Google Archives - Page 4 of 4 - Reputation Communications

Social media is a transformational communications tool. It enables anyone to broadcast a message to the global community free, easily and instantly. That makes it an empowering agent of change.

If you are interested in a topic and have a social media monitoring system in place, you can follow nearly everything that is said about a topic in real time – and participate in the conversation. (I say “nearly” because no monitoring system is infallible.)

The influence of social media on public opinion cannot be overemphasized. It is also changing the power balance in the Hollywood industry, as this article about the rush among celebrities to hire social media managers suggests. (The more followers a star has, the more fans, hence more negotiating power.)

Social media an important human rights tool

As the Arab Spring uprising showed, social media may be one of the most important human rights tools of our time. Yesterday, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (GC) confirmed that when it announced that the Ford Foundation has enabled GC to launch JustPublics@365. The initiative will bring together journalists, academics, activists and policy advocates who are working to address social inequality — economic, housing, race and ethnicity, immigration, health, and education — through digital media. The program’s first Summit will be held at the GC on Thursday, March 6, 2013.

Coincidentally, Amnesty International executive director, Suzanne Nossel, has called on President Obama to use his second term to advance human rights and dignity, starting with restoring the United States’ own credibility on human rights issues.

Dyan Machan has an insightful piece in Smart Money about how Lady Gaga used her personal story, empathy and social media to become the most Googled person of all time (and earn $100 million this year). Her article is based on the business school case study, “Lady Gaga, Born This Way?,” coauthored by Martin Kupp, program director of the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin.

From the “If the Rules Don’t Work, ReWrite Them” section:

“Germanotta knew talent wasn’t enough to draw attention in a crowded music landscape…. perhaps most important, she worked at first without help from a very skeptical recording-industry establishment. One label turned her down; another dropped her, reportedly after one of its executives made a cutting-his-throat gesture while listening to one of her tracks. So Gaga fed her music and promotional info directly to her fans, via social media. An early-adopting Twitter user, she communicated with her followers an average of five times a day and used the service to announce the release dates of her new albums. Kupp says it’s all an example of how upstarts need to ignore the standards set by large, risk-averse corporations: “If you don’t break the rules, you won’t make it,” he declares.”

Another example of how social media has eliminated the need for many of the middle-men once necessary to launch and build a career, business and brand.