Business | Media Culpa

Corporate blogging among listed Nordic companies

Burson-Marsteller, were I work, has surveyed the adoption of corporate blogging among listed companies in the Nordic region, with a market capitalization of more than 1 billion euro. We found that 9.1%, or 12 out of the 132 companies have at least one company sponsored blog. Four of those 12 companies with blogs have two or more blogs associated with the company.

Corporate blogging among Nordic listed corporations

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Corporate blogging is much more common among the large corporations in Sweden than in the other Nordic countries. Ten of the 56 companies (17.9%) that are listed on the Swedish Large Cap list have one or more corporate blogs. That is an even higher percentage than the 14.8% of Fortune 500 companies with corporate blogs, identified in a separate survey done by Burson-Marsteller in February and March this year. Finland and Norway are lagging considerably with only one company each with a corporate blog (of 27 and 25 respectively) while in Denmark none of the 24 companies have a corporate blog.

A white paper can be downloaded here (pdf) and graphs and more info found here (although the press release is in Swedish).

Other findings:
– Nine out of the twelve companies have commenting functionality enabled on at least one blog.
– Three out of the twelve companies have trackbacks enabled on at least one blog.
– Nine out of the twelve companies have RSS enabled on at least one blog.
– Two out of twelve companies have social bookmarks enabled on at least one blog.
– Industrials is the sector with most blogging companies (4), followed by Telecommunications Services (3), Information Technology (2), Consumer Discretionary (1), Financials (1) and Energy (1).

This research was conducted during August and Sept 2008 and studied proactive blogging activities within the Nordic Large Cap list which includes corporations with a market capitalization of at least 1 billion euro and that are listed in Denmark, Finland, Norway or Sweden (as of July 18, 2008).

* Tele2 and West Siberian Resources Ltd. have shut down their blogs since the research was performed.

Tags: corporate blog, fortune500, social media, bloggar, företagsbloggar. Ping.

Marketers reach out to mommybloggers

The Swedish blogosphere is dominated by teenage girls with fashion blogs, but in the US another group of female bloggers are becoming a force to be reckoned with – mommybloggers. A few days ago some 1,000 women (60% of them moms) attended the BlogHer conference in San Francisco. Many companies have realized that reaching out to mommybloggers can have a positive impact on sales or brand recognition.

See for example the San Francisco Chronicle about mommybloggers here and Jeremiah Owyang’s photo of the goodie bags handed out to some bloggers at a pre BlogHer party with the purpose of getting positive publicity on their blogs.

Tags: mommybloggers, blogher, kvinnor, mammor, bloggar, usa. Ping.

How to jeopardize your brand for $5.98

The US bank Washington Mutual positions itself as an informal, friendly and fun bank. But Shel Holtz’ experience with the bank when he needs to send some cash to his son, who is in the army, is neither friendly nor fun. He concludes his story by saying that “The Stanley Cup Playoffs will be held in hell before anyone in our family has anything to do with WaMu again.”

When the gap between rhetoric and reality becomes too big, today’s consumers spell it out on their blogs or on social networks, which may seriously hurt a brand. Companies, are you listening?

Tags: brands, kommunikation, varumärken. Ping.

9 tips on how to engage website users

Steve Outing, formerly at Poynter Institute for Media Studies and now founder of the Enthusiast Group, has posted a white paper titled “Talk, Why Don’t You” about increasing online user engagement.

In the paper there are 9 tips on how to get your website users to be more engaged and participative.

Tip No. 1: Support and encourage user comments
Tip No. 2: Use alerts to keep comment threads going
Tip No. 3: Get your key people involved in comment threads
Tip No. 4: Have a human leader — preferably a celebrity
Tip No. 5: Develop a user points system
Tip No. 6: Cultivate and promote volunteer site editors or moderators
Tip No. 7: Everybody loves contests
Tip No. 8: Showcase the best from your users
Tip No. 9: Produce a newsletter featuring the best from users

Several of the tips above are based on the wise view that one should not just take users’ content on a social media-based website and not give anything back, in some form.

Tags: social media, blogs, sociala medier, media, sociala media.

Listed Swedish companies slow to adopt social media

I’ve had the feeling for quite some time that Swedish companies are extremely slow to adopt social media in corporate communications compared to companies in other countries. Today, Dagens Industri reports (not online) that the PR agency Hallvarsson & Halvarsson has compared listed European companies’ investor relations services online. The conclusion is that no Swedish companies are ranked on the top ten list , the first one to appear is Atlas Copco at #11.

Swedish companies have still not started to use new technologies such as corporate blogs, RSS or audio/video services to inform investors or media, is the conclusion in the article.