Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Lena Mellin, Aftonbladet (not online), about the news that Denmark now has the highest taxes in the world (via Dagens Industri):
“No prejudice about Sweden are true any longer. We don’t pay the highest taxes in the world. We aren’t world champions in suicide. It’s not even cold.”
Tags: sweden, sverige, varumärken. Ping.
Both Expressen and Helsingborgs Dagblad have added Facebook functionality to their websites, writes Medievärlden. Users can now easily add content from the two papers to their Facebook profiles.
Update: Sydsvenskan too, says Pelle.
Update 2: And Nerikes Allehanda. Thanks Nicclas.
Update 3 (Oct 29): And Eskilstuna-Kuriren and Norrköpings Tidningar.
When the PR agency JMW asked 1,325 Swedes between 15 and 65 years of age, four out of ten used social networks of some sort. MSN is the most popular choice (72 per cent), with Facebook skyrocketing up to second place (36 per cent) ahead of troubled Lunarstorm (32 per cent) and MySpace (21 per cent).
The survey included several different types of media that may not always be associated with the term “social networks”, such as chat, text messaging, blogs, communities, social networks, downloading and filesharing (of images, music, videos), email, online games, virtual worlds like Second Life, and wikis.
15 per cent of the respondents had their own blog.
Tags: facebook, social networks, facebook, myspace, lunarstorm, sociala media. Ping.
[Republished post, the original must have been accidentally deleted. Sorry for the inconvenience]
The blog of Sweden’s Foreign Minster Carl Bildt has become a question for Konstitutionsutskottet (KU), the Parliamentary Committee on the Constitution, writes Riksdag & Departement. Bildt’s blog is subject to an investigation by the prosecutor because Bildt did not remove hateful comments to some of his blog posts earlier this year. And before the prosecutor continues with the preliminary investigation, he wants KU to determine whether Bildt is blogging as a minister or as a private individual. If he is blogging as a minister, then KU will determine if he is to be prosecuted or not.
According to Swedish law it is the responsibility of the site owner to remove hateful comments “within reasonable time”. Bildt has declared that he knew about the comments and that he found them “very inappropriate”. But he did not remove them with the explanation that they were archived anyway. The comments were finally removed later in the spring.
Initially the blog was launched as a private blog, but when Bildt became a minister in the new right wing goverment he added a link to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ website which also registers all the posts on the blog as public documents.
During the 200 years that KU has existed it has only decided to prosecute a minister once, and that was in the 1850’s.
Tags: carl bildt, sweden, blogg, carld bildt, bloggar. Ping.
Primelabs, the company behind the service Twingly, released a report (pdf) a while back about the Swedish blogosphere. It contains a number of interesting statistics, like on what day of the week Swedes blog. As you can see (yes it’s in Swedish but I think you get it) from the graph below, bloggers are most active on Saturdays.
The two dailies (DN and SVD) that track blog links via Twingly are the ones with most incoming links from the blogosphere.
15,744 Dagens Nyheter
11,928 Svenska Dagbladet
10,956 Aftonbladet
4,843 Expressen
1,310 Sydsvenskan
1,121 Göteborgs-Posten
837 Metro
574 Dagens Industri
552 Dagens Media
502 Resumé
The last few days, Swedish media have been reporting about brand consultant Simon Anholt who talked at a seminar in Stockholm this week. Mr Anholt called Sweden “a Switzerland with sex appeal” already three months ago. And it turns out you can be both sexy and trustworthy. Edelman, one of the world’s largest PR agencies, have just published the 2007 Edelman Trust Barometer and it contains a number of interesting findings. The survey revealed that “companies headquartered in Sweden and Canada are the most trusted globally; Brazilian, Mexican and Russian companies are the least trusted.”
We can also see that for the third straight year, American brands operating in Europe continue to receive a trust discount. For example, McDonald’s is trusted by 60% of respondents in the United States and by only 26% across the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
Furthermore, according to the survey “A person like me” is the most trusted spokesperson across the European Union, North America, and Latin America. In Asia, it is second to physicians. This underlines the importance for businesses to manage relations with channels where “persons like me” meet, like blogs and community sites. And with physicians…