Tonight is the first semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 in Malmö, Sweden. The contest is sure to spark an enormous amount of activity in social media and below you can find an extensive list of official Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Instagram accounts and more. Don’t forget to vote and tweet your support for your favourite songs.

Official Eurovision social media channels:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EurovisionSongContest

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Eurovision and https://twitter.com/eurovisionpress

Twitter hashtags: #eurovision #esc2013

Google+: https://plus.google.com/104761602082790242480

Instagram: https://instagram.com/eurovision

Participating countries, semi-final 1.

1. Austria

Artist: Natália Kelly

Song: Shine

hashtag #AUT #eurovision #esc2013

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/escaustriaat

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nkellymusic

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/NKellyMusic

2. Estonia

Artist: Birgit

Song: Et Uus Saaks Alguse

hashtag #EST #eurovision #esc2013

Web: http://www.birgit.ee/

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/BirgitOfficial

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BirgitOigemeel

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/birgit.oigemeel.official

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/birgitoigemeel

3. Slovenia

Artist: Hannah

Song: Straight Into Love

hashtag #SLO #eurovision #esc2013

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/escslovenia

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HannahESC2013

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HannahEurovision

4. Croatia

Artist: Klapa s mora

Song: Mižerja

hashtag #CRO #eurovision #esc2013

Web: http://www.hrt.hr/eurosong/

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/HRTnovimediji

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZabavniHTV

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Eurovision-Song-Contest-Croatia-HRT/102329896604210

5. Denmark

Artist: Emmelie de Forest

Song: Only Teardrops

hashtag #DEN #eurovision #esc2013 #voteteardrops

Web: http://deforest.dk/

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/drmelodigrandprix

Twitter: https://twitter.com/emmeliedeforest

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dkemmeliedeforest

Instagram: http://instagram.com/emmeliedeforest

6. Russia

Artist: Dina Garipova

Song: What If

hashtag #RUS #eurovision #esc2013

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/dinagaripova

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DinaGaripova

Facebook: https://facebook.com/DinaGaripova.Official

7. Ukraine

Artist: Zlata Ognevich

Song: Gravity

hashtag #UKR #eurovision #esc2013

Web: http://www.zlatao.com/

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/MrFantasticmaria

Twitter: https://twitter.com/zlata_ognevich

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Z.Ognevich

8. The Netherlands

Artist: Anouk

Song: Birds

hashtag #NED #eurovision #esc2013

Web: http://www.anouk.com/

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/anouktv

Twitter: https://twitter.com/anouk

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anouk

Instagram: http://instagram.com/anouk_goldilox

9. Montenegro

Artist: Who See

Song: Igranka

hashtag #MNE #eurovision #esc2013

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Who-See/60576829852

10. Lithuania

Artist: Andrius Pojavis

Song: Something

hashtag #LTU #eurovision #esc2013

Web: http://www.andriuspojavis.com/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/kontaktopiloto

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndriusPojavis

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lrt.lt

11. Belarus

Artist: Alyona Lanskaya

Song: Solayoh

hashtag #BLR #eurovision #esc2013

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/LanskayaOfficial

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlyonaLanskaya

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alyona-Lanskaya/129439653869784

12. Moldova

Artist: Aliona Moon

Song: O Mie

hashtag #MDA #eurovision #esc2013

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/PashaParfeny

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlionaMoon

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/moonaliona

13. Ireland

Artist: Ryan Dolan

Song: Only Love Survives

hashtag #IRL #eurovision #esc2012

Web: http://ryandolanofficial.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryandolanmusic

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ryandolansmusic

Instagram: http://instagram.com/ryandolanmusic

14. Cyprus

Artist: Despina Olympiou

Song: An Me Thimasai

hashtag #CYP #eurovision #esc2013

Web: http://www.despinaolympiou.com/

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/DespinaOlympiouEsc

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DespinaOlympiou

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DespinaOlympiouESC2013

15. Belgium

Artist: Roberto Bellarosa

Song: Love Kills

hashtag #BEL #eurovision #esc2013

Web: http://www.robertobellarosa.be/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Robertobella01

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RobertoBellarosaOfficiel

16. Serbia

Artist: Moje 3

Song: Ljubav Je Svuda

hashtag #SRB #eurovision #esc2013

Web: http://www.despinaolympiou.com/

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/RDURTS

Twitter: https://twitter.com/RDURTS

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/BEOSONG-2013-Serbia/291432997643729

Socialbakers have introduced a concept called “socially devoted“, aiming to describe brands and pages on Facebook that excel in fan engagement and social customer care. That same label has now been applied on a country basis to see what countries are the most socially devoted. It turns out that Guatemala is ranked first in Q1, 2013, with an average Response Rate of 93.54% for local brand pages.

