Author: kullin

Media Culpa celebrates six years of blogging

six On Feb 4, 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched his Harvard student social network Facebook. At about the same time, I was goofing around with this new thing web log, and on Feb 17, I published my first blog post. Six years later Zuckerberg is a billionare and, well, I’m not. Either way, I’m happy that I have managed to keep this blog running for six years today and during that time I have published in excess of 1,400 posts.

During the years, the number of visitors peaked during the tragic Asian tsunami, in late December 2004, much thanks to a number of links from some mainstream media sites. Another day with thousands of visits was on Nov 2, 2005 when Media Culpa was pick of the day by the Blogger team.

A quick look at Google Analytics from Jan 1, 2005 and onwards shows that Twitter.com has sent a lot of traffic my way, it is fifth in the list of top referring sources. On July 18, 2009 the blog received the highest amount of traffic from search engines and my guess is that is from the post about the fake Zlatan Ibrahimovic on Twitter who was quoted by the AP.

I may not be blogging as frequently now as I used to (the last year I have also been running a blog in Swedish about social media), but I promise to keep it going for a little longer. And please don’t be too hard on me if you read the first few blog posts. It was a period of testing and trying to understand the concept of blogging.

Footnote: Image by Marie-II.

Samsung caught in fake Swedish viral campaign

Samsung has been caught with their pants down in an attempt to create a buzz in Swedish online forums for their LED tv sets. A Swedish agency called the Viral Company has been posting comments and questions to numerous forums about the best LED tvs, pretending to be an ordinary consumer. With fake identities the Viral Company tried to get the word going in forums about gaming, movies, home electronics, outdoor life and so forth.

samsung-led-tv-1

But they did a major mistake when they added a smiley to the posts with the purpose of tracking conversations, since the URL for the smiley icon went to a domain name owned by the Viral Company (http://power.moltoman.com). So the little scam was brutally revealed, and here is the fun part – someone else is following in the footsteps of the Viral Company, calling them out as cheaters. A user named “Felmeddelande” (Error message, in English) posts comments to the different forum threads explaining that these posts are done on behalf of Samsung, which in most cases are in breach of forum rules.

samsung-led-tv-2

If you do a Google search for http://power.moltoman.com/tracker/PMfegnEb/smile.gif (the image has now been taken down) or http://power.moltoman.com/tracker/ you get a long list of forum posts, almost all about LED tvs. The question now is, how much of these tactics did Samsung Sweden know about. If the campaign has been approved by Samsung then they are in desperate need of some rethinking in terms of social media strategy, because this campaign was doomed to backfire from the very start. It will also be interesting to see how they will handle this online crisis situation. Will they stay silent or will they address the issue?

Hat tip to @pellet who blogged about this story he calls Samsung-gate, in Swedish this morning. See also Adland (in English).

Update Feb 15: Adland has talked to Samsung about the matter. See more details here.

Tags: , , , . Ping.

Vodafone gained Twitter followers after bad tweet

Companies that manage an issue or crisis well may often come out stronger on the other side. As a follow up to my post yesterday about Vodafone and the obscene tweet, I thought I would check in on the number of followers to Vodafone’s Twitter account. In my view, the company handled the indicident well and I almost expected that they would gain a number of followers from the attention. As you can see from the graph below, that is exactly what happened. We can see a sharp increase in number of followers for VodafoneUK since the unfortunate tweet was published, almost twice the amount than on a normal day (+377 compared to +215 on average).

vodafone uk

Graph from twittercounter.com.

Tags: , , , . Ping.

One tweet causes crisis for Vodafone

When social media enters the business world, a larger number of employees get to speak on behalf of the company than what was standard practice before. Often this is a good thing, but of course there can always be one or two bad apples that will take advantage of this new found power and try to harm the organization. That was probably what happened to Vodafone today when someone internally tweeted an obscene tweet from Vodafone’s corporate account. And since Twitter is Twitter, also bad news spread extremely fast. That’s why VodafoneUK currently is involved in some serious online crisis management, see their Twitter stream below.

vodafoneuk

The story is currently among the top tweeted stories on Tweetmeme.com, but Vodafone is acting switfly to limit the damages before there are any major impact on its brand. They seem to be directly addressing a large number of people that are commenting on the issue or retweeting the obscene tweet. And I think Vodafone will manage to go quite unharmed through this incident. Fresh Networks sums it up nicely:

1.They responded quickly and said what was happening. In social media, people can spread messages quickly. Vodafone also responded quickly and said exactly what happened and was happening. It wasn’t a hack but an internal employee and that person was being dealt with.

2.They responded in the same place that people are talking about them. Vodafone responded to its Twitter followers on Twitter, using the VodafoneUK account. The key to crisis management in social media is to respond where people complain. Otherwise you risk alienating them and losing your role in the story.

Update: According to a statement from Vodafone, the employee has now been suspended. From the Telegraph: “The employee has been suspended immediately and we have started an internal investigation. This was not a hack and we apologise for any offence the tweet may have caused.”

Tags: , , , , . Ping.

Canada and Sweden most giving people in Haiti earth quake

This is a neat way of illustrating data. It’s an illustration that David McCandless did for UK paper the Guardian and it visualizes how much individual countries have contributed to the Haiti relief. Canadians were the most giving people, based on how much they donated per person on average. Sweden is second, followed by the other Nordic countries Norway, Denmark and Finland.

haiti

The entire data set can be found here.

Footnote: I don’t think 2.51 USD is that much to brag about really. I think we could have done better.

Image credit: mkandlez

Tags: , , , . Ping.

Vote for Media Culpa in the Yaba blog awards

Media Culpa has been nominated in the Swedish blog awards Yaba, in the Marketing category (Marknadsföring, in Swedish). If you like this blog, you might want to cast your vote for it. Just click on the yellow image in this post, or on the larger image in the side bar. The competition is tough, so I need YOUR vote 🙂

Thanks a bundle!

http://www.daytona.se/flashes/yaba-2010-180×150-vote.swf?nominee=296

Tags: , , . Ping.