Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
After social media comes social media spam. Niall Kennedy tells the story about how bloggers are gaming the system on sites like Digg in order to generate clicks on Google Adwords for high-paying words like teeth whitening, weight loss and dental plans.
Tags: adwords, teeth whitening, dental plans, sociala medier, spam. Ping.
The number of free papers in Stockholm just keeps increasing. Today I got three (3) papers in my mailbox: Täby Danderyd Tidning (still free, who’s surprised?), Mitt i Täby and now also RedPages Sthlm. The latter is launched as a new paper about culture and entertainment in Stockholm, distributed 8 times per year. Although one could easily question whether this is a paper or just direct marketing dressed up as a paper. The overall quality is quite poor and RedPages’ webpage adress is published on the front page, but the URL doesn’t work. Instead one has to go to www.redpagesmedia.se to find more info.
Dagens Media also speculates today about a new free daily from Metro that is supposed to be launched next year. Sound of Stockholm will be about culture and have a circulation of 40,000 copies.
Add to this, the three free dailies City, Metro and Punkt SE that is handed out on my way to work and you realize that something’s got to give, soon. All the multitasking in the world can’t support all these papers (I also have Dagens Nyheter and Dagens Industri in my household). One definition of fatigue is “a feeling of excessive tiredness or lethargy, with a desire to rest, perhaps to sleep. Often it causes yawning.” That’s the feeling I get from this flood of freesheets.
Footnote: Additional artwork on Mitt i Täby by my oldest daughter.
Tags: RedPages, freesheets, free dailies, RedPages, media. Ping.
Phil Askey runs a site called Digital Photography Review, or DPReview, and seems to be on such good terms with camera manufacturers that he gets preview information and products to test before news are introduced to the public. These sneak previews are often under an embargo which means that DPReview has agreed not to disclose information before a certain date. Now Phil has become very annoyed by the fact that news, photos and rumours constantly “leak” from Nikon and Canon. According to Moderskeppet where I picked this story up, this is done intentionally by these companies in order to build a hype before a product launch.
DPReview posts about the rumours of a new digital Nikon D40 camera on Nov 6 and cannot confirm it until Nov 16, the date when the official press release is distributed. In the meantime such sites like Gizmodo and Engadget had already published detailed info and photos of the D40.
The effect on DPReview is that everyone already knows about this new product and the site that is supposed to be the expert now looks like a fool for not commenting. When they finally can, it’s already yesterday’s news.
So by trying to have it both ways, these companies are making bloggers happy, while they are destroying relations to other important stakeholders. A strategy that most likely will backfire.
Tags: Nikon D40, Nikon, Canon, photography,foto, digitalkameror. Ping.
What does it take to become a successful blogger? Hard work is a good start. Many of the most linked to Swedish blogs post several times per day. This will not be a discussion about quality vs quantity, but an analysis of statistics from the blog portal Knuff.se tells us that the most linked to blogs are very frequent bloggers.
The trend line suggests that the very top blogs post more often than those lower down ont the top 50 chart. The average number of weekly posts among these 50 blogs is 17.59 posts per week, which is quite a lot. But there are huge differences between for example piratbyran.org (average 1 post/week) and the hardest working blogger in Sweden: Beta Alfa 2.0 (average 67.1 posts/week).
Here is the top 50 list (numbers are for number of blogs that link to this blog, and average number of posts/week):
50 Videofeber 54 : 17
49 Johan Ingerö 56 : 12
48 Bloggfrossa & Mannen som blev trött… 58 : 3.1
47 Annica Tigers Blog 58 : 10.3
46 kulturrevolution.se 58 : 24.9
45 The Libertarian In Room 101 61 : 8.9
44 Mickey J Barczyk 62 : 9.8
43 mymarkup.net 62 : 16.5
42 Blog Dizz! 62 : 3.6
41 Martin Jönsson om reklam och medier 63 : 15.8
40 Shopping 64 : 17.1
39 piratbyran.org 65 : 1
38 Det Ljuva Livet 65 : 9.6
37 deep|edition 65 : 31.6
36 Enpartistaten 67 : 2
35 NMI 69 : 3.6
34 Legally blonde 72 : 35.9
33 Linda K 72 : 40
32 Joel Malmqvists blogg 72 : 3.7
31 Sänd mina rötter regn 72 : 14.3
30 gudmundson 72 : 17
29 Camilla 73 : 7.1
28 $akine 74 : 11.2
27 stationsvakt 77 : 36
26 Det Progressiva USA 77 : 36.7
25 Media Culpa 77 : 5.4
24 SANDRA 78 : 18
23 Kulturbloggen 82 : 4.6
22 hotspot 85 : 20.9
21 sigrid 86 : 14.3
20 Oscar Swartz :: Texplorer 86 : 2.1
19 louisep.com | frihetspropaganda – 86 : 6.5
18 Henrik-Alexandersson.se 95 : 33
17 Beta Alfa 2.0 97 : 67.1
16 Linda Skugge 100 : 30.4
15 Stockholm Street Style 103 : 20.9
14 Liberalism-Capitalism-Globalisation: JohanNorberg.Net 105 : 10.6
13 Ytligheter 115 : 37.5
12 Frihet, Fildelning och Feminism 116 : 12.4
11 Engla´s Showroom 117 : 42.6
10 Ett liv i exil 122 : 15.7
9 Federley 122 : 16.7
8 Magnus tankar 124 : 6.7
7 Jinges Web och Fotoblogg 131 : 24.4
6 Copyriot 132 : 6
5 Isobels text och verkstad 133 : 9.9
4 Jonas Morian | PromeMorian 138 : 14.9
3 Karolina Lassbo – en glamourprinsessas dagbok 139 : 28.9
2 Esbatis kommentarer 147 : 17.6
1 Tjuvlyssnat 380 : 23.7
Footnote: Stats are for top 50 as of Wednesday this week.
Tags: A-list bloggers, posts, bloggare. Ping.
I recently blogged about a fake blog by AMF Pension where a blogger claims he travelled through time. I think most of us got that this was fake from the very start, and that might be fine, although I would never recommend stealth blogs as part of marketing campaigns. But if it was slightly interesting at one point, it’s just embarrassing now that even AMF Pension’s Vice President admitted it was not true in his own blog. When the cat is out of the bag, it’s time to end it, guys.
What does this blog have in common with Washington Post, Business Week, New York Times, news.yahoo.org, LA Times, Fox News and Jerusalem Post? We are all listed as top breaking news on Tailrank.com. Tailrank lists the news stories that are currently most linked to in the blogosphere. The Swedish portal Knuff.se does the same conversation tracking among Swedish blogs, but this is the first time I’ve noticed that Media Culpa has been picked up internationally in a similar context.
Apart from the sheer fun of being noticed, I think it demonstrates well how any source can be part of conversations online, regardless of financial muscles.
Footnote: Tailrank’s breaking news are continuously updates so you won’t find these sources on the front page for more than a few minutes.