Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber of Center for Media and Democracy (and PR Watch), authors of for example Toxic Sludge is Good For You and Weapons of Mass Deception, are launching a new book on May 24, Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State. This book should be a must read for anyone in the “perception management” business.
You can still contribute to the project via the website Banana Republicans, which comes in a neat wiki format.
MarketingSherpa has started a poll for their blog awards for blogs about PR, B2B marketing, online marketing etc. You can either vote for the nominated blogs or suggest one yourself at the bottom of the page.
Via Canuckflack.
More and more news sites are offering RSS feeds. Reuters now offers RSS feeds for at least 12 different channels. Here in Sweden the adoption rate is slow. The news sites I know have started RSS feeds so far are:
Dagens Nyheter (daily)
Expressen (tabloid)
Ny Teknik (technology trade publication)
Svenska Dagbladet (daily)
Sydvenska Dagbladet (daily)
Yelah.net (“radical digital news”)
I don’t know the reasons behind the small number of Swedish sites that offer RSS, but one thing for sure is that resistance is futile. With the help of myRSS anyone can build an RSS feed for any site, for free. I’ve tried to create a few channels of my own, and it actually works. Not on all sites, but on some. I’m not technologically savvy enough to determine what the trouble is, but it’s a little like when you create your own channels with Avantgo for your PDA. You have to pick a page that contains frequently updated items, like the press room if you want to monitor a competitor’s site.
One disturbing factor is the delay between clicking on a headline (I use Bloglines) and the actual news item or post (see graphic). But you can get around that by sponsoring the specific channel (more details on their home page). So if you are really eager to get an RSS feed for a specific site, now you can.
Last week Italian TV channel RAI lost two leading profiles that resigned in protest of Silvio Berlusconi’s increasingly strong grip on Italian media. The chairman of the board at RAI, Lucia Annunziata, said that RAI had become a “mailbox for Berlusconi’s demands”.
Accordingly, Italy now drops in Freedom House’s press freedom rankings. For the first time since 1988 a Western European country apart from Turkey is now ranked “partly free”. The press in all countries in Western Europe apart from Italy and Turkey are considered “free”.
Link via Phil’s Place.
The PR blogosphere is expanding further. Two new blogs have been brought to my attention. Angelo Fernando has a blog called Hoi Polloi, about “Marketing, Communications, Media, and PR in a post-Cluetrain world.”
Fredrik Wackå is a communications consultant at W PR & Information AB and he introduced their corporate PR blog (in Swedish only) to me.
Citroën is running a tv commercial in Sweden for its C5 model with references to the new rules that allow Swedes to import larger volumes of beer. The C5 carries 49 cases of beer, 4 more than the competing model Volvo V70.
Problem is, that if someone would actually fill his car with 49 cases of beer, the would run the risk of being fined for exceeding the maximum weight the car is allowed to take, with 200 kilos.
The reporter at Resumé asks the Account Manager at ad agency Euro RSCG: “did you think about that?”.
Ad guy: “Yes, of course we did”.
Seems like they took a calculated risk.