Author: kullin

Eight-year olds in the UK are joining social networks

face-book

Facebook’s privacy policy states that children under the age of 13 may not register on the social network. But that doesn’t stop kids from wanting to join the site. As an effect, parents are discussing in online forums how to react when their 10 or 11-year olds want to become members on Facebook. Here is one discussion (in Swedish) from last year in which a parent says that several kids in his or her 9-year old’s class are on Facebook. On the family forum Familjeliv there was a poll earlier in 2010 of how many kids under 13 that were members. About a third of the 52 that answered said that their kids were on Facebook, despite being under the mimimum age.

It is quite possible that this trend will only increase with the growth in popularity in social networks. Research from the UK communications regulator Ofcom reveals that children as young as 8 years old are ignoring social networking site rules and creating their own site profiles.

“The research found that a quarter of children aged 8-12 who use the internet at home say they have a profile on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace. All these sites have a minimum user age of 13.”

The research also showed that one in six parents didn’t know that their children were spending time on social networks.

In the UK, 1.6 million teens age 13-15 have a Facebook profile. It seems reasonable to think that also several thousand children under 13 are on Facebook, although they aren’t allowed to register.

Photo credit: ntr23

Nordic communicators are lagging behind journalists in use of social media

PR practitioners and professional communicators at organizations and businesses are often experts in building good relations with journalists and other influencers that can help get their messages across to the target audience. Reading and monitoring traditional media has always been an essential part of the daily routines of PR professionals, we need to know who says what and where. With the strong growth in comsumption of social media, one would assume that most communicators had started to use social media by know, but according to a survey by Cision, there is still room for improvement.

Cision conducted a survey of journalists and professional communicators in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden about their attitudes to and use of social media. The survey revealed that journalists are becoming heavy users of social media such as blogs and micro blogs (like Twitter), especially in Sweden. As many as 42% of Swedish journalists and 26% of Danish journalists read blogs daily. In Norway and Finland the figure is slightly lower, 19% and 16%, respectively.

53% of Swedish journalists read blogs for research and 28% say that they blog as part of their work.

journalists-blogs-chart

Twitter is a lot more popular among journalists in Norway and Sweden, where one in four read it daily (27% and 25%). In Finland, only 4% read micro blogs daily.

17% of Swedish journalist write on micro blogs daily. When asked “how do you work with micro blogs?”, 36% said that they monitor what is written, 36% follow interesting people, 25% publish news, 21% build relationships and 21% read for research.

journalists-microblogs-chart

Among communicators, it is more common to read blogs in Sweden and Denmark, at least on a daily basis.

communicators-blogs-chart

Communicators in Sweden and Norway are the most frequent users of Twitter.

communicators-microblogs-chart

If we compare the use of blogs and Twitter between journalists and communcators in each country, we find that a larger percentage of journalists read blogs on a daily basis. This is quite interesting because it could signal that journalists are better connected to the blogosphere than professional communicators. And if as many as 53% of Swedish journalists read blogs for research (35% of Danish and 33% of Norwegian journalists) then communicators probably should put even more focus on building relations with bloggers.

denmark-chart

finland-chart

norway-chart

sweden-chart

Journalists are also more frequent readers of Twitter than communicators, with the exception of Finland. If for example 50% of Norwegian journalists read micro blogs at least weekly, why are only 32% of communicators doing the same? Shouldn’t they be out there to monitor and connect with influencers on Twitter? Well, I think so. Fortunately for communicators, there are people that they can turn to for advice, namely PR consultants (yes, people like me…). It turns out, not very suprising, that the individuals that uses social media most often are PR consultants. 52% of Swedish PR consultants read blogs daily, 50% in Norway and 35% in Finland (not enough responses in Denmark). As many as 61% of Norwegian PR consultants read Twitter daily, 34% in Sweden and 17% in Finland.

pr-blogs-chart

pr-microblogs-chart

Footnote: The report Cision Social Media Survey 2010 can be downloaded here.

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IKEA victim of Facebook hoax

ikeagiftcard

A while back, more than 200,000 Swedes were fooled to join a Facebook group that promised to donate 2 SEK per fan to the victims of the Haiti earth quake. Only problem was that once the group reached the goal, it changed name and added some really outrageous content. I was somewhat amazed that all these people didn’t see through that scam because when something seems too good to be true, it often is.

The latest scam is a Facebook campaign by IKEA that promises to give you a 1,000 USD gift card if you became a fan of the Swedish company. Of course, this is not really a campaign that is really run by IKEA. If you have any knowledge of the IKEA culture I’m convinced that you would agree that IKEA would never give money away in a stunt like this.

IKEA spokesperson Mona Astra Liss says the “false offer” is not some half-baked publicity stunt by IKEA. “It’s absolutely not a publicity stunt and absolutely not endorsed by IKEA,” she says. She adds that Facebook performs closed investigations of scams, so IKEA doesn’t know who’s behind the hoax.

