This morning in a danish newspaper there was a story about that the royal family of Denmark was looking for two interns (at a master degree level) to work for them for free. Think about that what you will. But the thing that struck me was that some of their tasks was to update the website of the royal family.
I understand why the royal family doesn’t need a strong online presence, in most cases they are not required or sometimes even allowed to have an opinion about stuff. Â It was so clear from the interview that the internet was not portraited as something that could generate anything for them. The internet was a place where people went to a website to get information about the royal family and not the other way around. It’s very ancient and pre-2005 to me.
Anyway the question I want to raise today, is if students should be in charge of your online identity, meaning your brand and your contact with people online, and not solely that, but amongst a lot of other tasks probably as well. But the students isn’t my point either.
My point is that if you’re online identity is something that you don’t make a strategical priority, then the possibilities you’re missing out on, and the things you don’t prioritize from the top of the company might be the things that will make you be outcompeted in a couple of years. It’s a serious pitfall, that I can see, if we’re still, in 2011 having people updating websites as a part of a student job. And only updating websites. Not any form of dialogue or online identity apart from that.
On another note, wouldn’t it be AWESOME if the danish royal family (and their staff) started to take the internet seriously as a communication channel and made it apart of their strategy to communicate with the people ? I think it would.
I think the thought of a digital firstmover royal family would rock the whole world.
I mean for starters they could start to listen what happened about them online. A while back I wrote about the branding of denmark because of the birth of the royal baby twins and that blogpost get a lot of hits from google and from some closed fancommunities of the royal family.
If they would tab into that, I guess they could find out more about what people really think, and not just mainstream media and gossip magazines.
Update: From Edgar, on my facebook page I found out that the norwegian royal family (or more specifically the crownprince and princess) actually do have a facebook page and a twitter profile. Very nice and down-to-earth-ish. I just wished that they would interact more instead of just broadcasting, but it’s a start =)
