In February 2007 I registered the domain socialamedier.com which is the Swedish translation of "social media". Back then, the term was fairly new, but today there are literally thousands of self proclaimed social media experts out there, giving advice about how to be successful on blogs, Twitter or Facebook. It has come to the point where "social media guru" is almost seen as an invective.



So if you can't stand to hear one more social media evangelist tell you about how they will end starvation and bring world peace through social media, instead you might want to read this blog post from a newbie who just recently discovered the benefits of social networking. Dominique Dumont is the USA Team Handball's East Regional Director and she blogged yesterday about her experience with primarily Facebook and how she "discovered the holly grail of social media".

"We promote the use of [Facebook], why, because the biggest problem in developing our sport is getting people together, communicating and getting organized. Facebook allows this in one swoop and it allows for unlimited growth. Not four physical walls of course, but a forum to meet each other, share ideas and plans of action on the subject in common. Once athletes participate in this multi-directional forum, they quickly gain momentum. "

It's really a good story about a skeptic that turned into a convinced user. I encourage you to read the entire post. Dumont concludes:

"One day forced to use social media, and another, proud to see how useful it can be for all of us."

Tags: handball, facebook, handboll. Ping.

I blogged the other day about how a "viral agency" had been posting nice reviews in Swedish online forums on behalf of Samsung, but without disclosing their true identity. The scam was revealed and in a comment to the marketing blog Adland, Samsung said that the procedure was out of line and that they had put an end to it.

However, it seems that this undercover operation to get a buzz going may not be limited to Sweden. In an article today on the UK computer forum Computeractive.co.uk, Deputy Editor Tom Royal, writes that someone has started threads on the forum, promoting Samsung products such as digital video cameras.

"The user who started the thread wanted to share a video showing the "12 Mega Pixel quality that creates a clear and fine video" of a Samsung camera - which is fair enough, perhaps. But then check his previous posts: here, here and here. It's fair to say that he's very interested in Samsung products and nothing else."

The IP address to the user "Huey" comes from Seoul, South Korea. Tom Royal is pointing out that the IP addresses are not directly associated with Samsung. But we are starting to see a pattern here. I did some further investigation and found that the video that was linked to in the Computeractive forum has also been posted on a number of Korean forums, as well as this UK forum. The text in this post is the exact same as the text on Computeractive:

"This is a short sample video that is recorded by a new Samsung camcorder R10. Although the environment of aquarium was not proper enough to shoot by a camcorder, R10 did capture every single movement of beautiful sea animals in a dark aquarium. It has a 12 Mega Pixel quality that creates a clear and fine video."



Even though we still have no evidence that this was done on purpose, it may just be a fanatic Samsung fan, we should dig a little deeper. If you do a Google search of a snippet of the text above, you get more hits in online forums, for example here. Once again, same video, same text as above. But this time it was posted by a user named "samsungimaging", located in London, which is also linked to an official Samsung page called http://www.samsungimaging.net and this page is run by Samsung: "SamsungImaging.net© has been launched in January 2009 by Samsung Electronics, in order to improve the relationship and communication with our customers."

Other places with the same text and video are here, here and here.

I realize that it is possible that Samsung has nothing to do with the spreading of this video, it may just be enthusiastic fans or spam sites that scrape content online. But it is starting to look a bit suspiciuos don't you think? Tom Royal has tried to get a comment from Samsung and promised to post if he gets a response. We will continue to follow this story as it unveils.

Footnote: Original story found here, in Swedish.

Tags: samsung, viral, fake, tv. Ping.

On Feb 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched his Harvard student social network Facebook. At about the same time, I was goofing around with this new thing web log, and on Feb 17, I published my first blog post. Six years later Zuckerberg is a billionare and, well, I'm not. Either way, I'm happy that I have managed to keep this blog running for six years today and during that time I have published in excess of 1,400 posts.

During the years, the number of visitors peaked during the tragic Asian tsunami, in late December 2004, much thanks to a number of links from some mainstream media sites. Another day with thousands of visits was on Nov 2, 2005 when Media Culpa was pick of the day by the Blogger team.

