Media Culpa

China earthquake on Twitter

2008-05-12T14:14:00.003+02:00

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, jordb�vning, kina. Ping.

T�by Danderyd Tidning turns free

2008-05-12T13:18:00.003+02:00

T�by Danderyd Tidning (T&D) is a subscribed weekly local paper for the two cities T�by 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 T�by) 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, t�by, danderyd, media. Ping.

How to hold a press conference

2008-05-09T14:54:00.003+02:00

Hat tip to Mark.

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

TimesOnline to open online archive of 200 year old content

2008-05-09T14:35:00.004+02:00

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 ad takes over fashion blog

2008-05-08T16:15:00.008+02:00

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.

PHD wins campaign of the year

2008-05-08T15:49:00.001+02:00

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.

Aftonbladet launches Snack - a new community

2008-05-08T11:30:00.003+02:00

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 Mediev�rlden 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 J�nsson 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.

Play Rapport had 50,000 viewers first day

2008-05-08T09:56:00.005+02:00

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.

Higher quality comments as readers dump anonymity

2008-05-07T19:19:00.000+02:00

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.

Journalists are like elk hunters

2008-05-07T13:18:00.003+02:00

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.

Poke is "peta" when Facebook goes Swedish

2008-04-25T14:46:00.004+02:00

Facebook will soon release a version in Norwegian (via NRK beta). The social networking site has been translated by members to Norwegian and is currently in a voting stage where users are choosing the best options for different translations. Facebook is also soon to be released in Swedish, according to the Translation application on the site.

"Poke" is currently "peta" in Swedish and "prik" in Danish. In Norwegian it is still called "poke" although "pirk" and "dytt" are possible alternatives. Other suggestions for poke in Swedish are "puffa" and "knuffa" and users will decide which translation that will win.

1,207 members are currently registered as translators for Norwegian and 480 for Swedish.

Tags: facebook, social networks, facebook, sociala media. Ping.

Blogs influence purchase behaviour

2008-04-23T18:45:00.004+02:00

The PR agency Mahir PR has presented the results of a blog survey with 740 blog readers from 31 participating Swedish blogs. It is hard to objectively value the results since we don't know what types of blogs that participated. But among the findings they say that as many as 58% have bought a product after reading about it in a blog. Presentation here in Swedish.

As a comparison check out my BlogSweden 3 survey here (pdf) from January 2008. The two previous versions can be found in the right sidebar of this blog.

Tags: blog survey, bloggar. Ping.

Control and command PR backfires

2008-04-23T11:38:00.002+02:00

Yesterday we could read that cartoon figure Dilbert is embracing web 2.0 by letting readers "create cartoon mashups, use widgets, rank comic strips, share favorite lists, subscribe to RSS feeds, and add commentary". If it works out it could be a great example of how to give up control of your message and put it in the hands of consumers, who are encouraged to become brand champions and spread the word about Dilbert.

The exact opposite must be artist James Taylor who held a concert in Stockholm earlier this week. Apparently the organisers demanded that the media that were present signed a contract that limited the use of their own photos. As a result, both Dagens Nyheter and Expressen refused to publish any text or photos about the concert at all. And as you might have guessed, you only need to go to Flickr to find a few photos from the concert.

It's quite ridiculous to try to limit the use of photos in this day and age, especially in a country with more than 100% mobile penetration. Instead, take a look at the way the Shins involved fans to create a video from 200 video clips from fans' mobile phones and cameras.

Tags: james taylor, the shins, dilbert, musik, foto. Ping.

