It’s tough to sell a paper that bashes your brand

lidl Today’s Aftonbladet had one of those frontpages that PR professionals have nightmares about: “Rotten garbage transported with [supermarket chain] Lidl’s fresh food”. And since I happened to visit my local Lidl store today, for about the third time ever, I had to check if they had the paper on display or if it was sold out (as in “thrown in the dumpster”). But there it was, right next to the check-out, screaming out its unfriendly message. Probably not an ideal situation for the poor cashier, but it earned Lidl a tiny bit of kudos in my eyes.

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Be careful with those charts

People who know this stuff (source unclear), say that we remember:

10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we say
90% of what we say and do

That is one reason why participation is so important in today’s marketing communications. But it also means that images have more impact than plain text. So when a newspaper illustrates a news story with a chart, it needs to be especially careful not to doctor the statistics in a way that the chart gives a different impression than the text. In today’s Dagens Industri, the paper illustrates an article about its own increase in circulation. The increase is only one percent but it looks like the number of subscribers is skyrocketing because the baseline of the chart is 115,500 instead of 0, a common trick to make small increases look big. See my manipulated chart to the right and tell me which is closer to the truth.

original my version

See also Blind Höna (in Swedish) about the same phenomenon.

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Sweden’s most popular professional blogger quits

Alex Schulman has become a poster boy for online harassment. His blog at Aftonbladet has become Sweden’s most visited professional blog (there are other blogs with more visitors) through his provocative style which culminated with the recent criticsim of his Aftonbladet colleague Jan-Olov Andersson.

Today Schulman writes that he will no longer continue to update this blog becuase the “blog has grown into a monster” which makes him feel bad.

“I read what I have written about celebrities and I feel disgusted by myself,” he writes.

Perhaps it was the row with his colleague, or the criticism from the Press Ombudsman Yrsa Stenius in Svenska Dagbladet yesterday. Or the article by his mother in Expressen yesterday:

“The blog phenomenon Alex is not my boy, the Alexander I know,” she wrote.

Either way, there is still hope for the blogosphere…

Update: I forgot to add, that this should serve as a reminder to those who are quick to put a price tag on blogs. About a month ago, it was estimated that Schulman’s blog could generate as much as 28.7 million kronor in ad revenue per year. And now it’s going to shut down. Blogs can be instant hits, but also disappear in a split second.

Facebook forced cartoon character to hide his nipples

Nipples and Facebook seems to be a dangerous combination these days. Today, Dagens Media writes that the Swedish tv channel Kanal5 had bought ad space on Facebook for the tv show Myggan (“the Mosquito”). The ad displays a cartoon figure with no clothes on, but he conceals his private parts with his hands. But someone tagged the ad “topless man” which meant that Facebook didn’t show the ad as many times as they had agreed to do.

Per Lorentz at Kanal5 says that Facebook suggested that the character’s nipples would be covered with small black patches, which Kanal5 agreed to do.

The uncensored cartoon character can be found here. Just outrageous, isn’t he?

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Facebook messes up in breastfeeding kerfuffle

We recently touched upon the way Facebook handles its own public relations. Now the social networking site is the target of an uproar because it deleted photos of breastfeeding users and even suspended one Canadian mother from her account after she asked why her photos had been deleted.

The Toronto Star writes:
“Last month, Facebook closed the account of an Edmonton mother who had posted breastfeeding photos and the site deleted images many others has put up, claiming they violated rules about nudity and “obscene content.” Breastfeeding advocates set up a petition group on the social networking site called “Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene.” It hit the news and within days, the petition had more than 20,000 members.”

This group has now in excess of 25,000 members.

Now any company can make mistakes. But it’s how you handle those mistakes that make the difference in crisis communications. See for example how Southwestern Airlines (eventually) managed to score at least some PR points after almost throwing a female student off a plane for having a too short skirt. In the case of Facebook, blogger and columnist David Wescott took the trouble to ask Facebook about how and why they removed those photos. Read his email correspondence here. I think it’s fair to say that Facebook’s approach to PR does not include a lot of conversation, which is a bit odd for a social networking site.

[Via For Immediate Release.]

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Hiccup in Ad Age Power 150

This blog is honoured to be featured on Todd Andrlik and Advertising Age’s Power 150 – the list of the world’s top media and marketing blogs. The ranking is based on factors such as Google Page Rank, number of subscribers in Bloglines and Technorati rank. Today we’ve dropped from about #55 to #118. And if the examine the lists we can see that all sites have only gotten 1 point for Technorati rank, so there is obviously some hiccup in the way that Technorati stats are translated into ranking points. Hopefully this problem will be solved soon so that Media Culpa is back in the top 100.

Update, Oct 1: And now it seems to be working again.

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