Year: 2005

In order to raise awareness about international public relations, Scania will sponsor a professorship in international PR at Örebro University for three years. Inger Larsson, former Chief Information Officer at Gambro has been named guest professor.

The second edition of the Swedish blog forum, artfully named Bloggforum 2.0, was held this weekend in Stockholm. I couldn’t attend because I had other engagements, but I will try to watch the session about blogging to create confidence which will be on SVT 24 on Friday [link via Bisonblog].

15:30 – 16:30 Bloggforum: Skapa förtroende genom att blogga.
Paneldebatt om fenomenet bloggning, med bland andra Zaida Catalán, fd språkrör Grön Ungdom och Fredrick Federley, förbundsordförande centerns ungdomsförbund. Inspelat vid Bloggforum 28/5. Reporter Sanna Volny.

I’m as prone to go ego-surfing on Technorati as the next guy, but it seems you can’t trust the stats at all these days. I’ve had at least 20-30 different new incoming links to my blog the last week or so but Technorati says I still have 159 incoming links from 120 sources, i.e. same as a week ago. If you check my Technorati cosmos you can see that the first 20 hits are from the last four days, while on the second page you suddenly have blogs that linked to me 75 days ago. The third page (hits 60-80) comes up blank. Très strange.

I read somewhere that a customer that feels mistreated after a purchase tells 12 other people about that negative experience. Well, if that customer has a blog, that figure might now be 10 or 100 times higher.

A few weeks back I spent more than 4,000 SEK (about 550 USD) on wallpaper at my local paint dealer Färgtema in Täby, Sweden. I bought two different wallpapers, loads of paste and putty. We renovated our bedroom and put the wallpaper up and it looked great. I was however a bit bummed by the fact that we had bought one roll too many of the expensive paper (560 SEK each), but that was because it was hard to figure out if three or four rolls would be enough. We couldn’t return the extra roll so that money was lost, but there was really no-one to blame. Then the paint dealer sold us 12 litres of paste but we only used up about 4 litres. Of the 8 extra litres we could only return 2.

They had the second wallpaper on stock so any rolls that we didn’t use we could return. We ended up using 4 out of 6, and we wanted to return one of these two because it had a few dents in it. The problem was that we didn’t discover this until after we had torn the plastic off. So when I went to the store today they didn’t want to take that roll back, because we had opened the wrapping and they couldn’t get a refund for the product themselves. And not only did I have to argue with one of the sales clerks, but two, so I was feeling a bit uncomfortable and didn’t really push strong enough to make them take back both rolls.

From my perspective as the customer, I had spent 4,140 SEK in this store, out of which at least 1,088 for products I didn’t use or need (562 + 223 + 223 + 80). So when they question why I want to return one roll (“I’m not accusing you, but it might as well be you who made these dents in this roll”) it really made me annoyed. My question is, is your reputation worth the 223 SEK you saved by sending me home with a roll of wallpaper I don’t need? Of course not. Do you think I will come back next time I’m renovating my house? I doubt it. So when more and more customers start their own blogs, prepare to read some nasty stories about bad shopping experiences. Your brand is on the line, yes, it’s online!

Not that you need more evidence that journalists read blogs, but I couldn’t resist showing this article from Aftonbladet this week. It’s about the cult of the iPod and has references to this post on my blog.

Cool stuff, everyone. I’ve been nominated for MarketingSherpa’s 2nd Annual Reader’s Choice Blog Awards.

Voting has already started and ends Wednesday June 8th.

“Prizes this year include a “Winner” icon for your Blog, a special coffee mug, and your name and blog URL on our site and in a press release.”

C’mon everyone, I really want a new mug. Vote for me here and do it now. (Pretty please with sugar on top?)

Oh, and while you’re at it. Adland is nominated too so give them your vote as well. Åsk rules, you know.

[Edit: I mixed up Adland with Adrants to the amusement of Niklas at Researcher.]