"PR agencies are slow"

2008-04-20T07:03:00.005+02:00

Last week I attended the Disruptive Media conference in Stockholm with speakers such as Neville Hobson and Kristofer Bj�rkman. The conference covered inspiring topics from online video advertising to blog monitoring and strategies for social media. Fredrik Svensson from Starcom also held a stimulating presentation with five tips on how to succeed with social media campaigns:

1. Start to tell the story but let the consumer finish it.

2. Make the consumer your media channel.

3. Create ambassadors.

4. See social media sites as partners.

5. If possible, go where your customers are, don't force them to come to you.

During the day, the topic of blogger relations came up several times and although most agreed it is not rocket science, there were many examples of bad pitches. The most telling commment of the day came at the final panel debate about blogging. Roger �berg, from the Feber blog network talked about how they get pitched with stories. He said that PR agencies are incredibly slow, when one of the Feber blogs blog about a story on Monday, the Swedish PR agency sends a translated press release on Wednesday. In my opinion, these PR agencies demonstrate at least two things:

1. They are not tuned in to the new media logic in which news are instantaneous. When everyone is a publisher, news can travel the globe within seconds. Online publishers in general and bloggers in particular don't "save" stories to the next day or wait to get the local version. Instead they pick up ideas from around the world and publish without delay.

2. They are not monitoring the blogs they pitch. If they did, they would see that the story is already out.

Several PR agencies were present at Disruptive Media and I know there are a lot of smart PR people in Sweden who get social media. But apparently, many agencies still have a lot to learn about blogger relations. And clients also need to realize that news are global and that there is an increasing pressure to get stories out in most markets at the same time. It is no longer, if it ever was, a good strategy to expect the local agency to get ink on a story that is already out in the prioritized markets. Geography based launch programmes are not as effective in a web 2.0 environment.

Tags: digital pr, public relations, blogger relations, pr, public relations. Ping.

Aftonbladet for sale at Lidl, again?

2008-04-16T17:05:00.003+02:00

Interesting story on Resum�, which I don't quite get. It says that the two Swedish dailies Aftonbladet and Expressen have signed a deal with Lidl to sell their papers. I blogged a crisis story last year about Lidl being on the front page of Aftonbladet and the paper being on sale next to the check out. So apparently the papers have been sold in some stores.

Tags: lidl, lidl, aftonbladet. Ping.

Twitter could be testing ads in streams

2008-04-16T10:33:00.002+02:00

TechCrunch writes that Twitter is testing advertising in the Twitter streams. Ads were spotted in some feeds during some service difficulties but they are not visible at the moment which could mean that they are in a testing phase.

In a poll on the TechCrunch site, a little less than half of the users don't want ads while the rest is split about even between "yes to ads" and "I would pay for ad-free version".

Tags: twitter, advertising, reklam, twitter. Ping.

Free photos for bloggers from Image Source

2008-04-14T21:07:00.003+02:00

This is neat. Image Source, the world's leading independent producer of royalty-free stock photography, today launched PicApp, a platform that lets bloggers and online publishers get access to free photos for unlimited use. With a PicApp license, users are able to freely and legally use Image Source photos as often as they like. Images are streamed from the PicApp servers and are published with small ads that provide revenue to the content owners.

PicApp is still in beta.

Image details: Weblog Opens Up The World Of Maiko Or Young Geisha served by picapp.com

Tags: free photos, free images, photo, foto, gratis. Ping.

U.S. women say blogs are reliable source of advice

2008-04-14T20:43:00.005+02:00

According to a survey from the online network BlogHer, as many as 24 percent of the (U.S.) women in the survey now watch less television because they are blogging instead.

Some other conclusions were:

- Approximately, 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogosphere every week with 15.1 publishing at least one post a week and 21.1 reading and commenting to blogs a week
- More than 40% of women surveyed consider blogs a reliable source of advice and information
- 40% of bloggers believe their biggest impact is through fostering relationships with like-minded individuals
- Half of women surveyed say blogs influence their purchase decisions

Tags: social media, blogher, blogs, kvinnor, bloggar. Ping.

Gawker sells Wonkette, and other stories

2008-04-14T18:38:00.003+02:00

� CNN reports that the U.S. blog empire Gawker Media is about to sell three of its sites: music site Idolator, the "urban travel guide" Gridskipper, and the gossip site Wonkette.

