Bluetooth without internet connectivity. Eng. Mohamed Abd Elrahim Yassin General Manager of National Information Center and Elwaleed  Bashir of Nile Center received trophies for their achievement from the Minister of Communication and Information Technology Tahani Abdallah Atia. This event was organized by Saif Lutfi of Lutfi Self Development Centre.
The 2nd Digital Marketing Summit held at Corinthia Hotel on 16-17 April had a galaxy of International Experts in Digital Marketing from Canada, Belgium, United Kingdom, Lebanon, South Africa, UAE, India and Kenya.
Kaveer Behare from South Africa who had also visited in the 1st Summit last year, presented his study of Global Perspective on Sudan. The global perspective about Sudan is positive but more resources must be spent in drawing a line between South Sudan and Sudan. People should talk more about Trade and Tourism in Sudan to get the world excited.
Internet penetration in Sudan is 27% as compared to 29% in Africa, 33% in South Africa and 80-90% in Europe & USA.  Mobile penetration is higher at 72% and 35% of the population in Sudan have mobiles. 7-8% use social media in mobiles. 3 out of 7 billion people in this world use smart phones. This data was shared by Suren Govender Former MD of Accenture.
Eng. Christian Farioli who is an Italian working out of Dubai showed us in his presentation that in the last 83 seconds there has been 960646 mobile views of You Tube; 91263 photos uploaded in Instagram; 9606482 ‘Likes’ in Facebook; $11263 revenue from You Tube; $394765 made from sales of iPhones; 57638889 messages on Facebook and WhatsApp and 24016 profiles viewed on LinkedIn. Digital Marketing is the process of building and maintaining customer relationship through online activities to facilitate the exchange of ideas, products and services that satisfy the goals of both parties.
Farioli’s definition of Digital Marketing is ‘Getting Customers using only Computer and Internet’ and predicts the rise of Chief Digital Officer – soon CDO will become part of the board. CEO sets the direction, CFO provides capital and realizes benefits, CMO is the voice of the customer, HR leads the cultural change and COO embeds the changes. According to Farioli the First successful social media example is of Barrack Obama in 2008 which raised $650 million and got elected President of United States of America. Thanks to massive digital marketing campaign.
Tom Vassos, Author of the book titled ‘Destination Innovation’ came from Toronto, Canada to share that we are in the middle of a global mobile social media revolution. Successful entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are leveraging mobile social media marketing strategies to achieve business results. Mobile social media strategies are transforming marketing, commerce and entire business models.
Darine Sabbagh from Lebanon presented the tools to analyze and measure the Return on Effort (ROE) and Return on Investment (ROI) on social media. She also presented how to create content and build a Social Media calendar. Apart from the designation Chief Digital Officer, she gave us another title for the same job description which is Community Manager.
Tarik Shalaby a young professional from Egypt who is Online Monetization & Marketing Lead at MSN Arabia Market based at Dubai, helped us to analyze websites, improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which is the art of making your website 1st in search. He also presented the last session of the two day event about ‘How to Attribute an Online Campaign to Offline (POS) Transaction’. The take home jargons were O2O which is Online to Offline and ROPO which is Research Online Purchase Offline.