Norway is ranked second, followed by the Netherlands and Sweden in fourth place. The complete Top 25 country rankings, based on percentage of answered questions, can be found below:

This week, I had the opportunity to attend the Engage 2013 conference in London, courtesy of Socialbakers. Among the top speakers, we got to listen to Lionel Lassalle, Social Marketing & Co-Branding Manager at KLM who talked about KLM’s journey to transform social users into customers.

KLM has been working actively with social media for quite some time, and the airline’s presence in social media jump started with the crisis management during the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in April 2010. It was not until then that the company really started to take advantage of social networks in communicating with customers.

“The ash cloud changed everything”, said Lassalle.

According to Lassalle, one of the key factors in becoming a social business is to be able to break down the silos and start to co-operate between different parts of the organisation. Also, for KLM, customer service is the backbone of the organisation in social media. The airline has the ambition to answer questions in social media within 1 hour and to solve customer service issues within 24 hours. Currently, KLM answers within 15 minutes (on average) and solves issues within 9 hours. Impressive.

The experience from the ash cloud crisis management led to the establishment of three principles that guide KLM in social networks.

KLM’s three leading social pricinciples:

1. Service is sales
2. Be cool to hang out with
3. Don’t push, create stuff worth sharing

Social media can drive sales
One of the main take aways for me during the day was that we saw several examples where social media can actually drive sales. One project for KLM in the Netherlands increased sales with 30%. Also, Bruce Daisley of Twitter UK told us how sponsored campaigns on Twitter had shown that there can be a strong correlation between Twitter ads and sales. Some campaigns had been more than four times as effective as spending that additional amount on traditional advertising.

Becoming a social business
KLM has the ambition to be a social business and by relying less on stand-alone campaigns and working more with long term solutions, the airline has come a long way towards that goal. Here are a few more quotes about their social media strategy, from Lionel Lassalle’s presentation.

“We are connecting social media to our core business, which is flying.”

“We are heading to become a social business.”

“Social media is no longer a platform, it is integrated throughout the whole organisation.”

“From one side it makes our customer’s life easier, but it also constantly helps us to improve the quality of our service.”

And finally, about return on investment: “Is it worth the money? Hell, yeah!”

Below you can watch the entire presentation from Engage 2013.

Socialbakers have just released statistics for the top Facebook pages in Sweden for February 2013. Some notes about the report:

- One of the top ten brands is actually seeing a decreasing number of fans: the candy Hallonlakritsskalle. It has seen a steady but slow decline for the last six months.

- Just like in January 2013, three out of five top brands by post engagement rates are car brands.

- Four out of the five most socially devoted brands are telecom brands, compared to three last month.

- The #1 media brand by local fans, Vakna! Med The Voice, has lost more than 1,000 fans since the last report in January.

- The number of Swedes on Facebook is down from 4.9 million in January to 4.8 million (monthly active users).

Earlier this week, the official Twitter account for Burger King was hacked and turned into a McDonald’s feed. Now, the same thing has happened to @Jeep. The Jeep logo was replaced with a Cadillac logo and the hackers tweeted things like “We got sold to @Cadillac because we caught our employees doing these in the bathroom” with an image of a bottle of prescription-only pills. Jeep soon got control of the account and deleted the tweets tweeted by the hacker.

For a brand, crises like these are of course serious, but handled correctly they can also become an opportunity. Often an account that is involved in a similar incident gains a lot of followers, thanks to the increased attention.

This time, both Burger King and Jeep turn the hacks into a PR opportunity by posting some clever tweets. Burger King seized the opportunity to send their wishes to a brand that was the victim of the same type of crisis, which showed a human side of the brand.

