Dr. Sonja Utz

Our Eurostars proposal has been granted! INFUSE (intelligent fund search) combines vertical semantic search technologies and social media knowledge sharing tools. The technology is developed by Scan4News, Norway, in cooperation with Gjovik University College, Norway. At VU university, two PhD students will focus on a) the strategic processes underlying information sharing and b) the development of new strategic marketing analysis based on the principles of network economics.

From tomorrow on (1 November, 2011), I will work two days a week at the NHL Leeuwarden as associate lector social media and reputation management. In cooperation with insurance company achmea, we will study how organizations can and should use social media to increase or restore their reputation. I'm looking forward to conduct exiting research!

Friday, May 20, 2011, I will give a lecture in the course digital branding & social media, organized by the European Institute for Brand Management (EURIB), Rotterdam.

I will teach at the summer school Making sense of social media. Empirical research and future directions, organized by the Leibniz Graduate School for Knowledge Media Research and the ScienceCampus Tuebingen. Looking forward to work with enthousiastic and talented students at a beautiful place!

The paper "Crisis PR in social media: An experimental study of the effects on organizational crisis responses on Facebook", (Kerkhof, Beugel, Beukeboom, & Utz) has been selected as a Top Paper in Public Relations. It will be presented on May 29, 3p.m. at ICA in Boston.

I have been nominated for the Research Price of the Faculty of Social Sciences (Best Researcher of the Faculty 2010) and the Jenny Gierfeld Fellowship.

Why do people often feel bad after reading the blog posts of other people? Interview in der Süddeutschen Zeitung (German)

Wolfgang Steinel, Lukas Koning and I received the award for the BEST EMPIRICAL CONFERENCE PAPER at the 23rd Annual Conference of the International Association for conflict Management (IACM) in Boston, Massachusetts. The paper is also conditionally accepted by OBHDP.

Thursay, October 22, I will give the keynote at the conference "Online communication. Decoding the digital revolution - trends and tools in corporate communication", here in Amsterdam. This conference is organized by the Quadriga University of Applied Sciences (Berlin), and it deals with the use of social media for corporate communication, reputation management, PR and viral marketing. Speakers from companies such as SAP, Philips, Microsoft or NGOs as Amnesty International will present case on how they use social media. I'm looking forward to this interesting conference!

It's been/is a busy month. The semester has started again, I gave a presentation at the conference of the German social psychologists and another one at the conference of the German media psychologists . Next week, I will give an invited presentation on the impact of the internet on social relationships. This has been organized by LaRed, a professional networking organization.

The Erasmus Research Institute of Management and Globalpark organize a symposium on "Online research: Insights into methods and their application in practice" in Rotterdam. I will present the results of two online experiments in my talk "The reparation of trust after negative feedback - the results of two online experiments among eBay users".

I've been invited to give a talk at the conference of the psychology division of the Cusanuswerk. The topic is "Encounters in Cyberspace - social life with and within the Internet"

Here you can find some information about my research, my publications and my background. Enjoy :)