Swedish fashion retailer Lindex is breaking new ground when it comes to embracing bloggers. The company has already created an affiliate programme for fashion bloggers and makes it easy for bloggers to link to individual garments via a "blog this" button (see below) which gives bloggers a code to copy a photo into their own blogs.



Today Lindex became the first e-commerce site to partner with Twingly, the Swedish-based company who's service shows which blogs that link to a specific page. In other words, not only does Lindex use blogs to drive traffic to their web shop but they are also able to send traffic back to bloggers by showing links to their blog posts, which in turn will encourage more fashion bloggers to link to lindex.se. This is a great way of building value for both the bloggers and the company, and hopefully also to other visitors to the site that are able to get more information and viewpoints on different clothes they might consider buying.

Tags: lindex, fashion, mode, twingly, modebloggar, lindex. Ping.

This could possibly be the shortest press release this year, but the 30 words issued this morning from TeliaSonera will still create a significant buzz in the market. The Swedish-Finnish telecom operator has signed an agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia "later this year".

IDG has an "interview" with a press officer at Telia who does not reveal anything more than the press release. Quite amusing.

Tags: apple, iphone, sweden, teliasonera, sverige, iphone. Ping.

Schibsted and Aftonbladet today announced that they are shutting down the free daily Punkt SE. The paper lost a total of 258 million kronor in 2006 and 2007 and the figures for Q1 2008 were equally depressing, 44 million kronor, according to Martin Jönsson in SvD. But Schibsted still views the free sheets market as a strategic area and simultaneously acquires 35 percent of the local competitor, Swedish Metro, for 350 million kronor.

Tags: newspapers, punktse, schibsted, gratistidningar, aftonbladet, metro. Ping.

Communications professional, meet your new colleague, the mash-up communicator. This is the marketing student that has just graduated college or university, and who is equipped with a set of very different skills:

"Shrink, storyteller, financial wiz, global diplomat, used car salesman, communicator, community builder and code monkey are just some of the personas for a newly minted marketer to have handy (along with that MBA)."

Becky Ebenkamp writes in Brandweek: "In sum, this is not your father's marketing career."

I remember when I joined the Norwegian PR agency Geelmuyden.Kiese almost a decade ago (ouch!) that they made a big deal out of hiring people with vastly different backgrounds; journalists, marketers, economists, even poets. And they had a point. If you bring a group of people with diverse skills together they will probably be more creative and do a better job than if they are clones of each other. Sure there are professional services organizations, like management consulting firms, that operate with strict business models in which people are trained to work in a certain manner and where similar backgrounds and knowledge bases are an advantage. But for a creative profession like PR consulting there are clear benefits with variation.

The difference now is that these qualities need to exist within the same person and not just within a group.

"People who have cross-fertilization—both by function and by geography—are highly in demand," said Jane M. Stevenson, global managing partner of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, Chicago. "The marketing executive who has been in a finance or sales role as part of their development, and, who maybe worked in Europe or Asia as well as North America. Those are the people who get paid the premium once they get to the top."

If we look at the current media revolution there are still many PR professionals that have taken no or little interest in the new social media tools. I can imagine that communicators that choose not to embrace web 2.0 technology in a few years time will be seen as PR dinosaurs - creatures on the brink of extinction, not fit to survive under new conditions. Add to that a new generation of marketers that are multi-skilled, multi-experienced and who can multi-task like you wouldn't believe. Now that will be an interesting sight. Last year one of the big Swedish tech compaines offered 1,000 employees over 35 (!) severance pay because they needed to get more young staff into the company. Wouldn't that be something, PR agencies showing 35 year olds the door because their skills are outdated?

When the Swedish recruitment company Hammer & Hanborg surveyed 3,062 people in the communications business about their profession, a conclusion was that in 5-10 years time "the increased breadth of communication possibilies will force communicators to become more specialized in order to utilize all channels to their fullest potential".

I think you probably could look at the classic "T-profile", meaning that you need breadth in competence but also a field in which you are specialized. Can it be that within the next few years both the horizontal and vertical bars of the "T" need to expand in order to succeed in the communication industry? Your thoughts?

Tags: public+relations, pr, jobb, kommunikation, reklam. Ping.

Excellent Facebook parody. Poke!



Via DuttoPR.

Tags: facebook, ironi, humor, facebook. Ping.

In about 15 minutes the Swedish head coach Lars Lagerbäck will present the team that will travel to the Euro 2008 Football Championships. During the tournament they will be able to read a blog by Lars-Åke Lagrell who is the President of the Swedish Football Association. He will be blogging on the site of one of the sponsors to the national team, Svenska Spel, which is the state-owned gambling company. The ambition is that the blog will be updated each day, but it is not clear whether or not Lagrell will be the only blogger.

Lagrell promises to write about everything from meetings with the UEFA President Michel Platini to activities with the Swedish team.

Tags: euro 2008, soccer, fotboll, em 2008, fotbollsem, landslaget. Ping.

Celeb tech blogger Robert Scoble writes that news about the China earthquake broke first on Twitter. A time line of tweets can be found here.

Tags: china earthquake, twitter, jordbävning, kina. Ping.

Täby Danderyd Tidning (T&D) is a subscribed weekly local paper for the two cities Täby and Danderyd north of Stockholm. It was launched in October 2006 and intented to become the leading local paper in the region within five years. The competition has been tough with three free dailies currently being distributed in the Stockholm region and one (Mitt i Täby) locally. Dagens Media now reports that T&D only managed to get 2,000 paid subscribers and that the paper scrapped the old business model. Since last week the paper is distributed free to households in the region and it estimates to get a 60-70% reach in the area. The circulation will be 43,000 copies.

