Media Culpa - Two Swedish eyes on media and public relations

Swedish blog forum 2004

Finally things are starting to happen in the Swedish blogosphere. Thanks to an initiative of Stefan Geens and Erik Stattin, there will be a blog forum - simply called BloggForum Stockholm 2004 - on Nov 15, sponsored by Internetworld. The forum will have three different debates about politics, knowledge and media. I will be participating in the media session along with PJ Anders Linder, chief political editor of Svenska Dagbladet, Billy McCormac of JKL and Jonas Söderström of Cross Consulting. The session will be moderated by Mark Comerford from the Department of Journalism, Media & Communication at Stockholm University.

Entrance is free. Register on the website.

Internetworld launches RSS feed

Swedish Internetworld launches an RSS-feed: http://internetworld.idg.se/tjanster/rss/rss.xml

No PR people on marketers Top 100

The Swedish marketing magazine Sälj & Marknadsföring presents its list of Sweden's 100 most influential marketers (see pdf). Top 10:

1. Richard Sjöberg, Information Officer, Coca-Cola
2. Maria Erixon, Designer, Nudie Jeans
3. Thomas Areskoug, Brand Manager, V&S
4. Thommy Bindefeld, Head of Advertising, Indiska
5. Stefan Olander, Head of Advertising Europe, Nike
6. Anna-Lotta Model, Marketing Director, GM Norden
7. Karin Rågsjö, Information Secretary, Alkoholkommittén
8. Anne Thunman, Project Manager for Alcro Designers, Alcro Färg
9. Karin Ahlström Jensen, Information Officer, Öhrlings Pricewaterhouse Coopers
10. Michael Smirnoff, Information Officer, Nokia

There is not a single PR consultant on the top 100. Are they not (like the information officers) considered marketers?

Link via Researcher.se.

More PR bloggers

New PR blogs:

> David Kistle, The Chairman of IABC (International Association of Business Communicators)
> The Good Seed (Giovanni Rodriguez from Eastwick Communications)
> Drew B's take on tech PR
> JMWs blogg (Swedish)
> Södertankar (Pär Henriksson of JKL blogs in Swedish)

Links via PR Opinions, Media Guerilla and Billy Mccormac.

Podcasting buzz doubles in five days

I wrote last Friday about how podcasting is spreading round the internet at warp speed. I did a follow up today, and the number of hits on Google has doubled in five days, from 66,000 hits on Friday, October 15 to 118,000 today on Wednesday, October 20. And it's not just talk (!), some are actually trying it out. Swedish blog pioneer Steffanie Müller has started audioblogging on her blog "logblogwhatever".

Footnote: Googling "podcasting" got 15-20 hits a month ago. On October 8 it gave you 13,000 hits. On October 15 you got 66,000 hits.

(This is "google journalism" at its finest...)

Exploitation of grief

An 8-year old boy and a 56-year old woman yesterday were tragically stabbed to death in the Swedish town Linköping. There is just no way you can imagine the grief and the sorrow that has struck these individuals' families and close friends. When the two Swedish tabloids Expressen and Aftonbladet today had a photo of the boy on their posters, it is a hideous and extremely unnecessary exploitation of a tragic incident. This is stepping so far over the line that I can't even express what I'm feeling. Why the boy and not the woman? Why a photo at all? These are the victims, not the perpetrator (who of course hasn't been caught yet). As a father of two small children I urge media to protect our children and I wish no-one would buy these papers today.

New PR knowledge portal

One of the weirdest things about being in PR and having a blog, is to be on the receiving end of a PR pitch. I get emails now and then from PR people who want me to blog about a new book or a service. It is actually very rewarding for someone like me who make a living out of pitching others, to see what it feels like to get a pitch that is not personalized, misspelled or with a Word-file with "track changes" still in it (see Tom Murphy's comment on that pitch).

