Managing your virtual identity

Besides the features interactivity and networked , social media offers people a virtual space. They can create a whole new ‘virtual’ life. This virtual life can offer a different world from their ‘real’ lives. It gives disabled people the possibility to make a virtual walk trough the park with friends at Habbo Hotel and people can create their own, new life at Second Life. Companies and brands can create their own lifestyle. By using narrowcasting they can contact fragmented audiences in a certain way which is adjusted to the target group. They can present themselves as young and exiting to young people, and sophisticated and trustworthy to adults.

In a virtual space people and companies can be anything they want; a super hero, beautiful and attractive, rich and sophisticated, etc. Unlike in the real world, appearance is like content. It is adjustable, and people can be almost anything they want. Why does this seem so easy online? It has to do with presentation.
There are two types of online presentation: presentation of the individual who is using social media, and presentation of a brand or company who wants to reach their target group. They both should pay close attention on how they use social media.
Information posted online is often encoded with a preferred meaning; a message that the sender wants to communicate to the receiver. This message is being decoded by the receivers (Croteau & Hoynes, 2003). Whether it’s a brand or an individual; they want to present themselves.


Self presentation
Everybody tries to manage the impressions that he or she makes on other people. This is called self-presentation. A good self presentation has become necessary in daily life to function well. People should be really careful with what they post online. A good example is the article we posted last week on Thursday, about a girl from Quebec who’s insurance got cancelled because of photo’s she posted on Facebook. For a couple of months I worked at a recruitment agency and we use to check the Hyves or Facebook profile of people that were applying for a job. We used the profiles of people to get an impression of who they are.
Sasan Zarghooni did A Study of Self-Presentation in Light of Facebook. She claims that: “In general, people seek to present themselves positively. Paradoxically, the fear of appearing too pretentious may lead people to be so modest that the self-presentation becomes unsuccessful. This is particularly a problem on Facebook, where users create profiles that they hope will make good impression on their acquaintances.”


So if people use social media, brands should do that as well to keep in touch with their target group. The question is: how? There are some important things for companies to keep in mind when they are using social media. The most important is that it has to have added value to the target group. For making this project a succes, BNN needs to investigate. They need to make sure that information and actions fits well to the needs of the target group. Social media is about adding value in a social way or to social interactions. So instead of just joining, BNN should be listening, energizing, supporting and embracing the target group. If BNN does this well, it will lead to the high level of emotion, engagement and involvement of the target group. They will value the efforts of BNN and feel appreciated. In general BNN should create a platform where people can socialize, share and incorporate social validation. I would like to share an interesting video about this that I found on Slideshare:

Why Social Media Succeeds or Fails

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For some more information about the use of social media, I would like to refer to Danah Boyd. She is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and she is an expert on the field of social media an teenagers. Her research examines social media, youth practices, tensions between public and private, social network sites, and other intersections between technology and society. (www.danah.org)

She discussed her research on teenagers and their patterns of using social media at the 2009 Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. In this video she gives explanations on why people use social media, what is the added value to their lives? She noticed that most teenagers go online to interact with friends they already have, they are not really networking and meeting new people, but they hang out and keep in touch with people they already know. There are four important things about social media profiles: first their presentation which functions as a digital body; second the list of friends they have, some people have a few and others seem to be collectors with thousands of friends; third are the comments, these are not deep conversations but are used for the public structures, they want to be seen; fourth there is the constant stream of information about friends, they want to keep up with everybody. She also says that the average age on Twitter is 31, so not only teenagers want a virtual place to hang out with their friends, also adults want a public place where people can hang out and share information.



Books
Croteau, & Hoynes. (2003). Media. Society. California: Sage Publications.

Internet
Danah Borg, www.danah.org. Geraadpleegd op 2 december 2009.
Sasan Zarghooni, A study A Study of Self-Presentation in Light of Facebook, http://folk.uio.no/sasanz/Mistorie/Annet/Selfpresentation_on_Facebook.pdf). Geraadpleegd op 2 december 2009.