The Social Media Exchange is proud to announce the publication of the first of its social media guides, an Arabic translation of DigiActive’s Introduction to Facebook Activism by Dan Schultz. (Click on the image to download the guide). A second guide, Facebook Pages for NGOs, Nonprofits, and Civil Society Organizations by SMEX’s own Moustafa Ghaddar and Pascale Moussawbah, will follow soon.

After incorporating the original English guide into our Facebook training seminars and watching as activist groups around the world use social media and social networks like Facebook to get their messages out and organize, we thought that translating the DigiActive guide might help current Facebook users see the strategic potential of the application and help new users decide whether to adopt the platform as a means of organizing.

The guides are also particularly suited for Lebanon, where Facebook’s popularity—it’s the nation’s number one website, according to Alexa.com—have already made it a tool of choice for activists and organizations like Collective for Research Training on Development Action and Youth for Tolerance.

Tonight at our RootSpace social hour, from 6:30 to 9:00—all are welcome—we’ll listen to other Facebook groups as they share their experience with Facebook as an organizing tool. We’ll also be distributing a print version of the Arabic guide only. If you can’t make it, we’ll be liveblogging the event. Check back later to participate.

Soon, we’ll also post the guide on a wiki, where we hope we can encourage people from across the Middle East and North Africa to share case studies—success and failures—that may not have gotten international press and to discuss the Arabic terminology being used throughout the region to talk about digital activism.

In the meantime, please download and distribute the guides widely, whether you prefer Arabic or English.

Finally, we want to thank Mary and Amine at DigiActive.org, which provides a wealth of case studies and ideas for digital activists worldwide, and Dan Schultz, the author of the English version, for sharing the original guide so freely and for embracing our idea to translate it into Arabic. We hope it’s the first of many such partnerships.