Up till now I haven't really found any of the pitches to be worth commenting on but today I got an email from John Gerstner about the launch of a new knowledge portal for communications, PR and marketing professionals called Communitelligence.com. It could actually be worth checking out in the near future. And I won't even say a word about how he sent me a press release today that was out on PRweb.com on October 8...

Closet iPod user

What happens when the rebel becomes market leader? Author Seth Godin's reaction to the success of the iPod is that he has become a "closet iPod user". He doesn't use the white earbuds because he doesn't want to be recognized as an iPod owner.

"Apple is at a critical fork in the road when it comes to the iPod," said ad man Drew Neisser. "You can already begin to see the initial iPod pioneers, who embraced the value of individuality, shunning the storm of homogeneity that's growing with each new purchase."

Godin tells a story about a friend who got a pair of black earbuds.

"He gets on the subway, being very independent and a maverick, which is what New Yorkers like to do, and he sees another guy across the car wearing black headphones. And this guy pulls out an iPod to adjust the volume. My friend catches himself giving this guy the look, the I've-got-an-iPod-too wink. It proves people like it when they find other people like them. People who don't like being part of the main tribe still like being part of a smaller tribe."

Wired has the complete story.

Hockey site tackles the RSS issue

Ahoy, hockey buffs. The Swedish hockey web site Hockeymagasinet now has an RSS feed (in Swedish): http://hockeymagasinet.fpgroup.se/newsfeed.xml

Rise in demand for journalists

ILO, the International Labour Organisation, will discuss a report called The Future of Work and Quality in the Information Society next week in Geneva. The report shows how new information technology has created more jobs globally in the media sector and that the demand for journalists will continue to be strong.

There is an interesting paragraph in the report about journalism and the impact of blogs.

Ultimately, the new media channels have in many ways turned primary sources and ordinary people into de facto journalists themselves, perhaps reducing the previous monopoly that journalists used to have in producing public information. However, they are also giving a greater voice to all of those people who feel, for one reason or another, and some of them justifiably, that the media do not reflect their views, while every month new electronic information sources appear also in some of the poorest, least developed nations where increasingly skilled news men and women are leaping with alacrity over several stages of technological development to exploit the new platforms. Meanwhile, weblogs have grown exponentially in importance, allowing readers of online newspapers and other web sites to see the original sources behind the news – a somewhat troublesome development for many media organizations and some public authorities. In addition, message boards and readers’ comments on Internet stories have become a discussion group in their own right. “Disintermediation” allows Internet users to go straight to the source of what they want. Has this diminished or improved the quality and availability of information and opinion? If the mass media were previously involved in one-way communication, disseminating the world-view of those that controlled it, that is no longer so, and communication can now be more truly interactive.

If it is "troublesome" for media organizations that weblogs make it possible for readers to see original sources behind the news, what does that tell us about how media operates today? It can only be a positive thing that transparency increases and media will find a way to adapt to this new world order.

More in Svenska Dagbladet (in Swedish). Full report (pdf).

RSS ads borders on spam

There are no free lunches so the fact that ads are moving into our RSS feeds may be something we must accept (until Bloglines includes some filter function). But when the ads outnumber the real posts, it borders on spam.

From my Bloglines subscription to MediaGuardian, powered by Newsisfree.com:

UPDATE: More on the down side of RSS advertising.

Buzzword alert - Podcasting

You've just learned about blogs and wikis. Now you need to know the latest buzzword - podcasting, the process of sending audio content directly to an iPod or other MP3 player. Googling "podcasting" got 15-20 hits a month ago. On October 8 it gave you 13,000 hits. Today, one week later you get 66,000 hits. Now that's what I call a buzzword.

Steve Rubel has a good roundup for PR people. Wired also published a story about it last week.

Apparently Joshua Kinberg of Bikes Against Bush-fame is working on a video blog aggregator over at Vipodder.org. Stay tuned.

