kullin – Page 33 – Media Culpa

Metro promises to save blogs from deletion

I blogged earlier this week about how Metro had decided to shut down its blogging platform Metrobloggen.se, leaving thousands of bloggers with no other option than to cut and paste, if they wanted to move their content to some other platform. In a statement, Metro now says it is going to “save” all blogs from deletion. My translation below:

“Metro will soon, and well before April 25, offer all bloggers on Metrobloggen the ability to continue blogging. Current content will also be saved. We will get back with further information shortly.”

I think that Metro could have investigated this before they communicated that the platform was being closed. This new statement comes just a few days after the first one. Still, we don’t know if they are offering some tool that enables exporting of content or if they just offer to save the content as is. Either way, it is positive news that they will help bloggers to keep their blogs up in some form.

Metro pulls the plug on thousands of blogs

The Swedish free daily newspaper Metro has been hosting blogs on its blogging platform Metrobloggen.se since 2007. Back then it was described as an immediate success, with more than 2,000 registered blogs during its first 36 hours of operation. The original idea was to share advertising revenue with bloggers, but that model was soon ditched. And apparently the blogs have not generated enough revenue to keep the platform running, because Metro announced today that it is shutting down the service on April 25.

Metrobloggen.se is currently home to at least 10,000 blogs, possibly a lot more. Many are of course no longer active, but Metro’s decision comes as a blow to many bloggers who are left with no help in transferring to a new host. In a note today, Metro says:

“You can continue to blog on Metrobloggen as usual until April 25. After that date, the site can no longer be accessed and no content will be available or saved any longer.

Up until April 25, you can manually or in other ways save your content. Metrobloggen can unfortunetely not provide any tools or help in order to automatically copy your content.”

Exporting content to another blog platform

I do not oppose the closing down of this platform per se, I am sure they have looked into the business model and found that it doesn’t make good business sense to continue. But it’s sad that they offer no help for the bloggers who have generated millions of page views and ad impressions. Metro could have come up with some means to export the content and easily transfer it to another blogging platform. Many bloggers will probably not bother to copy and paste every single blog post and move it elsewhere.

WordPress has an RSS importer for self hosted blogs, but I haven’t tried how it works and most of the bloggers at Metrobloggen probably are looking for easier solutions like blogg.se or blogger.com.

Metro says they are working on a solution, but they say there is no guarantee they will find one before they close the site down.

Update: Ted Valentin has developed a solution to help bloggers export their blogs from Metrobloggen to Blogger or WordPress. Check it out here.

7th blog anniversary

Yesterday, I had a long talk with a journalist about personal branding and social media. We talked about how I started this blog and how it has developed over the years. As a matter of fact, today I am celebrating seven years of blogging on Media Culpa, which I started on Feb 17, 2004 (actually a little earlier, but those first test posts were deleted before going live on this domain).

To celebrate the occasion, I thought that I would share some small details about the past year for this blog.

72% of my visitors are from outside of Sweden. During the last 12 months, the blog has gotten visitors from 162 different countries/territories, including Turks and Caicos Islands, Kyrgyzstan and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Sweden is the top country (28%), followed by USA (23%) and UK (7.1%).
50% of all visits came from search engines.
Top referring search key words: “twitter handle”.
Most read post, is an old post from 2009: Strategies for choosing Twitter handle (see above).
Most read new post: BP oil spill and social media, which still ranks in the top 10 in Google for “BP oil spill”, between Huffington Post and the Guardian.
Most retweeted post (79 times): Flickr reaches 5 billion photos, which also was picked up by TechCrunch, CNN, BBC and hundreds of blogs.

If you want to follow my blog, don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed or “like” it on Facebook.

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Photo credit: Melanie Hughes.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic is not on Facebook, but his fans are

Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo uses both Facebook and Twitter to connect with fans. His official fan page on Facebook just reached 20 million “likes”, which is an amazing number. His Twitter account has close to 1.8 million followers.

The Swedish footballer who is closest to Ronaldo’s star status is AC Milan striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic, but as I have blogged before, he is not active on Twitter. Apparently he and/or his agent don’t bother too much about protecting the “Ibra” brand online. By the looks of it, he is not in control of the domain name zlatanibrahimovic.com and he has left Twitter open to a range of imposters. So what about Facebook? Well, for starters, he has not grabbed the vanity URL www.facebook.com/zlatanibrahimovic. It belongs to one Aymen Ak. An official page is nowhere to be found.

As is often the case, fans take matters into their own hands and create “fan” pages. The largest one currently has 725,000 fans and a community page has more than 100,000.

I don’t know if Ibrahimovic is just not interested in talking to his fans, is satisfied with his current “level of stardom” or if he has the wrong advisors. Either way, I am convinced that he could strengthen his brand even further if he would start to engage just a little with his millions of fans through social media. Better to start now, than after the career has ended.

Porsche tags one million Facebook fans on a 911 GT3 R race car

When Porsche reached one million fans on its Facebook page, the German sports car brand decided to celebrate the occasion by thanking its fans, each and every one of them. This video shows how a Porsche 911 GT3 R hybrid race car gets tagged with the names of one million Facebook fans and you can even search the names to see if you were one of them.

I wonder how many of these fans that are Porsche employees? Porsche recently said it blocked employee access to social networks like Facebook to prevent industrial espionage.

Via We Are Social.

The web is the most common place to complain

According to a UK survey by Lightspeed Research, customers are now making complaints about brands more often on the web than on the phone. It is far more common among 18-34 year-olds to complain on Facebook than among older consumers (15% compared to 5% and 4%).

How do you normally make complaints about brands?

Consumers expect brands to respond quickly. 13% expect a reaction within an hour and 63% within a day or less (50 + 13%).

Author: kullin