"In an internal e-mail obtained by CNET News.com, [Nick] Denton explained the sale: "To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did." The e-mail, and more, can be read here.

� Tom Foremski writes that the European software company Autonomy launches a new software "that can identify illegal content in corporate communications such as blogs, emails, any document, and phone recording, and even in video files." Foremski calls it "A Policeman Inside Your Computer And Inside Your Corporate Blog". [Via BMdigital on Twitter]

� According to a press release from SocialMedia Networks, the company today launched "the first social-enabled advertising network. The SocialMedia Advertising Network gives advertisers the ability to target users based upon their social network profile and behavior using applications as an advertising channel."

Tags: social media, gawker, wonkette, reklam, bloggar. Ping.

Jaiku page hits top ten in Google in less than a month

2008-04-12T13:26:00.005+02:00

I share my last name with 109 other people in Sweden, so it's not very common. And although my blog, which has a decent page rank, is published on the domain kullin.net, it is not ranked #1 in a Google search (it is #2 and has been for some time). The reason is probably that I have chosen not to name the blog after myself and instead call it Media Culpa. But what fascinated me when I made a vanity search on my name today was how fast my Jaiku page has climbed in the Google results. I have only been active on the micro blogging site Jaiku for less than a month and my page on Jaiku is already #6 on Google.se. In fact, the top 100 results are full of different pointers to my presence on Jaiku and it beats my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles by miles. The first Twitter reference clocks in just shy of #90.

So what? Well, first of all it strikes me how much better Jaiku performs compared to Twitter, in SEO terms. The amateur analysis is that this is an effect of the way the URLs are designed. Google rates http://kullin.jaiku.com higher than http://www.twitter.com/kullin since the former is considered a sub-domain (please correct me if this is not the case). There are probably other reasons too, of course (could there be a language parameter involved since I write in Swedish on Jaiku and in English on Twitter?).

My second thought is that it once again shows how well different forms of social media/user generated content ranks in search engines. Previously we have talked a lot about blogs and wikis in the search results, but we obviously have to look closely also at micro blogs. Social media monitoring is already complex and it evolves quickly. So companies that want to monitor their brands constantly need to tweak their monitoring tools. If they are listening at all, that is.

Footnote: Google owns Jaiku.

Tags: social media monitoring, jaiku, seo, jaiku, google, twitter, mikrobloggar. Ping.

Young politicians in Malaysia required to blog

2008-04-12T11:31:00.003+02:00

The Swedish journalism professor Kent Asp said a few months ago that blogs have had almost no effect on the local political opinion. Regardless of how close to the truth such a statement is, there is enough signs from the other side of the pond that we can be convinced that blogs and social media have great potential to impact political views and elections. In Malaysia, the ruling party seems confident that blogs will help the party get re-elected.

CNN reports:
"Abdul Rahman Dahlan, secretary general of the United Malays National Organization party's youth wing, said all those vying for national youth posts must have blogs to introduce themselves and their programs ahead of party elections in December."

"All candidates must have blogs," Abdul Rahman told The Associated Press. "If not, they are not qualified to be leaders."

Footnote: In Sweden, blogs about politics are among the top categories. On Bloggportalen for example, there are close to 4,000 blogs listed in that category which makes it the third most popular, and 1,053 are listed in the sub-category "politicians".

Tags: malaysia, politics, elections, malaysia, val, bloggar, politik. Ping.

Official Scrabble Facebook application launched

2008-04-08T08:30:00.004+02:00

Two guys in India developed an online version of Scrabble under the name Scrabulous, which has become incredibly popular. There are currently 629,000 daily users of the application on Facebook. The problem was that it did not have the proper authorization from the copyright holders (Hasbro and Mattel for the board game and Electronic Arts and RealNetworks for digital rights). After a period of lawsuit threats and talks about a deal, RealNetworks has now announced its own Scrabble application for Facebook: "Scrabble by Mattel". It will only be available to Facebook users outside the US and Canada, although the company will not monitor users' locations.

