Reputation and social media

Last week the Students’ Association of our Faculty of Social Sciences organized an interesting event together with MSL, a communications consultancy. The topic was Reputation and Social Media and in my introduction I discussed ways activist groups ‘use’  reputation and social media in their campaigns. Together with my colleague Sonja Utz from the Department of Communication Science we took care of the two “academic” introductions, followed by short introductions from the practitioners’ end with a representative from MSL and of a large corporation, Randstad. There appeared to be quite some unanimity in the debate following the introductions; the idea of bringing together these diverse groups provided some interesting points of view. I’m looking forward to the next event in this series!

Social media all around

It’s been a week full of social media for me. Last week I gave a short speech at the opening of the CSR Communication Conference in Amsterdam. On the program there were themes such as “CSR Communication via New, Social & Mobile Media” or “CSR Communication: Concepts, Models & Approaches”. The conference aimed to bring together scholars from marketing, communication and management. I argued in my opening speech that it would be wise to look beyond these usual suspects and to also incorporate related areas such as social movement studies, linguistics or social network analyses. After all, activists of all kinds often are involved in CSR Communication in one way or another, these communication messages could well be analysed using linguistic devices and highlighting networks of interaction is another useful angle. Maybe in the next edition of the conference?

Then I went to Copenhagen to attend the first Social Media for Social Purposes conference, organized by Mette Morsing and colleagues. A conference packed with interesting presentations, organized as part of the Responsible Blogging project. Interesting keynotes from a variety of speakers including researchers (Andrew Crane, Eszter Hargittai, Miriam Meckel) and practitioners such as Matthew Yeomans who works on the Social Media Sustainability Index. The academic papers provided some interesting presentations as well and gave me some useful feedback on my paper with Iina Hellsten on networks of activist groups. During the day, several tweeps provided online comments and summaries, using the hashtag #smsp2011 (check it out). Learned a lot, from sentiment analyses to corporate policies on social media.

Finally, today, I went to the inaugural lecture of Peter Kerkhof who was my predecessor as board member at the Faculty of Social Science. Peter gave an interesting presentation on how social media could strengthen customer media, the core area of his chair. Again, for an overview in tweets, see hashtag #oratiecm.