If you haven’t already heard, Lowe’s recently decided to pull their advertising from TLC’s “All-American Muslim,” a new reality show about American Muslims living in Dearborn, Michigan, due to backlash they received from a conservative Christian group called the Florida Family Association.

The result? A whole lot of pissed American Muslims.

Although I don’t watch the TV show or shop at Lowe’s, I thought I’d give you what I see as the 3 most important facts about the American Muslim consumer that should concern Lowe’s as a mainstream company.

Fact #1: There’s 7 million of us with a spending power of $200 billion

“Two-thirds of Muslim households make more than $50,000 a year and a quarter earn over $100,000. The national average is $42,000. Two-thirds of American Muslims have a college degree, compared with less than half of the general population.” – The Economist

Estimates of the American Muslim population vary from 5 million to 7 million, with Muslims active throughout society as entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, lawyers, educators, athletes, and musicians. (Source: JWT, Ogilvy Noor, DinarStandard)

Studies from the past few years suggest American Muslim’s have an annual spending power of $124-$200 billion just in the U.S. alone. This is similar to the Hispanic market in the early 90s, which today is worth a whopping $1.2 trillion (a punch in the face for any company who ignored it then).

Fact #2: Our highest expenses are in housing & housing services

As I was going through the Executive Summary of DinarStandard’s recent study, “American Muslim Market 2011: Business Landscape & Consumer Needs Study,” I came across something that tickled my fancy.

According to DinarStandard, when consumers were asked, “How does your household budget breakdown?” the highest expense category was the housing and housing services market, estimated at $33 billion in 2010, followed by food and education.

I’m no expert, but that sounds like a scary number for a company who’s primary market sector falls under housing services.

Source: DinarStandard, American Muslim Market 2011: Business Landscape & Consumer Needs Study

Fact #3: We just need a little bit of empathy, man

Here’s the fact of the matter: Muslim consumers want to engage, but they feel ignored.

In September 2010, Ogilvy Noor conducted research into how American Muslims were feeling about brands and businesses that they interact with today. This study titled, “A little empathy goes a long way: How Brand can engage the American Muslim Consumer” reveals the following:

• 86% of American Muslim Consumers believe that American Companies “need to make more of an effort to understand Muslim values” but at exactly the same time they are feeling largely ignored by American brands.
• 98% feel that “American brands don’t actively reach out to Muslim consumers”.

Source: Ogilvy Noor, A little empathy goes a long way: How brands can engage the American Muslim Consumer

Here’s where it gets real juicy:

“This despite these consumers showing the potential to be an extremely loyal customer base, with over 80% saying that they would prefer to buy brands that support Muslim identity through promotion and celebration of religious festivals, for example. And it’s not just that these are great consumers to have on your side — it’s also that they can be potentially vastly damaging to have against you. When faced with a brand that has offended Muslims, almost 99% of consumers said that they would stop using it, 65% doing so even if the available alternatives were not
as good. “

Lowe’s, if you’re reading this and want to know how you can earn back the loyalty you’ve lost in the past few days from American Muslims, here’s a break down by DinarStandard from the results of the 2011 American Muslim Consumer Advocacy Survey that should help you.

Source: DinarStandard, American Muslim Market 2011: Business Landscape & Consumer Needs Study

Conclusion

Lowe’s, it’s not easy to please everyone, we get it. But it’s time to get real. American Muslims are young, educated, and have a serious purchasing power which will only grow for the years to come. As Ogilvy Noor put it, a little bit of empathy goes a long way.

Until then, we know who’s going to get some serious street cred…

via @uncleRUSH

P.S. For those of you who don’t know, I’m one of the organizer’s of AMCC, an annual conference which focuses on understanding and marketing to American Muslim consumers. I encourage you to check out the website and reach out to the team if you’d like to learn more.

UPDATE: Thanks to you guys, we raised over $1,300!

