Social media has made life a lot easier for non-profits working on a low budget. Events are easy to organize and promote through fan pages and people can find out about different kinds of organizations really easily.

A good example is a Finnish non-profit organization Chorus. Chorus’ aim is to raise the appreciation of popular culture in Finland (the organizers believe it is undervalued in our country). They organize concerts in people’s homes that are called “pop in” concerts: people volunteer to have small concert in their homes and invite people they don’t know to enjoy the concert with them. Facebook has made it possibly for these concerts to be organized spontaneously and without the fear of too many people coming. The concerts can be advertised and invitations sent on the same day of the concert. New artists can be discovered this way as well – many of the concerts are filmed and posted on Facebook or Youtube.

A pop in concert. Photo from the Facebook page of Pop In.

Especially cultural events have become a lot easier and cheaper to organize with the help of social media. Free information technology has given small non-profits numerous new options to diminish costs and focus on what the non-profit is actually about.

A crazy success story, Angry Birds created by the Finnish Rovio is a game that everyone can play. The company claims to have spent zero dollars on marketing in the beginning because they didn’t have a dime. The game spread virally like wildfire through the first players of the game, and since 2009 it has been downloaded half a billion times making it the world’s most popular game ever.

The game has actually spread from online to offline. The first Angry Birds store opened in Helsinki a couple of weeks ago, and the toys are amazingly popular. What’s even stranger to me is that the stories the game creators come up with for each of the new Angry Birds games are uploaded on Youtube, and people go see the videos because they like the game so much. So they don’t first watch the video and then buy the game but vice versa. I find the existence of this kind of a fan base miraculous – one of the “back story” videos has 48 million views! Creating this kind of a fan base so quickly would never have been possible without the Internet.

Angry Birds trailer

Rovio is now trying to develop a whole entertainment business around Angry Birds, and movie and television rights are being discussed. Internet will no doubt keep on playing a big role for Angry Birds, though not so much in the marketing sense as in just keeping the fan community up and running.

I watched the Social Network the other day. It was a good movie, and got me thinking about how Facebook actually has changed the world. If I wouldn’t have Facebook now, it would be a lot harder to keep in contact with all my friends back home.

In Social Network, in the beginning, Zuckerberg is saying he doesn’t care about the money-making aspect of the site as long as it’s cool. The co-founder, finance-major is trying to start capitalizing on it at an early stage. Luckily for companies, we know the end result; Facebook is making a lot of money by letting companies use the site as a marketing channel. But what about the being cool aspect?

Companies are creating pages on Facebook and trying to get more and more people to like their page. However, according to Mashable, Facebook users are slow to “like” brands and retailers. Companies and brands have to compete with people’s friends and families for “likes”.

The article recommends companies focus on creating a Facebook presence for answering customers’ questions, providing customer service support and broadcasting promotions instead of trying to get a countless number of “likes” or fans. This, I think, would bring real value for a company, rather than artificially trying to raise the number of fans on a page, when the number doesn’t even tell whether the person actually likes the brand or is just “liking” it because or some competition.

Our last class taught us the importance of engaging people during the first 10 seconds of a video. The analytics Youtube provides for tracking the attention span of viewers did look very useful. But when you’re making a promotional video for a company, you put your company eyeglasses on. You’re not really able to see or forecast what is interesting or uninteresting to the viewer – until the video and consecutive analytics are done.

How to figure out whether to make a promotional video for a company or not, then? I think a company should define a clear communications strategy for themselves and figure out if the video is in line with it. If we’re not talking about advertisements, a video that’s meaning is just to promote a company image to a certain audience should be considered carefully. The consideration process should include the possible benefits gained by making the video, an estimation of the targeted people that are actually going to watch it and of course the costs of making the video in relation to the benefits.

Making videos is so easy today that many make one without giving it a second thought, causing the video to just sink in to the mass of videos no one ever watches. But if a company truly wants to make a good quality video that can add value to the brand, the decision shouldn’t be made hastily.

Last summer I was working for the communications department of a business-to-business company that operates in a very traditional industry. In the job interview they explained to me that they had problems in deciding how to use Facebook and other social media, as most of their customers were other businesses. They thought that they would need to be present in social media, but defining why they would need to be there, and what social media really meant for them seemed to be the issue.

This Emarketer article addresses the problems B2B companies face with social media strategies. Like my past employer, also other B2B companies seem to be unable to define the role for social media in their company. The article quotes a recent Accenture study on what changes North American marketing executives think should be made for their companies’ social media efforts to be more effective.

48 % of respondents thought that they should just invest in new tools and technology, like that would solve the issue of not knowing what to actually do with social media. 41 % did say they would improve the measurement of their social media efforts, and 38 % would hope for an improved collaboration with marketing, sales and IT departments. Only 31 % admit that they would need more skills to manage the social media.