Tags: free dailies, dagstidningar, täby, danderyd, media. Ping.

Hat tip to Mark.

Tags: tom waits, press conference, presskonferens, musik, tom waits, media. Ping.

TimesOnline in the UK is about to release newspaper content from 200+ years to readers online, reports Journalism.co.uk. A beta version of a digital archive has been opened which includes articles from The Times, Sunday Times and TimesOnline published as far back as 1785. The actual launch is expected to occur in the next couple of months and will be free to users although that may change after a period of evaluation.

Tags: uk, dagstidningar, mode, storbritannien, media. Ping.

H&M today launched what might be the first takeover ad on a Swedish blog. The content on the popular fasion blog by Kenza Zouiten is surrounded by H&M bikini ads. The arrangement has been managed through the blog ad network Tailsweep (disclosure: this blog also uses Tailsweep). The campaign contains more sites but Tailsweep is not willing to disclose any details at this stage.

Update: The claim by Dagens Media that this is the first HPTO (Home Page Take Over) on a Swedish blog is not correct. Roland Karlsson at Blogg Esse informs Media Culpa that both Lindex and Nivea have done so earlier this year on Engla's Showroom.

Tags: advertising, modeblogg, mode, reklam, kenza. Ping.

The Swedish media agencies handed out awards at StockholmMediaWeek this afternoon for campaigns of the year.

Grand Prix award: PHD for Match.com.
Gold award to Mindshare for AMF Pension.
Silver goes to Starcom for SAS Institute.

The four criteria that lie behind the awards were:
- Insight - consumer insight.
- Innovation
- Results
- Importance of media strategy for the campaign

Tags: advertising, reklam, stockholmmediaweek. Ping.

The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet yesterday quietly launched Snack ("chit-chat"), a new community for sharing opinions, videos and photos. Kalle Jungkvist, editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet.se, told Medievärlden that a reason behind the lauch was to move the power from anonymous whiners to people who contribute under their own name (also see blog post from yesterday). Another reason was to stimulate loyalty among readers.

Users will shortly be able to interact with the editorial content at Aftonbladet.se through article comments for example. This feature has not yet been launched.

Martin Jönsson writes that there initially seems to be a very high proportion of Aftonbladet employees among the recently registered profiles. No need yet for Facebook to get worried. Then again, Snack has just been launched and from what I can tell there has not been much marketing of the site either.

Tags: community, social networks, snack, community, aftonbladet. Ping.

A few days ago the Swedish public service tv SVT launched Play Rapport, a news web tv channel with streaming video. It is an online version of the news show Rapport and it will be led by legendary news anchor Claes Elfsberg. The content will focus on short news items from Sweden and the world that have a strong visual element. Today at StockholmMediaWeek SVT's Programme Director Annie Wegelius revealed that Play Rapport had 50,000 viewers during launch day and 25,000 viewers the second day, still just a fraction of the number of tv viewers of course.

Wegelius said that there is a higher proportion of viewers that choose the web tv versions of SVT material in the drama productions than for news. SVT posts three episodes each Sunday online of the drama series Andra Avenyn which then is broadcasted on regular tv three nights in a row. One in ten viewers of Andra Avenyn watches on the web, while the ratio for news is still only one to a hundred. With the introduction of Play Rapport SVT aims to improve those stats.

SVT publishes everything they own the rights to online on SVT Play for 30 days and there are currently 2,000 shows available at SVT Play.



Footnoote: The number of viewers for Rapport dropped by 10-15 percent in January compared to the same month 2007.

Tags: web tv, webbtv, svt, play rapport, stockholmmediaweek. Ping.

During StockholmMediaWeek this afternoon, Mattias Fyrenius from TV4 New Media and Kalle Jungkvist, Aftonbladet New Media, talked about their respective sites which are among the most visited sites in Sweden. Ljungkvist said that the typical visitor to Aftonbladet.se is well educated and visits the site several times a day. The first visit is often in the morning and readers scan most of the content of the front page in order to find stories to read. Subsequent visits are more to check if there have been any updates. Visitors are driven by two different motivations - entertainment or "value". Entertainment includes stuff like web tv, blogs, the content that is of a more "social" nature. The value driven users are more into niche content like the travel site, the site for parental issues and so forth. Women are more frequent users of the value content than men and there is a tendency to access it more often in the evening. The site has its prime time at 8 PM.

It was also interesting to hear from MSM what many of us have been saying for quite a while, namely that journalists are no longer megaphones. Ljungkvist said that the dialogue with readers is vital and that an effect of the new channels is that readers are no longer as anonymous in their comments as they used to be, which in turn equals higher quality because people tend to be more civil when they are identifiable.

More in Swedish on the event blog.

Tags: sweden, aftonbladet, tv4, stockholmmediaweek. Ping.

I am currently at the StockholmMediaWeek event, listening to a panel debate about people who get caught in the media meat grinder. Former State Secretary Lars Danielsson is perhaps one of the Swedes who have been hurt the most in recent years after he was blamed with being the main person behind the Swedish government's poor handling of the Asian tsunami disaster. On the stage beside Danielsson is also two experienced media consultants, Bo Krogvig of Springtime and my former colleague Paul Ronge.



Some of the more memorable advice and quotes regarding crisis management:

- PR: As long as a question remains unanswered, media will continue to dig.

- PR: compares journalists with elk hunters, they don't hate the elk, but they don't have very much sympathy for the dead elk either. In other words, trying to play on the journalist's empathy for the "victim" will get you nowhere (my interpretation).

- BK: The part that is first with the truth wins.



Tags: media, crisis management, lars danielsson, stockholmmediaweek. Ping.