Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Check this out. Media Culpa is pick of the day, by the Blogger team.
Since there are a lot of new visitors to this blog today, I thought I should seize the opportunity to recommend a subscription to Media Culpa’s RSS feed.
Tags: Blogger, blogs of note, bloggar, media culpa. Ping.
Bloglines is expected to have about a third of the RSS reader market and a guess is that the service is used by at least 2 million people. None (zero, zip, zilch) of them find it worthwhile to subscribe to Expressen’s columnist Lars Lindström’s blog. And he is not expected to get any more friends in the blogosphere after today’s bizarre attack on blogger Magnus Ljungkvist regarding his scoop on Swedish Minister for Trade, Maria Borelius.
Update: For some strange reason Bloglines only found one of Lindström’s feeds this morning. A new search revealed that his blog has three feeds with an impressive total of four subscribers. Sorry ’bout that.
Tags: Maria Borelius, blogs, medborgarjournalistik, Maria Borelius. Ping.
Five of the top ten most visited Swedish blogs on the portal Bloggtoppen.se are about fashion (marked in red in the graph below). Svenska Dagbladet interviewed several of these young bloggers today and discussed their growing influence on purchase decisions. Some of them say they have to buy the items themselves before they blog about them, because they sell out. The other five top blogs are part of the Feber (“Fever”) network.
A thing that interested me was if I could find any correlation between the number of visits to a blog and the number of subscribers. After all, the fact that you can subscribe to news is one of the big benefits of blogs. So I checked Bloggtoppen which measures the number of weekly visits to member blogs (and the accuracy of these figures are constantly up for debate) and as far as I understand, the current numbers are visits so far this week. A blog like Tjuvlyssnat, with almost 50,000 visits this week, has only got 149 subscribers in Bloglines, which is probably the most popular RSS reader around. In fact, all of the top ten blogs have very few subscribers (in Bloglines) as you can see below.
Of course you shouldn’t put too much importance on the ratio figure, it’s just a number I calculated in order to compare the top blogs. If we look at my blog, I have in total 210 Bloglines subscribers (two feeds) and 261 visits so far this week according to Bloggtoppen. That is a ratio of 80.46%. Quite a difference from the blogs above, don’t you think? I have no explanation to this big difference. At first I thought it could have something to do with the way different blogs publish feeds, but all top ten blogs do like I do, which is publish the full RSS feed. So in theory you wouldn’t actually need to visit the website to read the posts (apart from Videofeber where I think you need to visit the site to check out the videos).
Maybe it’s just me…
The blog portal Knuff.se lists the 50 Swedish blogs with most incoming links (from Swedish blogs), during the last few months. Media Culpa is at #23 and there are a few other media and marketing related sites on the list, like Beta Alfa 2.0 (#16), NMI at #38 and Martin Jönsson at #40.
Fashion retailer La Redoute has made an impression in the blogosphere. Fashion blogs are very popular and the company is a partner with the advertising network Tradedoubler which many fashion bloggers use to generate revenue for themselves. In a new drive, the company ran a promotion on its site where all products were sold at a 50% discount for only half an hour. Between 19.00 and 19.30 last night – shoppers’ heaven! Just the kind of campaign that will drive blogging shopaholics nuts. The word “redoute” is now one of the top words among blog posts, according to the blog portal Knuff.se:
So does this translate to “success”? Not necessarily. The people who managed to actually buy something were really happy, but many others were only left angry and disappointed.
Emilee: “Okej, La Redoute’s fenomenala 30-minuters rea var ju väldigt lyckad. Eller inte. Snarare det sämsta jag varit med om.” [“The worst I’ve ever seen”]
One comment to this blog post by Sandra: “jag lyckades men med deras leveranser vet man ju inte. en klänning jag köpte ska komma om 5-10 veckor. Brukar ju sluta med aldrig och sedan när den kommer in i lager så säljer den slut…hehe :-p”
Engla’s Showroom: “Läste bland alla kommentarerna i inlägget under att det var många som ej lyckades handla till halva priset hos La Redoute igår. Jag var en av dem. Blev insläppt kl 19.25 till slut. Men när jag sedan kom till kassan så tog det ca 30 minuter innan sidan laddat färdigt och när den gjort det. Tekniskt fel! Ja sedan kostade allt som vanligt såklart. Jag tycker La Redoute borde tänkt på att haft det under en längre tid så att alla verkligen kunde handla.” [“When I got to the check-out it took 30 minutes for the page to load and then. Technical error!”]