It seems these executives want to be all over social media before defining what it means to them – they want to make the same mistakes and learn it the hard way, like their B2C counterparts have in the past 3 to 5 years.

Information on people has never before been so easy to find. Type in a person’s name on  Google and you will find hundreds or thousands of links, depending on how many people there are with the same name. Protecting one’s professional reputation has largely moved from offline to online.

An article on Mashable (http://mashable.com/2011/11/02/protecting-your-online-reputation/) addresses the multiple ways you can keep track of what wanted or unwanted people are able to find out when they type your name on search engines at various sites. According to the article, pretty much everything you do online is easy to track. The infographic gathered by the Swiss digital marketing firm KBSD shows how to show off your best sides instead of the embarrassing ones.

E-reputation

According to KBSD, a whopping 48 % of recruiters and HR professionals refer to personal websites when deciding whether to hire you or not. Furthermore, apparently up to 78 % of employers does a search engine check on job seekers to find out more about them.

Whereas it is officially illegal in Finland to do any Internet research on information about job seekers, (for which they have not given permission for) different companies have different ways to go about it. Mobile phone manufacturer Nokia agrees that some related information may be searched online whereas the lift manufacturer Kone has a zero tolerance policy (HS 2011).

KBSD also wants to remind you that your online reputation is not only about what you put up online; it’s also about how, where and when you does it. Also the things that other people say about you will end up online, which I find to be the most disquieting thing. Even if you have put up all sorts of securities for your social media site, the friend of your friend might end up publishing those pictures from your earlier years tagging you to some less flattering situations.

Why should anybody care?

Many might say that they don’t actually care what goes on about them on the Internet. When up to 63 % of employers check job applicants’ social media presence (Mashable 2011), I would start caring about it. However unpleasant it seems, KBSD notes that the people you hang out with may affect whether or not you get the job. A shocking 8 % of companies have claimed to have fired a person for abusing social media.

What the article argues for is finding a way to keep a good online presence. This could yield to business, promotion and respect. According to KBSD, the biggest limitations in achieving a positive presence are:Meaning staying out of social media might also not be the right answer. Finding the middle road seems to be the tricky part. If maintaining a positive online presence requires work, what are the main things you should be looking at then? The article discusses the best solutions.

How to protect your online presence?

As it seems, not going on social media or not allowing people ever to take pictures of you is not an option. For me and people my age, staying outside Facebook would probably also have an effect on my social life by not hearing about social events or not being able to keep in touch with friends on the other side of the globe. So what answers does KBSD have?

1.      Set your own reputation

The article tells the readers to be ahead of it all by creating your own digital strategy. However, it doesn’t really explain how to do that. It’s not like joining all different kinds of social medias have been part of my “digital strategy plan” for years – these medias have never existed before. I know it is possible to plan to some extent, but with the pace of new things coming up, it is quite hard.

2.      Stay on top of things

This piece of advice I find useful. Googling your name frequently and actually taking note of the places you appear online seems reasonable. Also checking the status of all the online aliases you have used should prove to be useful, as there is almost always a way of finding out who is behind an alias.

3.      Ensure there is more good than bad

Acting according to this advice requires a bit more work than the others. KBSD recommends using even search engine optimization to ensure that the preferred articles are in the top results for your name. I don’t know how many people are actually willing to pay for some links to appear on top results instead of others, but I would take care of it in other ways. When SEO is the only option you have left, you should probably be quite worried about your reputation.

4.      Secure everything

This should be common knowledge for everyone who’s been using social media for more than a month. All accounts should indeed be secured, no full birth dates, addresses or other personal information should be revealed, especially to other than “friends” or contacts in social media sites.

5.      Educate your family and friends

Using Google image search and monitoring posts and tags with your image does come in handy, as does asking people to remove photos or unflattering mentions of you. Teaching your family and friends about the importance of all these aforementioned steps should come in first, if one thinks they’ve got it all covered.

All in all, this article seems to be a collection of earlier, well tried advice. It is clear that it is not only companies that need to protect their online presence, but people as well. With the massively increased use of social media and the Internet on average, every future job seeker needs to be on their digital toes.

Here’s a quick check list that CBS News provides for checking your online presence:

• Search engines: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s
• Bing Blogosphere: Known blogs in your professional arena, or use blog search engines such as Technorati or Google Blog Search
• Forums: Known discussion threads in your professional arena
• Social networking sites: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn
• Microblogging sites: Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk
• Personal rating sites
• Corporate Web sites: Your company, former places of work

References:

http://mashable.com/2011/11/02/protecting-your-online-reputation/

http://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/artikkeli/Tietosuojavaltuutettu+tyrm%C3%A4%C3%A4+Google-haut+ty%C3%B6nhakijoista/1135268575311 (In Finnish)

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-51349621/how-to-protect-your-reputation-online/