A quick look at Google Analytics from Jan 1, 2005 and onwards shows that Twitter.com has sent a lot of traffic my way, it is fifth in the list of top referring sources. On July 18, 2009 the blog received the highest amount of traffic from search engines and my guess is that is from the post about the fake Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Twitter who was quoted by the AP.

I may not be blogging as frequently now as I used to (the last year I have also been running a blog in Swedish about social media), but I promise to keep it going for a little longer. And please don't be too hard on me if you read the first few blog posts. It was a period of testing and trying to understand the concept of blogging.

PS: If you like this blog, please do take a moment to vote for Media Culpa in the Swedish blog award Yaba. You just need to click the image below and add an email address for verification. Thanks a lot!



Footnote: Image by Marie-II.

Tags: blogger, anniversary, bloggiversary, bloggar. Ping.

Samsung has been caught with their pants down in an attempt to create a buzz in Swedish online forums for their LED tv sets. A Swedish agency called the Viral Company has been posting comments and questions to numerous forums about the best LED tvs, pretending to be an ordinary consumer. With fake identities the Viral Company tried to get the word going in forums about gaming, movies, home electronics, outdoor life and so forth.



But they did a major mistake when they added a smiley to the posts with the purpose of tracking conversations, since the URL for the smiley icon went to a domain name owned by the Viral Company (http://power.moltoman.com). So the little scam was brutally revealed, and here is the fun part - someone else is following in the footsteps of the Viral Company, calling them out as cheaters. A user named "Felmeddelande" (Error message, in English) posts comments to the different forum threads explaining that these posts are done on behalf of Samsung, which in most cases are in breach of forum rules.



If you do a Google search for http://power.moltoman.com/tracker/PMfegnEb/smile.gif (the image has now been taken down) or http://power.moltoman.com/tracker/ you get a long list of forum posts, almost all about LED tvs. The question now is, how much of these tactics did Samsung Sweden know about. If the campaign has been approved by Samsung then they are in desperate need of some rethinking in terms of social media strategy, because this campaign was doomed to backfire from the very start. It will also be interesting to see how they will handle this online crisis situation. Will they stay silent or will they address the issue?

Hat tip to @pellet who blogged about this story he calls Samsung-gate, in Swedish this morning. See also Adland (in English).

Update Feb 15: Adland has talked to Samsung about the matter. See more details here.

Tags: samsung, viral, fake, tv. Ping.

Companies that manage an issue or crisis well may often come out stronger on the other side. As a follow up to my post yesterday about Vodafone and the obscene tweet, I thought I would check in on the number of followers to Vodafone's Twitter account. In my view, the company handled the indicident well and I almost expected that they would gain a number of followers from the attention. As you can see from the graph below, that is exactly what happened. We can see a sharp increase in number of followers for VodafoneUK since the unfortunate tweet was published, almost twice the amount than on a normal day (+377 compared to +215 on average).



Graph from twittercounter.com.

Tags: twitter, vodafone, uk, twitter. Ping.

When social media enters the business world, a larger number of employees get to speak on behalf of the company than what was standard practice before. Often this is a good thing, but of course there can always be one or two bad apples that will take advantage of this new found power and try to harm the organization. That was probably what happened to Vodafone today when someone internally tweeted an obscene tweet from Vodafone's corporate account. And since Twitter is Twitter, also bad news spread extremely fast. That's why VodafoneUK currently is involved in some serious online crisis management, see their Twitter stream below.



The story is currently among the top tweeted stories on Tweetmeme.com, but Vodafone is acting switfly to limit the damages before there are any major impact on its brand. They seem to be directly addressing a large number of people that are commenting on the issue or retweeting the obscene tweet. And I think Vodafone will manage to go quite unharmed through this incident. Fresh Networks sums it up nicely:

1.They responded quickly and said what was happening. In social media, people can spread messages quickly. Vodafone also responded quickly and said exactly what happened and was happening. It wasn’t a hack but an internal employee and that person was being dealt with.

2.They responded in the same place that people are talking about them. Vodafone responded to its Twitter followers on Twitter, using the VodafoneUK account. The key to crisis management in social media is to respond where people complain. Otherwise you risk alienating them and losing your role in the story.