I’m lucky that I’ve never been one for “stuff.” And birthday parties are cool, but it’s not the gifts I ever cared about, it’s my friends.

I’m so fortunate to know great people and that’s why this year I want to get everyone involved to do something really awesome for my 20th birthday.

A few months ago, my friend told me about a nonprofit social services organization he was starting called Smile. Their mission is to uplift and transform downtrodden communities through a food pantry, health clinic and a broad range of social services programs. Smile has provided a monthly food pantry service in the Paterson/Passaic community since 2008 which has distributed over 1,200 bags of food to low income and under privileged communities.

Recently, they launched a campaign called Smile Somalia, where they will donate $1 towards orphans in Somalia for every picture of a smile posted on their Facebook wall.

Take a look at some of these scary stats:

• An estimated 29,000 children under the age of five have died in Somalia over the past three months.
• An estimated 640,000 children are acutely malnourished.
• An estimated 740,000 might die of famine this year.

This year, for my 20th birthday, I’m asking everyone to donate to Smile with me.

As I’m turning 20 years old, I’m asking for $20 (more if you can, less + lots of promotion if you can’t) from everyone I know. And all of it is going to benefit the orphans in Somalia. I’ve set a goal of $2,150. If we hit that, we’ll be able to support 50 orphans for one month! 50 orphans!!

I want to make my birthday matter this year and I want to do it with the help of all of you. Thanks so much for participating.

You can find my fundraiser page here:
http://fundly.com/saadsbirthdaywish

Lots of love.
Saad

P.S. My birthday is October 4, just a few days away. Let’s do it people!

Below is a brief history of my business failures as a young entrepreneur (and some lessons learned). Last updated on June 21, 2011.

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I’ve always been a business-minded person. I told myself early on that I’d never work in a retail store or in corporate America. I wanted to work for myself from the very beginning. I wanted to build something of my own. I wanted to be someone who people would talk about. I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

I started out when I was in sixth grade. While my friends were out playing kickball, I was sitting on the computer in my parents’ room for hours (56k modem ftw) reading tutorials on things like Photoshop and HTML. I had a pen pal in Texas by the name of David Biers who I met through Red Faction (that game was the shit back then). His work inspired me to get into web/graphic design. Everything he made was amazing. I wanted to be like him.

Everyday, I was committed to learning something new. David taught me how to create a content management system using simple PHP and MySQL. I learned from him by copying him. When he created a blog, I created a blog. When he created an image hosting site, I created an image hosting site (my site was called Image”R”Us. Kind of funny how that failed. I’ll save that story for another day). Now that I think about it, I should probably write him an email thanking him for helping me get me started. Anyways, the point is that I didn’t stop learning. I enjoyed every bit of what I was doing.

I landed my first project in seventh grade through Guru.com. It was for a dating company who wanted some changes made to their website. The total project budget was $220. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to do half the work, so I ended up receiving a check in the mail for $40. It was my first paycheck and the feeling that came along with it was absolutely amazing. I truly felt like a million bucks.

Eighth grade was an interesting year. I was sort of accountable for launching one of the biggest MySpace phishing attacks which indirectly led me to almost getting sued by Wells Fargo. I should probably speak to my lawyer friend before writing about that. I did make a couple hundred bucks in the process though.

Fast forward a little to high school. I hated my classes. I was a decent student, in the sense that my behavior was good and that I usually got along well with my teachers, but I never did my homework. My time in class was usually spent writing down business ideas or sketching up wireframes for websites I was working on.

I launched my first business in tenth grade. The idea was conceived in the back of my Biology class with my good friends Navid and Dharmil. We all pitched in some money and used Navid’s PayPal account to purchase servers to start a web hosting company called eMazing Solutions (yes, I came up with the awesome name myself). Since I had been doing freelance web design work for a few years, I had a couple clients on hand who I was able to convince to sign up for hosting with me. Although we were instantly profitable, the business came with a whole lot of baggage. Customer support was a pain and our billing system was complicated. Some things weren’t working out and I ended up wasting more time than I anticipated. Couple months later, I decided it was better to drop the idea of a hosting company.

