How to cope with social media use of employees that concern your organization: “threat or addition”?

More and more organizations are implementing social media in their communication strategy to communicate to their external and internal stakeholders. Vice versa social media are also being used by employees to share daily activities, concerns or other organization-related content with their online social network. Employees are increasingly present during working hours and in spare time on social media. Almost one third of the employees are regularly posting organization-related messages, according to a study of Verhoeven (2012). So the question how to deal with content posted by employees on social networks that concern the organization is increasingly important.
Recently the national railways of the Netherlands (NS) has send official warnings to employees who posted messages on Twitter about defective coffee machines and used (#) hash tags of the organization and (#) fail during the winter period. This in turn could cause, from the perspective of the NS, damage to the organization.

tagged with: employees, social media use, organization brand, festivals

New Year's Resolutions

As some of my colleagues already said: happy 2012 to everyone! When the year comes to an end we reflect on the past and look forward to the coming year. We dwell by the things that we have achieved, the new experiences we have gained, the things that unfortunately went wrong or the goals we weren’t able to achieve. New Year is an event to reflect on our life and develop new goals for the coming year.

tagged with: mindfulness, resolutions, new year

Online versus real life experiences

It is a well known fact that the internet has brought with it many changes to the world economy, society and the daily lives of people. As people use the media and applications to define their identities (as I argued in my last blog), these developments and opportunities that accompany them might even be important for people’s perceptions and values. The popularity of internet applications results in their being used regularly to provide services for the general public. Besides that, the interactivity also creates opportunities for consumers to be proactive in gaining new experiences. As a result, the ways people choose to attend, prepare and experience events have changed.

tagged with: museumkompas, festivals, experience

I blog, therefore I am

Immersion in the world of cross-media. As a new member of the Cross-Media Lab I felt that I could relate to the issues the students of the Media Battle dealt with. Not literally in terms of creating a media strategy, but in terms of profiling and carrying out a message. Since you have to introduce yourself in an organization you have to carry out a message, so people are aware of your presence. You have to focus on characteristics and distinctions that you want to carry out towards the people that receive these messages. In sum you have to profile yourself, just like the students of the Media Battle had to. Therefore you are looking for aspects you can identify yourself with. The students of the Media Battle made an effort to find the best suitable cross-media strategy the concerned organization and their audience could identify with. In the end the students who won had created concepts that were the most appropriate and best suitable for their specific issue, and could be internalized the best with by the organization. The organization identified with the created concept and the jury identified with the idea of putting this concept into practice. Thus, it is clear that identification with cross-media concepts plays an important role for all those who are involved.

tagged with: digital profile, identity, identification