Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
I am off to Greece for a few days and will be offline, but if everything works out I will be able to participate in next week’s event, the Global PR Blog Week 1.0. I will be writing about corporate blogging in professional services companies. Be sure to check it out.
Weeklong Online Conference Featuring Some of the World’s Most Influential Public Relations, Marketing and Business Bloggers set for July 12-16, 2004
Nordic media wrote most articles about blogs in January (76) and March (78), about twice the amount of the other months. June had the lowest number of articles so far this year (31).
Disclaimer: search is for articles in the respective language which means that articles in Swedish published by Finnish papers (like Hufvudstadsbladet) is counted in the stats for Sweden.
Summer is here and that might explain why so little has been written about blogs in Swedish media during June. Still there has been several news worthy stories like the rumours of Bill Gates starting to blog and the RSS/blog capabilities built in to Apple’s new operating system Tiger.
One really good article was published in Axess which is a publication that the Retriever search engine did not find (so there are really more than 8 articles in June, but for comparison I leave it out).
Web surveys on media web sites are just about as unscientific as you can get, but they can still serve as an indication. The Swedish arm of IT publishing house IDG has a web survey on its web site idg.se and asks readers about blogs.
“Do you use blogs at your company?”
69.5% What’s a blog?
6.2% We don’t know if we’re blogging or not.
11.2% We have looked at it but decided it’s not for us.
1.3% We are blogging, but are sceptical.
2.3% We are blogging and like it.
1.6% We have stopped blogging.
7.8% I have a private blog, but don’t know anything about corporate blogs.
Number of responses: 1059
I don’t want to read too much into the figures (if I would, then about 50 respondents either have a corporate blog or used to have, and I just don’t buy that. To my knowledge, there are just a few Swedish corporate blogs to date, like JKL blog and WPR.) But it is fascinating that such a high percentage answers “What is a blog?”. The readers of idg.se should be among the most tech savvy audiences out there.
If you ever doubted the importance of distributing information via RSS, take a look at what Dan Gillmor writes about Apple’s next operating system, OS X 10.4, aka “Tiger”, and the web browser Safari.
Jobs spent a fair amount of time talking about the native inclusion of RSS into an upcoming version of the Safari browers, and a “personal clipping” service. There’s a special search function just for RSS; I’m not clear on whether it’s searching via one of the main RSS search engines, whether Apple will write its own or whether it’s only searching your designated feeds.
Apple says: “Scan all the latest news, information and articles from thousands of your favorite major news organizations, community web sites and personal weblogs in one simple-to-read, searchable article list using Safari RSS.”
Trevor Cook posts about blogging in Iran, which reminds me that I had an email conversation a few weeks ago with Hossein Emami, who is a PR blogger in Iran.
Hossein, who is a real PR blog pioneer, has his own PR blog and he started and runs a corporate blog for his employer, the Export Development Bank of Iran.This was the first corporate blog in Iran. According to Hossein, one of the most important advantages of a corporate blog is the informal tone of voice, compared to more traditional ways of communication. His personal blog is called Ravabete Omoomi, which means “Public Relaions” in Farsi.
Hossein:
“Now there are 5 active bloggers in Iran who write about PR. I write about Media, electronic public relations, journalism, Information communication technology (ICT) etc.”
He says that there are two PR societies in Iran: http://www.prsir.org and http://www.pr-pa.org (link does not work at the moment) and that blogging is developing in Iran and Iranians are interested it very much. He points out that the vice president Mr. Abtahi has his own blog (mentioned on this blog earlier).
Hossein:
“There are many Iranian journalists who have blogs, such as Dr. Shokrkhah who is the chief editor of “Jam-e-Jam Online”. Jam-e-Jam is one of the newspapers in Iran with highest circulation. Altogether the journalists accept blogs, and use them as a good source of information.”
This is another illustrative example of how Swedish PR practitioners, journalists and politicians are lagging many other countries when it comes to blogging. Hopefully, the more articles are being written about blogging in Sweden, the more people will start their own blogs. The Swedish paper Axess has a long and interesting article about watchblogs and the influence of blogs on journalism. More of this, and blogging will take off soon. (Link to Axess via Erik Stattin)