What does it take to be Twitter elite?

Success in social media isn’t necessarily measured in number of fans or followers, at least not if you are missing out on other aspects of the social media etiquette. This guy considered his promotion skills so great that he issued a press release in which he boasts about his rocket to Twitter fame.

“What’s better than soaring to the top of a popular social networking site? How about skyrocketing to the summit of two of them? That’s the envious position The Powerful Promoter, Matt Bacak, found himself in last month when he entered the Twitter elite.”

But that didn’t sit well with parts of the online community. Prime reason: he has 1,923 followers on Twitter, but only follows 32 people back.

The press release has now been “dugg” 261 times on Digg (and counting) with the accompanying headline “The. Biggest. Douche. In. Social. Media.”. Comment like these aren’t exactly the reaction you wish for.

“He follows a whopping 32 people. What a conversationalist. He sure does add value to the site. (Please tell me this PR is a joke?)”

“What an ass. This is a perfect example of a spammer on Twitter. A no-name marketer with 1800 followers and he only follows back 32 people. He obviously went on a mass friend adding frenzy and then un-followed people once they began following him. Freakin’ jerk.”

The comments on Twitter aren’t much better:

“seems quite amazing that @mattbacak has so many followers and yet participates in minimal conversations.. all his me me me makes ME sick”

What can I say? Conversation is king. If you’re only participating to add friends, then you’re not in the social media “elite” in my book. And I’d rather have 100 friends in my network that are the right friends, than 1,000 random people I have nothing in common with. But that’s just me.

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Bigmouth strikes again at Ryanair

Michael O’Leary, CEO of low-cost airline Ryanair, has a reputation for speaking his mind in a way that is great if you belong to the school that believes all publicity is good publicity. If you on the other hand think that a CEO that, among other things, calls journalists “wankers” is a walking PR nightmare, then O’Leary is it. And now he is at it again. In a press conference in Düsseldorf, Germany he recently joked that “in economy it will be very cheap fares, say 10 Euros, and in business class it will be bed and blowjobs”.

I don’t think that there is one single female flight attendant at Ryanair that finds that comment helpful in their daily jobs. Last week I flew to London and in the row behind me some “senior” business men apparently felt they had the right to get better seats so that the three of them could sit together, instead of divided on each side of the aisle. The flight attendant was a pretty, young woman who they addressed as “my little friend” and “be a good girl now”, basically talking to her like she was a twelve year-old. Typical male suppression techniques in other words. Now, the plane was full so there was no chance for these passengers to move and they made it clear to the flight attendant that she let them down, these superior men that she should serve.

It’s not difficult to guess that this is the daily routine for female flight attendants and so many other women in service professions. And O’Leary is adding insult to injury. So, O’Leary, that joke isn’t funny anymore, to make another reference to the Smiths. But what really surpised me was that Ryanair apparently is trying to spin this in a positive way. On their website the company has issued a news release that claims the video is the most viewed video on YouTube’s travel section. While that in itself probably is a bit of a stretch, instead I would be worried about the company’s reputation that so many people have watched the video.

The news release continues with quotes like “Since then it is rumoured that the ‘Beds and Blowjobs’ debate comes up at most management meetings and everyone is cock sure, it would grow from strength to strength.” They also make a big deal out of the fact that the poor translator did not find any German word for blowjobs.

Remind me to stay clear of Ryanair next time I need a cheap airline ticket. It’s not worth it.

Note to Dagens Media: this is not what any sane person would call good PR.

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Stock plummets 16% after negative blog post

c2sat You’ve heard the arguments against blogs. They have no influence. No-one reads them. And should a blog have influence it is only the few really big ones. Yeah, tell that to the people that own stock in C2SAT, which manufactures antennas for satellite communication. Their stock plummeted 16% today after a Swedish blogger posted a critical blog post last night.

Urban Bryngeld writes a blog, “Fiskebåten Polar”, about the fishing boat Polar GG 505 which is equipped with an antenna from C2SAT. Last night he posted a lengthy post about a series of problems with the antenna and the lack of support from the company. This morning when the stock market opened, the C2SAT stock traded at 1.42 SEK. At about 2.30 PM it was down 30% to 1.00 SEK, but then managed to climb up to 1.19 SEK at the end of the day, at total drop by 16%.

The Fiskebåten Polar blog has no (0) subscribers in Bloglines. C2SAT got whipped by the long tail.

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Aftonbladet for sale at Lidl, again?

Interesting story on Resumé, which I don’t quite get. It says that the two Swedish dailies Aftonbladet and Expressen have signed a deal with Lidl to sell their papers. I blogged a crisis story last year about Lidl being on the front page of Aftonbladet and the paper being on sale next to the check out. So apparently the papers have been sold in some stores.

lidl

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Swedish Minister fakes online chat

Maud Olofsson, the Swedish Minister for Enterprise and Energy, was scheduled to chat with readers at Aftonbladet.se yesterday. The problem was that she was in an interview with the local daily Västerbottens-Kuriren at that time. So instead of calling the thing off, her press secretary Lisa Wärn chatted in Olofsson’s name without revealing that readers weren’t atually chatting with the Minister.

When Resumé asks Wärn about how clever it was to let Maud Olofsson sit with another reporter during the “fake chat”, she replied:
– That was the mistake.

But it wasn’t the risk of being caught that was the mistake, of course, but instead the decision to decive the readers with a ghost writer.

Update: The entire chat is still up on aftonbladet.se, and knowing that “Maud” is not Maud, makes reading it extremely funny. Via Sydsvenskan and Vassa Eggen.

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