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I publish this post as my application for the Opera internship. I think everyone concerned should know the basic rules here, so there is no need for further introduction - let's go straight to the point because time is money!

✓ 22 year old;
✓ Student at the 4th year of the International Business specialization (Faculty of Management at the University of Economics in Katowice, Poland);
✓ Strong interest in the Internet marketing and social media;
✓ Big Opera and Opera Mini enthusiast

✓ Education in marketing field – basically about international marketing, managing an international corporation and management in different cultures. I know business English so we would not have problems with communication;
✓ Strong motivation toward success and personal development (I subscribe blogs about success and read books – currently The Way to Wealth by Brian Tracy);
✓ Experience in the Internet marketing – I subscribe blogs about marketing and I took part in the Google Online Marketing Challenge 2010 with quite good results (even 7% CTR at the end of campaign);
✓ Presentation skills – at my faculty I am usually the representative and coordinator of the team work;
✓ Ability to adapt quickly to a new environment – I spent the last semester of studies at the Hacettepe University in Turkey at the Erasmus program (no, I do not know Turkish but body language was enough and by the way I had a lot of fun

)
✓ Management skills – I am a member of the Erasmus Student Network (international organization for students) where I do a lot of events. From this experience I have learned how to manage time and very limited resources to gain maximum effects;
✓ Experience in sales, more precisely in direct sales - I was an "financial advisor" selling long-term saving programmes. I know how to present an offer in a way that the potential customer will love it

✓ Perfect knowledge of Opera – I know and take advantage of many Opera’s features: email client, notes, searches, password manager (including auto-filling forms), personalized look, unite, opera link, RSS client, extended to 15 quick dial, bookmarks, etc. I also use the Opera Mini at my cell phone (checking facebook, wikipedia and bus timetables).

Poland is currently experiencing a very rapid growth in social media. I made a little research to prove you that it is really reasonable to promote Opera here.

✓ Over 59% of households has access to the Internet – 15,1mln users!! It is quite good achievement in comparison with some other European countries (especially eastern).

✓ Almost 70% of those are at the age of 15-39 years, who I guess are the potential Opera users.

✓ Rapid development of social networks. Chart shows that Facebook.com has risen dramatically last year. The development of FB would be probably much higher but a lot of people are already registered and very loyal to the Polish www.nasza-klasa.pl (with 20mln accounts)

✓ Opera is already quite popular in Poland in comparison to other countries. The market share of Opera is equal to approximately 11% in Poland while globally it is just around 2% (both 9.x and 10.x versions summarized). As you can notice from the graph this value is still rising up, especially after implementation of Opera 10 and the “choose browser” option in IE.

Since a person should have passion for social media I will focus on activities connected with building an Opera community in my country.

First of all let's define what the Social Media is!

Basically, social media is about sharing a content between users, their friends and groups they're into. The point here is to manage this interaction between users to promote Opera's recognition. After a little reflection on the topic some ideas came to my mind:

✓ Opera’s official group on facebook and nasza-klasa.pl – the easiest and probably the cheapest way to reach wide audience. We will create official groups on two most popular Polish community sites and try to gain “fans”. With facebook it is much easier because we can promote it by the “I like it” button next to articles and other content connected with Opera in the Internet. To reach people on nasz-klasa.pl we can make information on facebook about it since majority of facebook users has nasza-klasa account as well.

✓ Unofficial group on facebook

– the point here is to manage the so called viral marketing groups. We will create some fan groups concerned with the Internet and Internet experience but not saying anything about Opera in the beginning. Groups' names should become popular due to catchy names like “I hate slow Internet”, “I hate Internet breaks at weekends”, “I hate Internet Explorer”, “If this group reaches 50,000 God will create a free, wireless Internet all over the world!”, etc. After a while we are going to have “access” to many people thankfully to these groups – it will be a great opportunity to promote Opera this way by adding content to those groups.

✓ What kind of content? Simply non-invasive! The content should be catchy, funny and interesting so people would share it among others. I bet we all know some Heineken, “Mac or PC?”, Budweiser (aka WAZZUP!!!!) ads

If we create good, share-valuable content people will simply spread it everywhere. YouTube videos are the very best for this, however we could create some funny, addictive games and some funny photos or comics with some red O in the background (people would share them on facebook).

✓ Competitions and events – another way to collect a lot of people in a short period of time. Maxwell House collected over 20000 fans in one day! They just said that the first 20 thousand of people who join the MH group will receive a MH coffee cup. Currently it has 38 thousand fans, since people believe that another promotion like this might happen in the future.

✓ Stalking game – I remember very well a stalking game created by the Knorr (Unilever group) two years ago and I think Opera could do something similar. The whole game was created as a house with rooms and in every room there was a different task to finish (some logical, intuitional and some to check your dexterity). The most interesting part was to find answers for tasks on the Internet – for example you had to find and add a person on facebook to find out what school did that person attend. Another task was to find a blog of a girl and check her puppy's name – in fact, you had to wait a few days for a new entry with the answer

Of course people who found the answers more quickly were getting more points and it really fired up the competition – you had to check these blogs, profiles, etc. a few times every day! Awesome brand recognition rise!

✓ Microblogs (twitter, blip.pl) – other great tools. Imagine we plan an event – we have to tell people about it somehow! It's quite easy with microblogs, we can use them to promote news (like updates) and other events in these media – simply by tagging the information with related keywords like #internet, #news, #opera. We can of course use some nebulous keywords as well, for example connected with competition, in a way it is not perceived as spam! Imagine news with a link to browsers comparison: “#Firefox is still the leader but #Opera is getting to take it by the horns!” – this way we can reach people who are not currently concerned with Opera to higher the brand recognition and maybe persuade them to change their browser. Microblogs give really wide range of opportunities in this area.

✓ Photo contest – a lot of people love photography! Preparing a photo contest is very easy both to do and promote because it can be spread widely in almost every place in the Internet and traditional media. Adding an Opera logo in each of these places and persuading them to join Opera group on facebook/twitter to follow the news etc. is easy and efficient way to collect thousands of fans. To do this we can use deviantart.com, flickr.com and myopera.com.

✓ Some other extra ideas which I do not want to talk about in public since the competition could be reading this and gain the competitive advantage before Opera

I hope that this basic information about me and my country will meet your expectations for the Wild Card. In case of some doubts or questions, please, simply contact me because I believe I could bring a lot of potential to your company during my internship and we could both benefit from this cooperation.

Best Regards,
Mateusz

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