One comment to this blog post by Therese: “tja…. jag hängde på låset kl 19, kom in direkt. Försökte komma till kassan mellan 19.20 och 20.10 – MEN bara felmeddelanden. SURT! ILLA!” [“Tried to get to the check-out between 19.20 and 20.10. But only technical errors!”]
When you surf around these blogs you find more of these comments from shoppers who drew a blank. So, if La Redoute is monitoring what is said about their brand in the blogosphere they might be able to repair the damage they caused. If they are “guillouing”, i.e. ignoring the blogosphere, they might make the same mistake again.
Rick Murray, executive vice president of Edelman, said it well:
“We look at the blogosphere as a focus group with 15 million people going on 24/7 that you can tap into without going behind a one-way mirror.”
Worth noting is that none of the referenced blogs above are included in media monitoring company Observer’s list of monitored blogs.
UPDATE: La Reduote makes an effort to reach out to affected bloggers. But they are apparently not offering any concrete solution yet, as would be desired.
Footnote: Att guilloua = ignorera bloggar. Från Jan Guillou.
Tags: fashion, fashion blogs, mode, modeblogg. Ping.
To get a better picture of the Swedish blogger and blog reader, I conducted an online survey between June 28 and July 4, 2006 where 700 blog readers answered a number of questions. BlogSweden 2 is the second annual blog survey that I have conducted and here are some key results:
Bloggers: The typical Swedish blogger in the survey is:
• Female
• 26-30 years old
• has a college/university degree
• would vote for the Social Democratic Party if there was an election today (read: between June 28 and July 4, 2006)
• has a broadband connection
• blogs because she likes to write
• updates her blog every day
• has nothing against being contacted by companies in her role as a blogger
• is anonymous
• reads 6-10 blogs daily
• spends 6-10 hours per week reading blogs
• never uses an RSS reader to read blogs
• likes to read blogs about everyday life experiences
• reads blogs to read “ordinary” people’s views
• has never clicked on an advertisement on a blog
Blog readers: The typical blog reader in the survey has a similar profile, but:
• would vote for the Moderate Party if there was an election today (read: between June 28 and July 4, 2006)
• reads 1-5 blogs daily
Other interesting results from the survey:
• Half of all Swedish blog readers in the survey spend 5 or more hours per week reading blogs (43 minutes or more per day) which is more than the Swede generally spends on reading daily newspapers.
• Most female blog readers don’t use an RSS reader to read blogs, (25.5% use RSS at least sometimes), but male blog readers do (59.6%)
Male blog readers prefer reading blogs about:
• Politics and society (69.9%)
• Journalism and media (59.3%)
• IT and blogging (54.7%)
• Everyday life experiences (35.6%)
• Literature and writing (24.9%)
• Economy and entrepreneurship (24.6%)
• Advertising and PR (23.4%)
Female blog readers prefer reading blogs about:
• Everyday life experiences (74.7%)
• Fashion and design (39.9%)
• Journalism and media (38.8%)
• Literature and writing (38.5%)
• Politics and society (32.2%)
• Parenthood and children (31.3%)
• Food and beverages (31.3%)
• Women blog anonymously (68.2%), but men don’t (29.6%)
• Nearly four out of ten bloggers have at least once regretted something they posted on their blog.
• One in four bloggers have at least once felt harassed by comments in the blogosphere.
• Male bloggers blog to a higher extent than female bloggers to influence others, strengthen their brand, to create an archive of information and because there is a need for more voices in the public debate.
• Nine out of ten bloggers update their blog every week. Female bloggers update their blogs more often than male bloggers (68.9% at least once a day, compared to 46.6% of male bloggers).
• Male bloggers more often than female bloggers have ads on their blogs (18.2% compared to 3.9%).
• More male bloggers say they have clicked on an advertisement on a blog (40.8% compared to 28.4% of female bloggers).
I will upload as many graphs as possible to Flickr, tagged with “blogsweden2”.
The entire report (pdf) can be found here in English or in Swedish. Last year’s survey, BlogSweden 1.0 is here in English and in Swedish. I’m sorry that it took so long to translate the report and if I will do a third survey I need to find a less time-consuming solution in order to produce a report in both languages.
Footnote: Respondents were chosen through a convenience sample.
Tags: Sweden, surveys, blog research, blogsweden, bloggsverige, bloggar. Ping.