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Top 20 Swedish brands on Twitter

Last weekend I decided to take a deeper look at my list of Swedish brands and businesses on Twitter and see which companies have the most followers. After publishing the list on my Swedish blog “Sociala Medier”, I got some feedback from companies that weren’t on the list. Although this list may still not include every corporate Twitter account in Sweden, here is a pretty good list of the top 20 Swedish businesses on Twitter, based on the number of followers.

1. Spotify – 36020
2. Stardoll – 32252
3. H&M; – 28583
4. Adland – 14551
5. Acne – 5963
6. Ericsson Labs – 4616
7. The Duffy Agency – 4518
8. Propellerhead Software – 3071
9. SJ AB – 2745
10. Sony Ericsson DW – 2719
11. SAS – 2676
12. Ericsson – 2614
13. H&M News – 2309
14. Twingly – 2281
15. Ishotellet Jukkasjärvi – 1940
16. Pacemaker – 1583
17. SAS Group – 1495
18. SF BIO – 1492
19. Piratförlaget – 1478
20. Saltå Kvarn – 1396

Among the top three, H&M; is the account that has the fastest growth in followers, with on average 113 new followers per day during the last 3 months (according to TwitterCounter). Spotify gets 83 and Stardoll 85 new followers per day.

Footnote: Number of followers calculated on March 13, 2010. Follow me on Twitter at @kullin.

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Using social media to promote handball

In February 2007 I registered the domain socialamedier.com which is the Swedish translation of “social media”. Back then, the term was fairly new, but today there are literally thousands of self proclaimed social media experts out there, giving advice about how to be successful on blogs, Twitter or Facebook. It has come to the point where “social media guru” is almost seen as an invective.

So if you can’t stand to hear one more social media evangelist tell you about how they will end starvation and bring world peace through social media, instead you might want to read this blog post from a newbie who just recently discovered the benefits of social networking. Dominique Dumont is the USA Team Handball’s East Regional Director and she blogged yesterday about her experience with primarily Facebook and how she “discovered the holly grail of social media”.

“We promote the use of [Facebook], why, because the biggest problem in developing our sport is getting people together, communicating and getting organized. Facebook allows this in one swoop and it allows for unlimited growth. Not four physical walls of course, but a forum to meet each other, share ideas and plans of action on the subject in common. Once athletes participate in this multi-directional forum, they quickly gain momentum. “

It’s really a good story about a skeptic that turned into a convinced user. I encourage you to read the entire post. Dumont concludes:

“One day forced to use social media, and another, proud to see how useful it can be for all of us.”

 

 

Samsung-gate spreading outside Sweden?

I blogged the other day about how a “viral agency” had been posting nice reviews in Swedish online forums on behalf of Samsung, but without disclosing their true identity. The scam was revealed and in a comment to the marketing blog Adland, Samsung said that the procedure was out of line and that they had put an end to it.

However, it seems that this undercover operation to get a buzz going may not be limited to Sweden. In an article today on the UK computer forum Computeractive.co.uk, Deputy Editor Tom Royal, writes that someone has started threads on the forum, promoting Samsung products such as digital video cameras.

“The user who started the thread wanted to share a video showing the “12 Mega Pixel quality that creates a clear and fine video” of a Samsung camera – which is fair enough, perhaps. But then check his previous posts: here, here and here. It’s fair to say that he’s very interested in Samsung products and nothing else.”

The IP address to the user “Huey” comes from Seoul, South Korea. Tom Royal is pointing out that the IP addresses are not directly associated with Samsung. But we are starting to see a pattern here. I did some further investigation and found that the video that was linked to in the Computeractive forum has also been posted on a number of Korean forums, as well as this UK forum. The text in this post is the exact same as the text on Computeractive:

“This is a short sample video that is recorded by a new Samsung camcorder R10. Although the environment of aquarium was not proper enough to shoot by a camcorder, R10 did capture every single movement of beautiful sea animals in a dark aquarium. It has a 12 Mega Pixel quality that creates a clear and fine video.”

Even though we still have no evidence that this was done on purpose, it may just be a fanatic Samsung fan, we should dig a little deeper. If you do a Google search of a snippet of the text above, you get more hits in online forums, for example here. Once again, same video, same text as above. But this time it was posted by a user named “samsungimaging”, located in London, which is also linked to an official Samsung page called http://www.samsungimaging.net and this page is run by Samsung: “SamsungImaging.net© has been launched in January 2009 by Samsung Electronics, in order to improve the relationship and communication with our customers.”

Other places with the same text and video are here, here and here.

I realize that it is possible that Samsung has nothing to do with the spreading of this video, it may just be enthusiastic fans or spam sites that scrape content online. But it is starting to look a bit suspiciuos don’t you think? Tom Royal has tried to get a comment from Samsung and promised to post if he gets a response. We will continue to follow this story as it unveils.

Footnote: Original story found here, in Swedish.

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