By the time I started eleventh grade, eMazing Solutions had taken a different direction. I asked my friends John and Joe (fictional names) to join me in starting a full-blown web development firm. It was going to be a real company. We were going to do it right this time. John was doing awesome work with PHP and Rails while Joe was leveraging his network to get us clients. We would dress up like true professionals and have meetings every week. We were signing contracts and NDAs left and right. We even had our own company credit cards. How cool was that?

We ate out almost every day, bought company cell phones, and even new computers. “Put it on the card” became a popular expression among the three of us. We were confident that we were going to have enough clients to be able to take care of our expenses.

Turns out it wasn’t so cool. Although we were making good money, we were spending even more. In other words, we were being typical Americans (you gotta admit that was a little funny). Some of our clients disappeared on us. They signed the contracts and even met with us multiple times, but when the project was near completion, they stopped responding. We totally got played.

The result? We were three high school students who were $10,000 in debt.

Being in debt is more discouraging than it is scary. I think the three of us quickly lost focus in the business. We tried getting new clients but it just wasn’t working out (maybe it was the effects of the economy or something like that). Around the same time, John became extremely ill and wasn’t able to work for months. We ended up splitting away from the company and using our own individual means to help pay off the debt.

I was now in my senior year of high school. I was pumped. I’d count down the days until my graduation. I was ready to do something big.

I had a friend at the time who’s father was in the commodities business. I was helping him take professional photos of their products for promotional use. Through him, I met Tom (fictional name), who at the time was working on their new website. Tom was in his mid thirties and had recently left his position as Senior Vice Manager at Deloitte to start a startup. He was interested to meet me after hearing about how young I was and the work I had done in the past. Tom saw potential in me.

We met up for lunch at my friend’s office. Turns out, we had very similar goals and aspirations. After bouncing around thoughts and ideas for a few hours, he asked me if I wanted to work with him. Tom was a natural salesman, a networking master, and had over fifteen years of experience in corporate America. There was so much I could learn from him. My answer was obvious.

We started HS (fictional name) in early 2009. HS was a digital media company. Actually, we started out as a “presentability” company, then became a digital studio, and then finally settled as a digital media company. It was difficult to describe what we did because we did just about everything. Our business cards simply read, “Ideas Implemented”. It was a hook to get people to ask the question, “So, what do you actually do?” Not a bad conversation starter.

We did awesome work. The company’s name got out quick and generated a buzz. We created cool videos, worked with some popular companies/organizations, blogged about technology and marketing, and even created a cool iPhone app. I’d spend long hours at the office. If I wasn’t in school, I was working on the company. I really worked my ass off. I was confident that HS was going to be big.

Tom and I were a great team. I learned a lot about business from him. But from time to time, he’d disappear on me. Weeks would go by without a single email or phone call from him. It was his way of recovering from a cold or a fever, by literally sleeping it off. It was weird and annoying, but I didn’t let it get to me. I’ve always been a patient person.

By this time, I was in my first year of college. We had a good number of projects on hand and things were going well. But towards the end of my semester, Tom started disappearing on me again. He would be out of touch for weeks, then after an email or two, he’d disappear again. This happened at least a dozen times. The worst part was that it was all happening during my final exams. Can you imagine how stressful it was to sitting in class and having my phone vibrate non-stop over emails, text messages, and phone calls from clients who were angry because deadlines were missed and they weren’t able to reach Tom for weeks? All I could do was respond saying, “I don’t know where my partner is, but I’m trying my best to get in touch with him. I’m so sorry.” I even took the blame at times. I wanted to protect the company. I genuinely cared about my clients and I didn’t want to screw anyone over. That’s not the way business is done.