Update: According to a statement from Vodafone, the employee has now been suspended. From the Telegraph: "The employee has been suspended immediately and we have started an internal investigation. This was not a hack and we apologise for any offence the tweet may have caused."

Tags: twitter, vodafone, tweet, uk, twitter. Ping.

This is a neat way of illustrating data. It's an illustration that David McCandless did for UK paper the Guardian and it visualizes how much individual countries have contributed to the Haiti relief. Canadians were the most giving people, based on how much they donated per person on average. Sweden is second, followed by the other Nordic countries Norway, Denmark and Finland.



The entire data set can be found here.

Footnote: I don't think 2.51 USD is that much to brag about really. I think we could have done better.

Image credit: mkandlez

Tags: haiti, sweden, canada, haiti. Ping.

Media Culpa has been nominated in the Swedish blog awards Yaba, in the Marketing category (Marknadsföring, in Swedish). If you like this blog, you might want to cast your vote for it. Just click on the yellow image in this post, or on the larger image in the side bar. The competition is tough, so I need YOUR vote :)

Thanks a bundle!



Tags: blog award, sweden, yaba. Ping.

It wouldn't hurt to practise some critical thinking when participating in social networks. What many suspected turned out to be true today, namely that a Facebook group titled (translated from Swedish) "2 kronor for every member to the earth quake victims in Haiti" was only fake. Everything from the identity of the person who created the group to the hidden information about the "sponsors" who would donate 2 kronor (0.28 USD) per user, signalled that there was something fishy about this group.

I checked in on the group about two hours ago and it looked as it had done the last few days and the group now had about 211,000 members. But an hour later Computer Sweden published an article revealing that the official photo of the group had now changed to a hideous photo and that the information of the page had now been changed to contain information about necr0philia.

I understand that people want to help the victims in Haiti, but it's still quite fascinating that so many people are willing to join such a group without questioning the motives. And of course very disturbing that some twisted mind uses a tragic incident like the earth quake in Haiti to pull a sick stunt like this. Especially since we less than a week ago read in Aftonbladet about another Facebook group that managed to attract thousands of members, only to change name to indicate that the members like to have sex with their children.

I think Facebook will need to monitor this issue very carefully or users will lose trust in the whole concept of groups. In the mean time, users need to be a little more careful about what they post and which groups they join. After all, it's mostly common sense.

Footnote: The link to the group is here, but I don't recommend a visit: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=243968684541

Tags: facebook, sweden, sverige, facebook. Ping.

Twitter doesn't disclose how many members it has, so it has been hard to determine how many people that use Twitter in Sweden. I tried to calculate a number in June 2009 using a survey by Sysomos that showed that 0.54% of the accounts were from Sweden. My estimate landed at 75,000 Swedes on Twitter.

Now, Sysomos have now published a new report, in which they have studied 13 million unique Twitter accounts that demonstrated tweeting activity within the period from Oct. 16, 2009 to Dec. 16, 2009. The US is still by far the largest country, but it's dominance has decreased as the service has expanded more rapidly outside the US, with a very fast growth in for example Brazil (the US dropped from 62.1% share in June to 50.9% now.

Sweden is still in the top 20 chart but has slipped one spot from 18 to 19 and the share has decreased from 0.54% to 0.50%.



Sysomos also looked at the number of tweets by country, and in that chart, Sweden is not among the top 20 countries.

So how many Swedish Twitter accounts are there then? Hard to tell, but according to Twitter COO Dick Costolo, the micro blogging service had more than 58 million global users in November 2009. Here is a quote from a chat with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.

MA: What about user accounts?

DC: Yeah I won’t say that, but 58 million undercounts it.

So, taking these to figures into account, there should be somewhere in the range of 290,000 Swedish accounts, which sound like a lot. If the statistics from Sysomos are correct, they have at least found 65,000 Swedish accounts (0.50% of 13 million active). What springs to my mind is that considering the extreme growth for Twitter, it might not be long before more Swedes are tweeting than blogging. By the end of 2010, that might actually be a reality.

Footnote: I'm @kullin on Twitter.

Tags: twitter, sweden, sverige, twitter. Ping.