Engagement managers in Spot The Future play mostly the role of connecting us to the local hacker/civic hacker/social innovation communities in Armenia, Egypt and Georgia – all countries in which ER is not present.
We are looking for people that are embedded in those communities, and recognized by them; fluent in the local language; good social media traction. We employ them to connect them with that scene and drive signup. Notice that “social media” in Armenia and Georgia means essentially Facebook, the only game in town. Armenia reported 560K FB users in November 2013 – 20% of the population, and around half of all Internet users (source). Georgia (4.5M inhabitants) apparently has 1.6M Facebook users (source). Egypt is a different ballgame: 85M inhabitants, reported to have a whopping 13M Facebook users. Egypt also has good Twitter penetration: 2% of the population are monthly active Twitter users (source): that’s 1.6M users, and we can generally propagate through Twitter much faster than through Facebook.
Nadia suggested hiring her old school mate Sultan Al Qassemi for Egypt. He is actually Emirati, but has a huge following in Egypt (320K+ Twitter followers!). He looks like a good catch to me. Can we find good people in the other two countries?