After continuous searching, I got a hold of Tom’s brother, who finally got me in touch with him. Apparently, Tom was going through some internal family issues. Although I understood his situation, it was still unacceptable to completely disappear off the face of the planet. Tom always taught me the importance of communication, but you’re playing under the shade of hypocrisy if you’re not talking to anyone, even you’re own business partner.

After speaking with some of my close friends and mentors, I decided to jump ship. It was extremely painful to leave something you wholeheartedly believed in, but it had to be done. I couldn’t let my name be ruined because of someone else’s screw ups. HS was dead.

Some Takeaways

1. Business isn’t for everyone. If you’re not comfortable working 10-13 hours a day and 7 days a week, you’re better off getting a job somewhere. Also, entrepreneurs go through a heavy ride of emotions. There will be days where you feel like you’re on top of the world and then days where you feel like you’ve lost everything. I personally ended up having high blood pressure and gaining almost 30 pounds in a year because of stress.

2. Start as early as possible. Looking back, I don’t regret anything that I did. I learned from every screw up and I just positively moved on. I’m nineteen years old now but I feel I have more knowledge and experience than many of the older folks in my industry. Not to mention, I’ve built up an amazing network over the years which will highly benefit me down the road.

3. Choose your partners wisely. There’s nothing wrong in working with your friends. In fact, I encourage it. But if they aren’t going to be serious about the business, drop them like it’s hot. Run away from the debbie downers. Surround yourself with people who are better than you. Afterall, you are the product of your environment.

4. Save money. It’s easy to make money, but it’s ridiculously difficult to save it. I could have avoided the $10,000 debt if I was more careful about my spending. I wish I had read a book like this before starting my first business.

5. Be realistic. I was so confident about the success of HS that I was strongly considering dropping out of school for a few semesters. I come from a family where education is taken very seriously, so the process of convincing my parents would’ve been extremely stressful in itself. I’m glad I chose otherwise since there really was no way for me to be able to predict the downfall of the company.

6. Failure is good. When I asked Adnan Durrani for advice, he told me, ”The more mistakes you make, the more successful you will be.” I screwed up so many times in so many ways, but I learned so much in the process. This is not the kind of shit you can ever learn in school. You just have to live through it. What doesn’t kill you will only make you stronger.

–

Follow me on Twitter.

I loathe the “experts”, “gurus”, “jedis” and whatever horrid names they come up with for “social media mavens”. Anyone calling themselves an “expert” in this space has no idea what they are talking about. Nor does any of them know how to run a real business.

Social media reminds me of SEO – both had an initial boom with tons of snake oil hucksters. But I think both fields are maturing for the most part and the dust is being settled. If someone tries selling social media or SEO as a full fledged marketing program, that’s a mistake, but if it’s part of something larger, it makes sense. The clowns are the ones who sell those services as a cure all, the serious folks are those who sell the service as a measurable value add.

Every morning, I wake up at 5:30 am to get ready for school. I leave my house around 6:45 am to catch my 7:00 am train. During my commute, I use my iPhone to surf through my RSS feeds to catch up on news and other websites relating to my interest. If I come across something that I enjoyed reading, I usually share it with my Twitter followers.

There’s a problem though. Just because I’m awake at 7 am doesn’t mean the rest of my Twitter followers are awake as well. Because Twitter is such a fast paced social network, my tweet will quickly get buried under the hundreds (if not thousands) of other tweets. Not to mention, sharing too many articles too quickly is an easy way to spam people, hence pissing them off and encouraging them to unfollow you. This is when services like Buffer, Sharefeed, and Timely come in handy, which are awesome apps that allow me to schedule my tweets ahead of time so I can spread them out throughout the day.

But there’s another problem. I spend most of my day away from the computer and depend on my iPhone for most tasks. Sure I can access those websites from my iPhone, but since none of them have mobile-friendly versions or native iPhone apps, it becomes a pain to schedule my tweets.

