Media Culpa

A former colleague of mine (aschoenb[at]cme.com) is conducting research for his master’s degree of in-house/corporate communication practitioners and their influence and relationships with senior management. He is hoping to understand what attributes, such as organizational structure, individual leadership and relationship management, contribute the most to our role as professionals. I’ve personally taken the survey and it should take only 15- 20 minutes to complete. The survey is completely confidential and he’s promised to send you the results if you’re interested. If you work on a corporate communications team here is a link to the survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=1797813187

Thank’s for your help.

SVT, the Swedish public service television, has caused irritation in Italy because of an ad campaign promoting SVT as “free television”, not folding under political pressure. The campaign portrays Italy as a warning example of the opposite, due to Silvio Berlusconi’s strong hold of some 90 per cent of Italian tv which in turn “gave him” the last election. The campaign did not amuse the Italians who unite in front of the insults from their northern EU neighbours. The Swedish ambassador in Rome Staffan Wrigstad was called up to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the embassy was the target of hundreds of email protests.

The reactions from Swedish politicians show that the left haven’t lost their tactic skills. Both (m), (c) and (kd) voice concern over the fact that Swedish state owned television makes political statements, while the left, (s) and (v) do not want to interfere. Quad erat demonstrandum, sort of.

Stockholm Spectator has a summary in English, while Expressen has some interesting views in Swedish, if you belong to those who believe that SVT might not be that free of political interference after all.

Lundblad responds to my post yesterday about the importance of blogs. Among other things he writes: “But writing is the most important. Not blogging.” (What is blogging really?). And I agree, a democratic society benefits from having thinking citizens that are able to freely express what’s on their minds and blogs have enabled millions of people with easy access to a writing platform. But the technology does play an important role here and that’s why I pointed to syndication and connectivity yesterday. If we are to look at this topic from a democratic standpoint, then a million webpages with people writing is a good thing. But what is better than writing is dialogue. The way blogs enable people to engage in conversations with others is a strong power that has already brought down both politicians and media stars from their previously almost untouchable positions. This network effect would be hard to achieve if there were 6 million web diaries that only to a limited extent read and challenged each other.

About the connectivity: ego-searching on Google is not quite the same as checking Technorati links, for several reasons. Google is not updated (I think) as frequently and there is nothing that indicates that a new link automatically gets such a high rank in Google that you can easily find it. Technorati on the other hand is updated continuously. An hour after I wrote my last post, you could find it if you searched Lundblad’s domain on Technorati, and it was shown first because it was the latest link. And if you want to know what others write about your blog, you could do like me and create an RSS feed for Technorati links and subscribe to it in your news reader. The address to my feed is http://www.technorati.com/watchlists/rss.html?wid=13545. That way I don’t need to search myself, I get information automatically the minute it happens.

That is why I mean that the choice of channel is extremely important. Of course the writing is number one, that is the reason why we spend all these unpaid hours in front of the computer. But the result can be vastly different if you choose to write on a regular website or an RSS-enabled blog.