Jeep cleverly responded with this tongue in cheek tweet.

As you see, both tweets got loads of retweets and were marked as favourite by many followers. Also, note the dots before the Twitter handle, enabling all their followers to see the tweets, not only the ones that follow both accounts.

I’m lovin it

I started blogging nine years ago and the first public post that remained online is from February 17, 2004.

Back then we didn’t have Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, so it has become increasingly hard to find the time to post longer texts. I still enjoy blogging as much as I used to and I wish I could blog more. I now have two blogs, the second one is about social media and is in Swedish.

The post during the last 12 months with most views was the one titled “Fake photo of hurricane Sandy goes viral on Facebook” with close to 8,000 views to date. Also worth noting is that a blog post from January 2009 about chosing Twitter handle, still attracts so many views that it was one of the top ten posts of the last year.

Other than that, posts about Instagram and Cinemagram are among the topics that are most viewed on this blog.

With that said, I am starting the countdown to the next anniversary which will mean a full decade of blogging. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more.

Image by gak on Flickr.

Yesterday I blogged about how SAS, Emirates and SF got their brands hijacked on Instagram. Today I found two new examples of fake accounts that promise to give away gift cards in exchange for email addresses. Hundreds of Swedish Instagram users are currently giving away both email addresses and even mobile numbers on the fake accounts of Abercrombie & Fitch and coffee chain Espresso House.

Fake Abercrombie & Fitch at http://instagram.com/abercrombiesverige. The account bio says: “We are soon opening a store in Sweden! Follow the instructions in the image to get unique offers and gift cards”. The image caption says that the company will give a gift card worth 1,000 SEK to all followers of the account if they add their email address in the comments.

Fake Espresso House at http://instagram.com/espressohouseofficiell. The account bio says: “The first 5,000 that follow and share this account will get a gift card of 100 SEK at Espresso House”.

Ok folks, it is time to apply some critical thinking to social media. As I blogged about yesterday, it is incredibly easy to trick thousands of people to like a fake account and even post their email addresses publicly on Instagram. Today I found another example on Facebook that was posted yesterday evening.

A Danish guy says he won 23.5 million Danish kroner on Lotto and that he will choose two people who like his picture who he will give 75,000 DKK. The problem, it is fake.

It took me about 30 seconds to search for the facts on Google. A Danish newspaper wrote about it this morning. According to a representative at Danske Spil, the company behind the Danish Lotto, the coupon in the picture is from February and that no such large prizes were awarded during February. The person in the photo is not a Lotto winner.

The image has been shared 62,000 times since last evening.

Once again, take a second or two to double check if the image you are about to share is fake or not. It might save you some embarrasement.

The Instagram account SAS Scandinavian, @scandinavianairlines, promised two tickets to New York including 5 stars (sic) hotel to the first 20,000 people that followed the account. The account quickly attracted more than 14,000 followers.

Of course, this was not the official account of the Scandinavian airline, which can be found at @FLYSAS. Instead, the account soon changed name to @s0viknes and it belongs to, it seems, a young Norwegian guy who did this as a prank to get a lot of followers. He boasts: “follow this king who tricked them all”.

Note: I have cropped this photo because it seems the person in the photo was not the person behind the account.

As always, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. If SAS would give away 40,000 airline tickets that would cost about 44 million USD. Plus hotel rooms for 40,000 people. That’s just ridiculous. And you would think that the lousy English spelling would reveal that this was not an official account. Please think before you follow and share hoaxes like these.

And for brands, it is always wise to secure the most apparent versions of your brand name on popular social networks. At least that makes it a bit harder for others to use your brand to scam people.

Update: Several similar fake accounts have apparently appeared the last week. Via @AndersEriksson we can see a screen shot from the fake @emirates_dubai here: http://instagram.com/p/Vb9H-VNmYo/

And one account is pretending to be the Swedish cinema chain SF: @sfbioofficial. It says it will hand out 10,000 movie tickets to people who follow the account and add their email address in the comments to an image. More than 6,500 comments can be found so far, most of them include email addresses to teens and kids. And new comments are still being added every second as I blog this. The official account can be found at @SFBIO.

Parents, you need to have a talk with your kids about scams on Instagram. Found via @kingdeborg and @jonatanahlin on Twitter.