"Elite designers against IKEA" - an IKEA hoax

Swedish furniture giant IKEA is the target of this campaign from "Elite designers against IKEA" who portray IKEA as the source of all evil design. The designer Van den Puup writes:

"We design profound and beautiful furniture for those with wealth and taste. Which is why IKEA makes us furious livid and angry. Do their designs live, breathe and growl? Are they born from tears of pain? Do they gently touch the bottom of the human soul? Pah! Of course not, no more than weeds can attract a bee. The big blue place is odious, its affordable design is sickeningly shallow and we loathe it even more than we loathe football. Please join us in our unqualified hatred."

Or at least that is what we are supposed to believe. From what I can tell, this seems to be a marketing stunt by IKEA's Danish advertising agency Robert/Boisen & Like Minded. The domain elitedesigners.org is registered by Michael Robert at Robert/Boisen & Like Minded and on the ad agency's own web site, IKEA is listed as one of the clients. The agency has launched other web sites for IKEA, like IKEA-fans.dk with an amateurish look, complete with rotating gifs and dreadful design to look as non-corporate as possible.

Clever and fun you guys. Maybe this will start some buzz about IKEA. I've done my part.

UPDATE: It seems that this is part of an ad campaign in the UK with three tv commercials and print ads on the theme "At home with Van den Puup". Seems like a cool campaign, but since web sites have global reach we who don't see the rest of the campaign might not get the message.

The blogosphere doubles every 5 months

I've been nagging about the lack of interest for blogging in Sweden. Now Dave Sifry of Technorati has some stats that might get a few local trend watchers up and running. Apparently the blogosphere doubles every five months and Technorati now tracks 4 million blogs. That figure was 3 million just three months ago. Ignore at your own peril. (Via Corporate Engagement).

In another post today, Sifry examines the relationship between blogs and big media in terms of inbound links. Big media sites are on top but "a large number of people are getting news, information, and opinion from outside of the mainstream media, and ... these sources are rivaling or exceeding the attention paid to smaller “professional” sites".

In Sifry's chart, the top five web sites ranked by number of inbound links are still traditional media web sites (www.nytimes.com as #1). But 20 of the top 40 are blogs, which shows how blogs are eating into big media's business concept of delivering consumer attention to its advertisers. If blogs are already this influential it can only mean that we are witnessing a transformation of considerable ad spending from big media to blogs. It may not yet have happened but ad money goes where eyeballs go, that's just the way it is.

Sifry also writes that there are approximately 8000 blogs that have between 100-1000 inbound sources and tens of thousands of blogs with between 50-100 inbound sources.

The insanity of embargoing press releases

Journalists may sometimes depend on having a good relationship with influential PR people and therefor more willing to accept an embargo on a news story, but 1) you can never count on it and 2) bloggers don't. So if you are distributing a press release with embargo your whole launch plan might be out the window if the recipient doesn't feel like playing along with your rules. I never understood the purpose of an embargo anyway.

Sam Whitmore's Media Survey spills the beans on today's launch of MSNBC.com's RSS feeds. The story is a bit embarrasing for the PR agency who sent the email. The agency just changed name to DBC Public Relations Experts and then managed to spell the headline wrong: "EMABRGOED: MSNBC.com Users Get Personally Relevant Headlines Delivered Directly to Their Desktops". Maybe Sam didn't understand what emabrgoed meant.

Via Micropersuasion.

Swedish MacWorld RSS-enabled today

More Swedish media with RSS feeds. Today IDG launched an RSS feed for MacWorld.se (http://macworld.idg.se/tjanster/rss/rss.xml).

On top of that, Mikael Zackrisson, chief editor of Internetworld in Sweden, informs us that IDG has several other RSS feeds:

Computer Sweden - Latest news
IDG.se - Latest news
IDG Test centre - Latest tests
IDG Eforum - Latest posts in forum

Thanks for the tip Mikael.

Another Swedish PR agency starts blogging

Another Swedish PR agency has launched a blog about PR and communications, following in the footsteps of JKL and W PR & Info. This time it is JMW Kommunikation. The blog is in Swedish and has been up and running since August. The RSS feed is not visible on the site, but here is the address. Welcome to the blogosphere.

