Opera forever

Opera employees are encouraged to spend time in Social Media, participate in forums and interact with the users and the industry. We have guidelines, but more important is to find the best people: Social Media is nothing you can learn in School. In Opera's Marketing Team, we hire people who fill these requirements, and we encourage everyone to be 'social' as much as possible during the working days (we even let our community members select the best candidates for us).

Social Media is much more than Facebook and Twitter. We therefore have people to represent us in local Social Networks and we socialize with our users in our very own My Opera platform. We are sometimes represented by our users in markets where we don't have a presence ourselves, and a good example is the community driven Opera community in Turkey, where some enthusiastic users run the independent Opera Türkiye community. Opera's presence on vKontakte, one of Russia's biggest Social Networks, is run by community members, but Opera employees participate as moderators and are active in the forums - we actually have 269,320 followers.

Other Social Networks have less Opera presence, such as reddit, which is a brilliant service to share, discuss and evaluate Web content. Reddit users are among the most educated, opinionated and influential Web users, so it is important for us to get their feedback and perhaps win some new fans. You don't mess around with redditers, so our approach was to be fully transparent and engage some Opera engineers to represent us. We arranged an iAMA (Ask me anything), placed some ads and made this campaign site. The result was valuable feedback and very positive response.

A summary of the campaign was well described by Reputation Online today, titled “Opera proves there’s more to ’social’ than Twitter and Facebook”. Have a read and evaluate yourself.

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EDIT:

Someone in my team just responded to a comment on reddit and decided to screw up opera.com - I lost control over my marketing team, but the redditers love it! This is how our web page look like just now: http://imgur.com/43PxV