kullin – Page 11 – Media Culpa

25 maps that show how Sweden is unique

Sweden is a neutral country, a fact that has helped keep us out of war for 200 years. We like to think of ourselves as quite moderate people. We even have our own unique word, “lagom“, which means not too much and not too little, rather “just enough”. But we might not be just as average as we would like to think. In many aspects, Sweden is the most progressive and extreme country in the world.

Here are 25 maps that show Sweden being ranked number one or in the very top on various facts. Click on the maps for larger versions.

1. Milk consumption per capita

Via Foodbeast

2. Global AgeWatch Index 2013

Via GlobalAgeWatch

3. Equal distribution of income – Gini coefficient

Via the Atlantic

4. Gender Inequality Index

Via the Atlantic Cities

5. Social Progress Index

Via SPI

6. Number of researchers per million inhabitants

Source

7. Coffee consumption per capita

Source

8. Failed States Index 2013

Source

9. BCG Global Innovation Index 2013

Sweden ranked #2. Via Wikipedia

10. One of only 22 countries Britain has not invaded

Via the Telegraph

11. Average age at first sex

Source

12. Heavy metal bands per 100,000 inhabitants

Via Slate.com

13. Percentage of 15-year-olds who discuss political or social issues with their parents several times per week (Sweden among lowest)

Source

14. Least religious countries

Source

15. Government information transparency

Via Washington Post

16. Global Competitiveness Index

Source

17. Forest area in percent of land area

Via World Bank

18. Corruption index

Source

19. Percentage of Women in National Parliaments

Source

20. World Press Freedom Index

Source

21. The best countries to be a mother

Source

22. Map of world happiness

Source

23. Global Cleantech Index

Source

24. Research and development expenditure as percent of GDP

Via World Bank

25. Fixed broadband internet subscribers per 100 people

Via World Bank

And finally a bonus chart. The result of the World Values Survey shows that Sweden is quite alone in the upper right hand corner. The graph below ranks countries on factors such as self expression values vs survival values and secular-rational values vs traditional values.

Via World Values Survey

Footnote: Inspired by 40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World. This is a translated version of my post that was first published in Swedish on my blog “Sociala Medier“.

World class response by Sainsbury’s on Twitter

This conversation on Twitter by Sainsbury’s and a customer may be one of the funniest and best Twitter responses by a brand in a long time.

Hat tip: @eskimon

What happens when you click like? Ask these 4 million people

It’s easy to trick people to click, like and share the dumbest things on social networks. I have blogged about this topic before, for example regarding how to spot a fake giveaway on Facebook. But I can’t stop being amazed at the number of people who are fooled by these easy hoaxes time and time again. Here’s a fresh example. Whitetail Overload is a Facebook page dedicated to the “pursuit of the Whitetail deer”, and it has half a million followers and a PTA (people talking about) of more than 1.3 million.

4 million likes on one post
How do they get that much engagement? They post often, entertaining and they trick users into interacting with the content in the most deceiving ways. Take this post for example, it uses and old trick, asking users to guess what happens when they click like on the post. Of course, absolutely nothing at all happens. But look at the numbers, 4.1 million people have liked the post and almost 100,000 have shared it. Incredible.

Here’s another one, and I must admit that this is as brilliant as it is evil. The last person to comment on the post wins a t-shirt. And of course, the comments never stop coming. As of now, there are 47,000. For a t-shirt!

As long as people are this naive, don’t be surprised when your social networks are filled with spam and scams.

Pepsi’s Cristiano Ronaldo stunt on Facebook backfires miserably

Pepsi Sweden put up three images on its Facebook page before the last night’s World Cup qualifying game between Sweden and Portugal. The three images portrayed Portuguese icon Cristiano Ronaldo as a voodoo doll full of needles, a doll being crushed by a Pepsi can and lying tied on a rail track.

Pepsi is a sponsor to FC Barcelona’s Leo Messi, one of Ronaldo’s main contenders for the FIFA Ballon d’Or award, and apparently someone at Pepsi found it to be a brilliant idea to mock Ronaldo on Facebook. It was not.

The stunt has caused outrage among Portuguese football fans who have flooded Pepsi’s Swedish Facebook page with angry comments and images of their own, mocking Pepsi. Here are a few examples:

“Shame on you! Shame on you! You’re a disrespectful and unprofessional brand and you did not manage to achieve anything positive at all with that ridiculous, non-humorous and offensive campaign. It serves you right that 10.6M people shutted you up tonight, and will stop drinking Pepsi.” Link.

There are also many angry comments on both the Portuguese Pepsi page as well as the global page on Facebook. And that’s the trouble with a local crisis, it often spreads to a global scale. A Portuguese anti Pepsi page has also been created and it has currently attracted more than 40,000 followers. The story has already been covered in both Swedish and Portuguese media.

Pepsi has now been forced to delete the images from Facebook and to apologize:

“We would never want to put the sport or the spirit of competition in a negative light. We regret if people were offended by the posts; they were immediately taken down. We would like to extend our apologies to all concerned.”

Mocking someone else’s idol can never be a clever way to promote your brand. Pepsi has learned that the hard way.

The problem with bad targeting of promoted tweets

Twitter made a successful debut on NYSE a few days ago and as a listed company there will surely be an increased attention to revenues in the months ahead. Revenues that will come from for example promoted accounts, trends and tweets. So prepare to see more sponsored tweets in your Twitter feed from now on.

We can already see more examples of businesses that are experimenting with advertising on Twitter. One key factor in the future success of Twitter is its ability to gather enough relevant data about its users so that advertisers can target their key audiences properly. If you advertise on Facebook you are able to select targets based on age, geography, interest and so forth in quite som detail. At the moment, either Twitter isn’t able to provide this data to its advertisers, or the advertisers are ignoring it.

More often than not, ads on Twitter will look like the one below. This promoted tweet was visible in my feed two days ago.

For Twitter to be able to increase revenues from sponsored tweets, it is vital that the ones we are exposed to are as relevant as possible. I blogged recently on my Swedish blog about the nasty and angry responses to one promoted tweet on the Swedish market by Scandinavian Airlines, SAS. Users have been spoiled since they have been able to use Twitter for free for so long and any change towards more ads is seen as a deterioration.

The tweet pictured above is totally irrelevant to me for two reasons. First of all the timing. Why advertise a Halloween tweet more than two weeks after Halloween? Second, why is this ad in my feed at all? I am from Sweden and I have noted both my country of origin and language (Swedish) in my Twitter settings. Sure Becker is an international company but they have no representation in Sweden. The chance that this message is relevant to me is next to zero.

That’s just one of many similar examples from the last week or so. Here are two more. The first is a post by Al Jazeera and I can’t even read the letters.

The second is a tweet from @ANGAus.

Obviously, I will never be a customer to America’s Natural Gas Alliance. So why am I exposed to these irrelevant ads? I can think of a number of reasons, some mentioned above. However, I think it comes down to this sentence on the business section on Twitter regarding pricing for promoted tweets.

“You’ll only be charged when people follow your Promoted Account or retweet, reply, favorite or click on your Promoted Tweets.”

This basically means that an advertiser never pays extra for having its tweets posted in the feeds of people who would never be interested in its message. The advertiser only pays for interactions and if users are exposed to an irrelevant ad they just ignore it. The only part that loses is the user who is bothered with ads that make absolutely no sense.

As I understand, advertising on Twitter is limited to a number of markets. So hopefully when more markets open up, targeting of ads will become better and Swedes will get ads from local businesses instead. Because ads on Twitter are here to stay, might as well make them as relevant as possible.