Kryptonite crisis and its impact on the blogosphere

Dave Sifry has an interesting graph on the number of blog posts in the blogosphere and how it relates to certain events. The Kryptonite bike lock controversy for example created two spikes - first when the news broke in the blogosphere, and second when traditional media picked up on the story which made bloggers discuss the implications.

The Kryptonite case will go down in history as classic example on what happens to a company's reputation if it fails to handle crisis PR in a blog enabled world.

Via Mymarkup.

Swedish Radio goes RSS

Feedster adds ads to feeds

They really tricked me this time. I use Bloglines for RSS feeds and have a lot of Feedster feeds in there. Apparently they've started putting in text ads in every feed, that's where I got the news about Washington Post's blog awards. I didn't realize it was an ad post. Had I done that, I wouldn't have written my previous post because thousands of people would already know this. Since some feeds have very few hits, the ad posts gets high visibility.

Best election blogs awards

Deutsche Welle is doing it. And now Washington Post is doing it. Giving out awards to blogs, that is. (Do I hear anyone say "Hello Sweden?")

On October 25, Washington Post will be announcing its "Best Blogs - Politics & Elections 2004 Readers' Choice Awards" to readers' favorite politics and elections blogs. Categories include Best Democratic Party Coverage, Best Republican Party Coverage, Best Inside the Beltway, Best Outside the Beltway, Most Original and Most Likely to Last Beyond Election Day.

Voting ends on October 15 and [drums please] here (free registration required) are the nominees. Daily Kos is nominated in 7 out of 10 categories. Other obvious candidates are Eschaton, Wonkette, Talking Points Memo, Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan.

A sample from one of the political blogs mentioned above. From Wonkette. Ten reasons to invade Iraq (instead of WMD):

- Didn't rewind rental tape
- Mixed recyclables
- Wrote a book
- Reads books
- Throws like a girl
- Is too tall
- Fuzzy math
- Prevented OBGYNs from practicing their love
- Wanted us to pass a global test
- Is a BIG GAY

Printed PR Week now available online

Steve Rubel notes that the printed edition of PR Week now is available online.

A constructive blog debate

This is unusual - a constructive Swedish blog debate. The liberal blogs are usually in consensus about current topics, but a post by PJ Anders Linder about a proposition from the Swedish Moderate Party sparked a comment from Mathias Sundin. That was picked up by Dick Erixon, who for once had a differnet opinion than SvD:s "PJ Just Nu" who in turn replied here. Johan Norberg threw in his five cents the day after and it is actually quite refreshing to see that these gentlemen are able to discuss topics online and in public that they don't fully agree on. Erixon and Sundin continues to discuss. There is hope for the Swedish blogosphere.

Bloggers are the new post-debate spinmeisters

The Guardian has a great article by Markos " Daily Kos" Moulitsas about how bloggers helped turn the perception of first election debate in the favour of John Kerry. This is political campaigning 2004 style. Fascinating reading.

Link via "Det Progressiva USA".

Thank the guys in PJ

It's an amuzing coincidence that bloggers nowadays are referred to as "the guy in pajamas" and the first op-ed blog in Sweden is led by PJ Anders Linder.

Footnote: Jonathan Klein, former senior executive of CBS 60 Minutes, on Fox News said in the Dan Rather controversy: "Bloggers have no checks and balances. [It's] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas." Andrew Sullivan responded in Time magazine "Does this mean the old media is dead? Not at all. Blogs depend on the journalistic resources of big media to do the bulk of reporting and analysis. What blogs do is provide the best scrutiny of big media imaginable—ratcheting up the standards of the professionals, adding new voices, new perspectives and new facts every minute. The genius lies not so much in the bloggers themselves but in the transparent system they have created. In an era of polarized debate, the truth has never been more available. Thank the guys in the pajamas. And read them."

