Next week’s World Communications Forum in Davos has PR and corporate communications speakers and delegates from dozens of different countries so I thought it would be interesting to take a look at where visitors to my public relations blog come from.

Not surprisingly for an English language blog most are from the UK and USA. However, there are also a healthy number of visitors from India, Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Russia, Philippines and the United Arab Emirates. Some of the more unusual countries with a reasonable number of visitors are Mongolia, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine and the Palestinian Occupied Territories.

Everywhere in the Middle East is represented except Yemen. South America has a few gaps with no visitors from Bolivia or Uruguay or indeed most countries in Central America and the Caribbean. There are also some gaps in Africa and Central Asia.

Some of these visitors come from search and Twitter, but I think a good number are also as a result of people that I’ve done digital corporate communications training or online PR training for. In the last 18 months alone I’ve done PR training or corporate communications consultancy for PR professionals from Bahrain, Belgium, France, Italy, Kenya, Kuwait, Netherlands, Poland, Qatar, Oman, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, UAE and UK and hopefully I’ve projects coming up with corporate communications professionals from Estonia, Hungary, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nigeria, Switzerland, Ukraine and USA. The PR training is a mix of work I do directly with clients, which include both in-house PR teams and PR agencies, and work I do through third party training and conference companies. The PR consultancy work is all direct with in-house corporate communications teams.

Much has been written about the role that social media played in the Egyptian revolution. Online PR and marketing author and speaker David Meerman Scott has been in Egypt teaching a social media master class and in this video asks if social media can be used to help bring tourists back to Egypt?

Google has announced a new initiative to increase the amount of Arabic content online. Arabic content makes up just three per cent of the total digital content online, yet Arabic speakers make up more than five per cent of the global population.

Google’s 30 day Arabic Web Days initiative in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) focuses on boosting the amount of Arabic content online. Google has secured the support of numerous partners including Vinelab, Wamda, Yamli and Taghreedat, as well as Twitter, Wikipedia, TED, Soundcloud, and regional organizations Al Arabiya, TwoFour54 and Qatar Foundation’s Qatari Computing Research Institute.

This is a great initiative as when I’m doing PR and social media training in the Middle East I meet some fantastic local PR and corporate communications professionals. I believe it’s not just about creating more Arabic content, but also doing more to promote some of the great content that already exists.

It has also created a YouTube video (Arabic only of course!):

Arabic Web Days was announced in a blog post by Maha Abouelenein, Google’s head of communications for the Middle East and North Africa:

• Participate in a series of Hangouts on Google+ to get tips and tricks from industry experts on contributing Arabic content to the web—through online journalism, YouTube videos, Wikipedia editing, translation of English content, SEO and more
• Join the YouTube Tweet Up in Doha, Qatar on December 15 to learn how to create viral Arabic videos and make money through YouTube
• Participate in the region’s first Arabic infographics competition with Tajseed
• Volunteer to be part of a TED initiative to create quality Arabic digital content via Arabic subtitling during a kick-off event with TED, twofour54 and Taghreedat in Abu Dhabi on December 4
• Sign up for developer training at g|days in Jordan on December 5-6 and Egypt on December 9-10 to learn about Arabic localization, webmaster tools, SEO and YouTube for Business
• Learn about the Egyptian Ministry of Education’s educational channels on YouTube which include different curricula from first to twelfth grade, as well as e-Lessons via video and Google+ Hangouts.
• Celebrate 12/12/12 as National Arabic Web Day
• Connect with us: add the Arabic Web Days badge to your site, upload a video to youtube.com/arabicwebdays, visit our website: www.arabicwebdays.com and follow us on Google+ and Twitter (in Arabic)

To get more details and to sign up for any of the above events, visit Arabic Web Days on Google+ or see the Arabia Blog. Until then, let’s go Arabic!