Month: December 2007

The use of social media among US teens

Pew Internet has just published the results of a new survey called Teens and Social Media. It shows that US online teens increasingly are using the internet as a means to collaborate and to engage in conversations. Among the findings:

– 39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33% in 2004.
– 33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments, basically unchanged from 2004 (32%).
– 28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004.
– 27% maintain their own personal webpage, up from 22% in 2004.
– 26% remix content they find online into their own creations, up from 19% in 2004.

Overall, girls seem to dominate the teen blogosphere in the US.

“35% of all online teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online teen boys. This gender gap for blogging has grown larger over time.”

Another interesting finding was that “Only 14% of all teens report sending emails to their friends every day, making it the least popular form of daily social communication on the list we queried.” Talk to friends on landline telephones is still the top channel.

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Estonia opens embassy in Second Life

Perhaps you think that Second Life is yesterday’s news, but it’s not. It’s actually the news of Dec 4, because that’s when Estonia launched their embassy in Second Life. Sweden opened the Second House of Sweden in Second Life in May 2007.

“We expect people interested in Estonia, as well as people interested in foreign relations and foreign policy, to participate in events at the embassy,” said Secretary General of the Foreign Ministry, Matti Maasikas who also claims that more countries are planning to follow the same route.

estonia embassy second life

Interestingly, in relation to the debate that PR firms supposedly don’t know how to handle social media, the project is being implemented by PR firm Hill & Knowlton.

Via Olle Wästberg’s newsletter.

HP invite scrapbooking bloggers to contest

I often feel that there is a shortage of real life examples when we talk about social media. Therefore I thought it would be appropriate to write a short post about a blogger outreach by HP. Earlier this fall, HP reached out to scrapbooking bloggers with a challenge to create the most creative Christmas card. HP has now announced that the winner is Theresa Lundström and photos of the entries can be found here. Perhaps not rocket science, but the contest seems to have been very much in line with HP’s products, and not just some blog PR stunt. Well done.

Facebook replaces Expressen as Aftonbladet’s main enemy

Joakim at Mindpark ponders over who Aftonbladet’s main enemy today is. The Swedish daily successfully beat its prime competitor Expressen a decade or so ago, and Aftonbladet has remained the leader ever since. Expressen is no longer seen as a huge threat.

“Who is aftonbladet.se fighting against, what threats does TV4 picture, who is the morning press going to beat into humiliation? Who is friend and who is foe?” [My translation]

And maybe the answer is very close at hand. Henrik Torstensson writes about an inteview with Kalle Jungkvist, editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet Nya Medier.

“When Aftonbladet.se recently did a focus group with twentysomethings, the main competitor in terms of time to Aftonbladet.se was said to be Facebook. The choice for young Internet users was to, more or less, aimlessly surf Aftonbladet or Facebook for a while.”

UPDATE 1: Sure enough, there is a difference between Aftonbladet and Aftonbladet.se, and today Jan Helin, the brand new editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet, tells Medievärlden that “We have a distinct competitor, the tabloid Expressen”. He continues to say “Then the picture is more complex in reality, we compete about people’s time and with what you do online. But now the tabloid is in focus and every day we face Expressen on the starting line”. [My translation]

UPDATE 2: Jeff Jarvis also comments over at BuzzMachine.

Major increase in traffic from Aftonbladet to blogs

Two weeks ago I wrote about how aftonbladet.se noticed a 12% increase in incoming links after the news site started showing blog links to articles. Then I got an email from Roland Karlsson, the person behind the popular Swedish blog networks blogg.se and webblogg.se. Roland told me that the incoming traffic from aftonbladet.se to the blog network quadrupled since the introduction of blog links.

Number of visitors sent to blogg.se and webblogg.se from aftonbladet.se:

week 41: 5,005
week 42: 5,438
week 43: Aftonbladet introduces blog links
week 46: 15,084
week 47: 24,854

Aftonbladet leapfrogged into 10th place of sites that sends most traffic to the blog network, and #6 if you exclude Google, according to Roland Karlsson.

1. google.se 407,526
2. images.google.se 356,596
3. google.com 126,878
4. bloggtoppen.se 50,028
5. englasshowroom.com 38,928
6. lunarstorm.se 37,067
7. images.google.com 31,492
8. playahead.se 31,144
9. bloggkoll.com 26,341
10.aftonbladet.se 24,854

At first sight it might look like a no-brainer that Aftonbladet would send loads of traffic to anything it links to. But a recent example shows the opposite. When 7 bloggers, including myself, participated in blog panel at aftonbladet.se, none of us recieved more than about 20-30 visitors per day from the panel. So the question is whether our topic was too narrow for Aftonbladet’s readers or if it is more beneficial to piggyback on news articles than actually contributing your own original content. I’m leaning towards the former.

Footnote: During week 47 blogg.se/webblogg.se had 58,000 active bloggers.

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