No comments on Svenska Dagbladet's blog

Nicklas Lundblad writes about Svenska Dagbladet’s op-ed blog "PJ Just nu" in the current issue of Axess (not online yet, and I have not yeat read it). PJ Anders Linder comments on the article in the blog today and says that there are no plans to introduce a comments function on the blog, something that I fully understand. I wouldn't expect any corporation or organization to set aside the resources for monitoring that kind of instant feedback. But I don't think that the reasons that Linder points to are valid.

He writes: "SvD's offer to readers is not to listen to everybody's opinions about this and that, but to offer a flow of chosen material furnished with personal, hopefully thought-provoking and readable comments. With a completely free comments function the border between SvD and all other web sites would be blurred, the quality label disappear, and the readers nor SvD would benefit from it."

I think no-one expects an uncensored feedback channel online in any corporate blog. What we would like to see is a representative from big media to open up to the conversation that blogs enable. Traditional media's monopoly on selecting what is considered to be news and setting the agenda is slowly disappearing, thanks to blogs. The views that Linder expresses shows that SvD maybe considers its blog to be just another vehicle for the same type of information, i.e. another one-way megaphone for the carefully selected and filtered news angles that we already see in the printed paper. We don't need more of that, we need you to listen to us, the grassroots. That's the whole point with a blog. And maybe Linder can show that he is actually able to listen to other sources than his liberal blog buddies. We are out here, are you reading?

No comments is fine, but more conversation would be valuable.

Update: Further evidence of the symbiotic relationship between PJ Just Nu and liberal bloggers today when PJ Anders Linder and Dick Erixon give each other a pat on the back, here and here.

George Soros blogs

He is one of the wealthiest and most powerful business men on the planet. George Soros now turns to blogging in his quest for regime change in the US.

Via JD Lasica.

How to handle journalists

All you ever wanted to know about how to handle PR people and journalists. Not!

Examples:
27. Press invitations should always be delivered with as much fanfare as possible. If you can figure out a way to send three or four teasers in advance -- the more cryptic the better -- do. Journalists love puzzles.

57. Always make sure to send an individual copy of every press release all staff writers and editors on a title. Otherwise they might get jealous.

Via CorporatePR.

Timbro in the blogosphere #4

The free market think-tank Timbro continues to secure its grip on the Swedish part of the blogosphere, and the only op-ed blog, Svenska Dagbladet's PJ Just Nu is naturally happy to report about it. Yesterday PJ Anders Linder reported on a new libertarian blog, by Johnny Munkhammar from the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise. Munkhammar has written op-ed pieces together with Timbro's Johan Norberg and had books published by Timbro. On his blog, Munkhammar links to both Timbro and Smedjan. Maybe there is something in the nature of blogs that libertarians are particularily quick to pick up. Either way, any parties opposing the opinions that Timbro et al are bringing to the market, is way behind in the blogosphere.

Footnote: I have previously reported about libertarian blogs like nyliberal.se, Dick Erixon, Johan Norberg and the connections between them and PJ Anders Linder, here, here, here and here.

Richard Edelman starts blogging

Richard Edelman, the CEO of PR agency Edelman, has started a blog.

Update: Richard Edelman's blog hasn't exactly gone unnoticed in the PR blogosphere. Most seem to think that it is positive for the industry that one of the largest PR agencies now has a CEO blog. And of course, so far we are impressed that he blogs, not what he blogs about. That will hopefully come later.

See Technorati rank for Edelman blog.

Vdlkomna

Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ~C.P. Snow, New York Times, 15 March 1971

Advances in technology has made it simple to communicate with thousands of people at the push of a button. Email newsletters cost close to nothing to produce and send to a number of clients and prospects. But the greater the opportunities, the greater the risks. If you are for example a PR agency - an expert in communications - you need to check that your email newsletter works across different types of platforms and browsers. In Sweden we have three letters (å,ä,ö) that sometimes gets you into trouble, like in this newsletter from a Swedish PR-agency (the three letters above are replaced by others, turning the whole text into gibberish).