Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Gianluigi Buffon, Michael Owen, Edgar Davids, Claude Makelele, Kevin Kuranyi and Xabi Alonso have all launched blogs on MSN’s “Road to the World Cup” web site. Perhaps Kuranyi will have to stop once the World Cup starts. The German Football Federation recently announced that their players couldn’t blog during the tournament.
Via Niall Kennedy. Technorati tags: Worldcup, World Cup, football, Germany06.
Jack Shafer, media critic for Slate, is interviewed by PRWeek. His repsonse to the question “How do you feel about PR pros?” is a poor grade for PR practitioners:
“Well, I have found, with only rare exceptions, that PR officers are impediments to journalism. They are the people who man the barricades, who salt the earth before you can get to it to plant your story. The number of times in my career that I have responded to somebody doing outreach PR, trying to convince me to do a story, and turned that overture into a story, you might be able to count on two fingers.”
I’ve read reviews like this many times and they should serve as a wake up call. Sure, I can understand that if you are the head of corporate communications at a company listed on NYSE, there’s just no room for mistakes. I’ve worked with people who acted like that, and they had good reasons. But command/control PR is not the future of our industry and every PR blogger and corporate blog out there serves as good examples of how we can move on to a more conversational model of corporate communications.
Via New Media Musings. Technorati tags: PR, public relations.
The FA fires England’s coach Sven-Göran Ericsson and “Svennis” will quit after this summer’s World Cup in Germany. In what can only be described as a furious media campaign to get Sven out of the country, English media finally reached their goal. 
Well maybe England doesn’t deserve a coach like Sven. Sven-Göran Ericsson happens to be the most successful coach ever to head the English team. Eriksson achieved the most successful start of any England coach, including the legendary 5-1 victory away against Germany when England’s hopes of qualifying to the 2002 World Cup were close to nil.
Sven has the highest number of points per competetive game (2.30) and no other coach has managed to get 23 wins. He only needs four more points to get ahead of Bobby Robson who currently has most total points, but in 10 more games than Sven.
OK, who’s voting for a comeback for Kevin Keegan?
(Three points awarded for a win, one for a draw. Matches decided on a penalty shoot out are counted as a draw. PPG: Points Per Game. It is possible that Sven should have one more point for the penalty shoot out against Portugal in Euro 2004.)
In September, the Swedish daily Sydsvenskan became the first media company in the country to purchase a blog when it acquired the fasion blog Manolo. Today the Swedish media conglomerate Bonnier buys 8 theme blogs from founders Roger Åberg and Andreas “Wille” Wilhelmsson who runs a number of “fever” blogs (feber in Swedish is fever).
Bonnier Newspapers which owns Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Sydsvenskan and Stockholm City, purchases Prylfeber (gadgets), Macfeber, Ipodfeber, Spelfeber (games), Bilfeber (cars), Hojfeber (bikes), Reklamfeber (advertising) and Videofeber.
None of the blogs have had any major income from advertising according to Roger Åberg. Both founders will continue to work with the blogs which will co-operate with Bonnier’s dailies.
No financial numbers were revealed.
Adland has put together a competition called “Battle of the ad blogs” and I’m honoured to be nominated in the first category. Go on and cast your votes, I’d really like to get my hands on one of those neat Pixies CDs.
Winners will be announced on Feb 10.
Almega, an organisation supporting service companies in Sweden has just launched a new blog called Tjänstebloggen (“the services blog”). The blog will cover such subjects as economic policy, the election and contract negotiations. Almega’s President Jonas Milton will be blogging along with Ulf Lindberg, who is responsible for economic policy at Almega.