Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
I can’t say that I’m extremely impressed by the accuracy in PubSub’s LinkRank. A quick check for the last week shows that PubSub is pretty far from being correct. White cells are PubSub stats for my blog, pink cells are Technorati links and actual numbers.
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2006, global opinion leaders say their most credible source of information about a company is now “a person like me”.
In the U.S., trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today. Opinion leaders also consider rank-and-file employees more credible spokespersons than corporate CEOs (42% vs. 28% in the U.S.).
Also interesting is that trust in government is low in the U.S. (38%) but high in China (83%, up from 63% in ’05).
Last September, the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten published 12 drawings of the Prophet Mohammed, which sparked anger among Muslims in Denmark and abroad. The degrading caricatures were later reprinted in a Norwegian magazine (in defense of free speech), causing a boycott of Danish and Norwegian products in the Arab world. The Danish-Swedish dairy producer Arla even paid for an ad in Saudi Arabian newspapers, in order to “stop the boycott from escalating”. As of yesterday, Arla products were off the shelves in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Lebanon, Kuwait and many other nations.
Late last night Jyllands-Posten issued an apology, not for publishing the drawings, but for the fact that the drawings offended Muslims! It’s a hazardous strategy, not to apologize for you own actions, but apologize for the reactions of the offended part. I guess the reason is that an apology for the actual publication would be seen as caving in to external pressure and in the long run a threat to the freedom of speech.
“They were not intended to be offensive, nor were they at variance with Danish law, but they have indisputably offended many Muslims for which we apologize.”
The same strategy was used in Norway:
In Norway, a foreign ministry spokesman denied media reports that the government had asked its diplomats to apologize to Muslim countries.
“We have not asked our diplomats to apologize for the publication of these cartoons, but to apologize for the agitation they have created,” she said, according to Norway’s NTB news agency.
It will be interesting to see if this apology will be enough to make this issue go away.
(By the way, maybe a pop-up for a net survey shouldn’t be what greets readers that click on the link to the apology.)
In September 2005 the Swedish government formed a parliamentary committee to do a review of integration politics in Sweden. Now the committee has started a blog about its task and the blog will be active until 1 June, 2007.
What is quite interesting is that the blog is hosted on Blogspot. That’s probably ok, but not the most obvious choice. I wouldn’t expect an American committee to host its blog on a Swedish server.
The blog also uses Sitemeter for site statistics. Kind of fun to see the adverts for Spongebob Squarepants screen savers on the stat page of a parliamentary committee.
Forget about global warming, famine and poverty. Today is Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day. That’s right, your chance to pay tribute to air trapped in plastic is back by ‘pop’ular demand. How good it is to be in PR. (Thanks Tess.)