So I created Twoffy as a means of scratching my own itch. Twoffy is an email based service that allows you to quickly schedule your tweets on the fly. Since all smartphones have email capabilities natively built in, this makes the process much more smoother.

Twoffy also has a web interface that allows you to add multiple Twitter accounts and edit/delete any scheduled tweets. There’s another cool feature that allows you to make your tweets longer than Twitter’s limit of 140 characters. Since most mobile email clients don’t give you a word/letter count, it would be difficult to tell if your tweet is within the limit. Don’t worry though, Twoffy will automatically shorten the tweet and add a URL at the end. This URL will be linked to a page where the full tweet can be viewed.

There you have it! I hope Twoffy is just as useful to you as it is to me.

This past October, I helped organize the 2nd American Muslim Consumer Conference. My role on the team was to create the web presence and use search and social media marketing tactics to increase the conference registrations.

Because we experimented with various marketing campaigns, our web traffic shot up immensely. The top 3 pages receiving the most traffic were the homepage, about page, and the blog. Not too many people were going to the registration page and signing up for the conference. I decided to set up an A/B test on the homepage, as it was receiving the most traffic, to understand why we weren’t getting enough people to register for the conference.

A/B testing, or split testing, is a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates. In web terms, A/B testing essentially represents testing of more than one version of a web page to see which has a better outcome. These outcomes can include sign ups, click throughs to next page, conversions, etc.

The Experiment

Winner: Variation #2

Simply removing the one line of text increased the conversion rate by 19.4%.

Conclusion

As Avinash Kaushik says, “80% of the time you/we are wrong about what a customer wants/expects from our site experience.” Instead of being purely focused on advertising, take a break and run some tests on your landing pages. You’d be surprised by the results.

My buddy Sameer and I were recently recently interviewed by Elan Magazine about our project, Sameer’s Eats. Check it out!

The following is a clip I recorded of Adnan Durrani, Chief Halal Officer at American Halal Co. Inc., at the American Muslim Consumer Conference 2010.

The following is an excerpt from the book “The Power of Focus: What the Worlds Greatest Achievers Know about The Secret of Financial Freedom and Success”

“…successful people have developed successful habits. Learn to observe what those habits are. Study successful people. As well-known business philosopher Jim Rohn says, “They have clues.” What if you were to interview one successful person every month? Take him or her out to breakfast or lunch and ask lots of good questions about their disciplines, routines and habits. What do they read? What clubs and associations do they belong to? How do they schedule their time? If you listen well and take good notes, you’ll have a wealth of powerful ideas in a very short time. And if your request is sincere, truly successful people are happy to share their ideas. They enjoy the opportunity to be a coach to people who are genuinely interested in improving their lives.”

That’s right, a “message.” Not in your fans’ news feeds, but in their inbox!

This is one of the main deciding factors for people when choosing between a Facebook group page or a Fan page for their company/organization.

Some benefits of a group page include the ability to easily message all your group members at once and and the ability to send bulk invites to join the group or for upcoming events (this can now be done on a Fan page as well with a small hack). Whereas on a Fan page, some of the primary benefits include the ability to have a custom vanity URL, add custom HTML code, user analytics (known as Insights), and have better search engine presence since they are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed.

Due to the amount of attention Facebook received on Fan pages, they are slowly working on enhancing the functionality to make them more useful for companies who are looking to promote their businesses. One of these functions is the ability to message all your fans, which is something that was  previously only possible in group pages. Not to mention, it’s sort of hidden, so most people are not even aware of it!

Send a message to your Facebook fans:

Prerequisite: Make sure you are the admin of the page you are trying to send a message out from.

Step 1. Go to your fan page and click the “Edit Page” link under your photo.

Step 2. Look in the right column and under “Promote your page” click the “Send an update” link.

Step 3. Type your subject, message, and hit Send!

Tip: The cool part about sending messages out through your Facebook fan page is that you can actually target them to a very specific audience.

Have any questions? Any tips to share? Leave them in the comments below!