Update 2: The account @sfbioofficial changed name to @williammkarlsson, then reappeared with the first name with new followers and new images. @williammkarlsson is now gone, hopefully because it got reported as spam. The scam continues and new comments are added every minute. It seems that the account adds a new image now and then to attract new followers and commenters.

The blogosphere may have reached its pinnacle some years ago, but some are doing their best to reignite their blogs. My friend Fredrik Wass last year decided to post every day for 100 days in a row in an effort to keep his blog more active. This year he is repeating the challenge, with one big difference. A lot of bloggers are accepting the challenge too, more than 500 Swedish bloggers have now decided to post 100 blog posts each for 100 days. In total, if all succeed, that would amount to 50,000 blog posts.

Fredrik explains the challenge with #blogg100.

“#Blogg100 is a blog challenge started by me, a Swedish tech and business journalist and blogger. It’s about finding your inner blogger voice again. By having to publish at least one post every day, 100 subsequent days in a row, hopefully you’ll end up with a number of great blog posts in the end. Facebook and Twitter have kept us busy posting short messages. This blog challenge is about getting back to that old familiar feeling of running your blog, interacting with your visitors and creating community. #Blogg100 was first arranged in 2012. This year there are about 520 Swedish blogs participating in the challenge. Blogging is time invested in your own platform, not someone else’s meeting space. There’s also an opportunity to reflect upon freedom of speech and the notion that we’re all able to speak our minds in a free and democratic society.”

I decided to ask Fredrik about the challenge.

Why did you decide to blog each day for a hundred days (last year)?
It was just a thing I came up with trying to find my old blog spirit again. Occupied with “short social media” like Twitter and Facebook, I’ve been blogging less the last couple of years. I knew putting myself up to the challenge of blogging everyday for 100 days in a row would be beneficial not only for traffic volume, comments and feeback, but also to inspire me and make me learn new stuff.

What did you learn about blogging the last time you blogged a hundred days in a row?
That it’s a mindset, and also that I really had missed the sense of community and engagement that blogging really is, especially when you’re not blogging for business or pr, just for your own pleasure. I got a lot more comments on my posts and also I felt more up to date with what was going on within my field of interest.

How many blogs are participating this year?
Last time I checked there were 521 blogs that are registered for the challenge.

Why do you think so many are willing to participate?
I think that many people have made the same conclusion that I did. They have been blogging for a while but are now realizing that they are publishing less content on their blogs but more shorter updates on Facebook and Twitter. In another interview I said that blogging is time invested in your own platform, not someone else’s meeting space, and I still think that it’s a valid thought. There’s also an opportunity to reflect upon freedom of speech and the notion that we’re all able to speak our minds in a free and democratic society.

Do you think this initiative will have any long term effects on the blogs that participate or on the Swedish blogosphere in general?
Well, if everyone finishes the challenge there will be 50 000 blog posts published at the end of it. So I guess that’s one big footprint that we would make. But I think the greatest effect from Blogg100 is the sense of community amongst fellow bloggers. I almost feel like I’m back in the good old days when there was about 300 blogs in Sweden in total and you could pretty much keep track on every blogger out there. Now there’s of course hundreds of thousands of blogs, in Sweden. I’ve started a Facebook group for all the bloggers in the challenge and the discussions are really active and intense. One can feel the engagement that a lot of us have for blog related questions and issues. It’s beautiful.

Any other interesting aspects of this project worth mentioning?
At the end of Blogg100 I’m planning to arrange some sort of meetup. I think it would be interesting to talk about blogging today compared to 6-7 years ago when it really hit big in Sweden. Blogging today is much more integrated in other services and platforms. For instance, a Facebook status update could be described as a blog post I guess. It would also be interesting to talk about the blog as a tool for change in societies, and how it could be used for activism.

I decided early on that I would not participate myself. I realized that I would most certainly fail after a few days due to lack of time, but I salute all the bloggers that dare to take on such a massive challenge. Good luck everyone.

Here’s a list of all participating bloggers (in Swedish): http://bisonblog.se/2013/01/vi-som-ar-med-i-blogg100/

Footnote: Blog is “blogg” in Swedish.

Photo: Johanna Hanno