The new app has been online for a few weeks and has so far attracted 2,400 daily users. Although still in beta, it has also been critized for not working as well as Scrabulous.

Not surprisingly, many users are commenting on the application page about bugs and suggestions for improvements. Many are also outraged about the fact that users in North America don't have access to the new app.

RealNetworks should do a better job explaining that they don't have the rights to make that possible at the moment and they should also actively answer questions and monitor the debate. One could easily have anticipated that some negative feedback would appear during the initial phase and that the future success of the app depends on how you handle this feedback.

Via Marketing Pilgrim.

Tags: scrabble, facebook, scrabulous, scrabble, facebook, alfapet. Ping.

Schibsted takes community site to Spain

2008-04-03T22:13:00.000+02:00

The Norwegian community site Nettby is quite a success. It has currently more than 650,000 members with 10,000 more added each week. According to Propaganda, the site has 50 million page views per day (that would mean that each member would visit almost 80 pages per day...?). Anyway, the site's owner Schibsted is planning to launch Nettby in Spain as a part of the site for the free daily 20 Minutos.

Tags: norway, schibsted, norge, schibsted, sociala medier. Ping.

Magazines and papers are opening their vaults

2008-03-31T18:53:00.001+02:00

Online newspaper advertising in the U.S. rose by 18.8 percent in 2007 to $3.2 billion, according to the Newspaper Association of America [via Mindpark]. And although advertising on newspaper web sites have seen double digit growth for thirteen consecutive quarters, the increase in Q4 was the lowest in the last eight quarters, "only" 13.6 percent.

However, we should not be surprised if this is a temporary dent in the curve. Many news organisations have begun to exploit a resource that has remained largely untouched up til now, namely their archives. About a week ago, Sports Illustrated introduced the Vault, a free part of SI.com that contains all the articles that Sports Illustrated has ever published, many of the images, and some video material. The Vault is expected to account for 5 percent of SI's online revenue in its first year and then continue to grow.

Other sites have done the same and the experience from for example the New York Times is that the archives drive a significant amount of traffic, with increased ad revenue as a result. When NYT removed its pay wall last September, visits to the archive grew quickly.

- Since then, search traffic to archive pages has more than doubled, and the archives now represent 10 percent of the page views on NYTimes.com, said Diane McNulty, a spokeswoman.

In other words, as more newspaper sites follow the same route, advertising revenue will continue to increase. And with those numbers in mind, it will be interesting to follow how sites like Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet will manage to keep content behind a pay wall. Aftonbladet.se has indeed seen an increase in the number of unique visitors during the last 12 months by about 12 percent, according to KIA Index, so they're not doing so bad after all.

Tags: advertising, reklam, annonsering, media. Ping.

DagensPS to add Twingly and host blogs in redesign

2008-03-17T14:00:00.004+01:00

Media Culpa can reveal that the Swedish business online publication DagensPS is planning to introduce blog links via Twingly and social bookmarking features in a new redesign. That's the conclusion after we got access to two versions of the site at dagensps.se. The new site design, which was labelled "DEMO" just a few days ago, is not yet launched. It has a much simpler feel to it with less (and fewer) colours and lighter fonts. For example are serifs introduced for the largest headlines instead of sans-serifs.

The current design below:

The demo design below includes such features as "sharing", i.e. you can save and share articles via the social bookmarking sites Digg, reddit, StumbleUpon, Pusha, del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia and of course via Facebook.

The new site will also link to blog posts via the Twingly service (DagensPS is not listed yet as a partner of Twingly).

Under "Services" the site is set to include for example a blog hosting service ("create a blog").

The redesign does not seem to be ready for launch just yet since articles with the old fonts appear further down on the pages. But by the look of it the site will make better use of social media tools and have a more appealing design. Definitely a step into web 2.0.

Tags: twingly, social bookmarks, design, twingly. Ping.