Tag: Sweden

Influencers on Twitter talked about Sweden in 2009

Gryts skärgård

Sweden may be a small and sparsely populated country, but when it comes to Twitter, apparently influencers talk about us. According to Klout, which measures influence across the social web, Sweden was the 6th most talked about country on Twitter in 2009. Klout’s Influencer Zeitgeist 2009 claims that these are the ten countries that influencers on Twitter tweeted about:

1. United States
2. Iran
3. United Kingdom
4. Canada
5. China
6. Sweden
7. India
8. France
9. Australia
10. Japan

I find it quite extraordinary to find Sweden, a country of 9 million, in this list of international super powers. Apart from the standard explanations, that Sweden is one of the world’s most wired countries and that most people speak decent English, one reason could be that there are several Swedish companies and startups that have generated a lot of buzz. For example Spotify, Polar Rose, Voddler, Tobii, Rebtel and Twingly.

Other reasons Sweden has been discussed a lot of course have to do with the trial against the Pirate Bay (and the failed attempts to sell the site), and the success of the Pirate Party in the EU election. Sweden was the third most talked about country on Twitter during the election, according to Tweetelect09.eu (a site developed by my employer Burson-Marsteller). Sweden also held the Presidency of the European Union in 2009.

Some other stories about Sweden during 2009 that got attention were:

– 24 hour business camp
– What is it with all these Swedish startups? Videoplaza signs new UK deal
– Sweden’s Entire Internet Goes Black for an Hour
– iPhone Homescreen Exposé Concept: Would you use this? “Swedish design house made an awesome mock-up video of an alternative homescreen for the iPhone.” This was the third most read post in 2009 on Mobilecrunch.
– Voddler, the Spotify-for-movies, partners with Paramount and Disney
– Swedish government promises superfast broadband for all
– First 4G Mobile Network Launches . . . In Sweden 🙁

The most dugg story in 2009 on Digg.com, tagged “Sweden” was “Jessica Alba schools Fox’s O’Reilly in WW II history” with 5733 diggs.

Another interesting finding in Klout’s statistics is that #fail was the 6th most used hashtag among influencers on Twitter during 2009. Brands should take note.

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10 most popular Swedish businesses on Twitter

Swedish-businesses-on-twitter

More and more Swedish businesses are joining Twitter. In a recent study (in Swedish), I checked the corporate accounts with most followers and came up with this top ten list. The graph above was updated today and the company with most followers is Spotify, followed by H&M;.

Although it’s good to have a large following, of course the number of followers is not everything. Equally important is how the accounts are managed and if companies are engaging in conversations with others.

In the study I found that the active companies are actually quite good at maintaing a dialogue with followers. Roughly speaking, 80% of the tweeting companies post updates about news or announcements. Almost as many, 74% use Twitter to respond to feedback, answers questions or handle customer complaints. 32% use it for promotions and 6% use Twitter for rectruiting/HR purposes. This is quite a contrast to the notion that a large portion of tweets are pointless babble. At least businesses are trying to add meaningful information to Twitter.

Footnote: Stardoll and Ericsson Labs were not included in the initial analysis, but were added today. Hat tip to @beantin for the pointer to Ericsson Labs.

Update: A list of more than 160 Swedish corporate Twitter accounts can be found here. Feel free to add to the wiki.

Update Oct 8: Added Adland to the top list. Thanks @dabitch.

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Participation in social media increases but Sweden is lagging the US

Forrester Research has just published its third annual study about consumers’ participation in social media. The data from the US is available and indicate that the digital divide is closing. Consumers who are participating the most in social technologies are labelled Creators, Critics and Collectors and all three groups have either grown moderately or are at the same level as last year. Instead the inexperienced groups called Joiners and Spectators grew rapidly. As many as 73% of online Americans are now in the group Spectators, which means that they read blogs, listen to podcast or watch videos from other users.

The inactive group decreased from 25% to 18% of the online US population.In the age group under 35 only 10% are Inactive.

social ladder by Forrester

According to the research data for Europe, “The Netherlands and Sweden have the most participation, Italy has the most Creators, and social networks are most popular in the UK.” But Sweden and Europe is still lagging the US. A comparison between Sweden and the US looks like this:

socialladdersweden

Participation in social technologies are growing fast and as author Josh Bernoff at Forrester writes: “Marketers, if you’re not doing social technology applications now, you’re officially behind.”

You can also check the data for individual contries on this widget.

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Hey TechCrunch, Sweden is not the worst greenhouse gas emitter

Tjörn bridge, Sweden. Photo: Fredrik Stålhandske, Sweden.se 2008

A blogger writes a provocative post with claims that turn out to be completely false. It happens every day, why should I care? Well, if the blog in question is no other than TechCrunch, things start to get a bit problematic. The site is so influential that its content reaches many thousands of people. As you may have read in my previous post, TechCrunch posted an article on July 31 claiming that Sweden and Canada are among the worst emitters of greenhouse gases in the world. This turned out to be at least partly bogus but TechCrunch shows no interest in correcting the misleading information.

Actually I don’t really care if people lose trust in TechCrunch, but when disinformation about my country keeps on spreading across the web, I feel I need to raise my voice. The false article is bad enough, I could live with that. But due to the authority of TechCrunch and the behaviour of its readers, the false statements continue to have an impact for a very long time. Here’s why:

– As seen on Techmeme, Twitter users are still retweeting links to the article so the lies keep reaching new people. In total at least 220 retweets so far.

– The article has been dugg 110 times on Digg and I’m sure it has been shared on many other different platforms during the last few days.

– All this sharing helps place this story high on Google. For instance, in a search for “worst country greenhouse gas” the TechCrunch article comes up first. A search for “Sweden greenhouse gas” shows the article on top as a news result, with three more mentions in the first ten results. There is an obvious risk that the false facts will stay around and influence people’s opinions and views about Sweden.

There is really no need to add more proof, all the arguments and links are clearly available in the comments to the TechCrunch article. But just to point out how ridiculous statements like “So who are the worst offenders? Topping the list is Sweden!” are, I have compiled two tables below.

As TechCrunch actually noted further down in the article, USA is the country among the 42 in the report that emits most greenhouse gases. But a more fair comparison of course is to look at how much gas each country emits per capita. So I took the liberty of compiling a table of the 42 countries, based on the total emissions for 2006. Population numbers from the Population Reference Bureau (pdf).

tc1

The tables show that Australia is topping the list, which is due to a high reliance on coal to generate electricity. The US is in the top along with Canada, with Sweden at the very bottom.

Another way to illustrate how much greenhouse gas a country emits is by looking at the amount of emissions divided by GDP. That could illustrate the ability of a country to generate wealth with a small impact on the global environment.

In the following table, countries in Eastern Europe are the worst, while again Sweden is at the very bottom.

tc2

If you feel like I do, please continue to comment the article. You can also blog about greenhouse gas emissions and link to a trusted source (like some of the links above) so that the correct information climbs in the Google results. You can tweet about the story and include the hashtag #techcrunchfail.

Don’t sit back and let this insult stand unchallenged.

Additional links:
Sweden does the most of any country for tackling emissions of greenhouse gases.

Updated Swedish data: (zip file).

Photo credit: Fredrik Stålhandske, Sweden.se 2008

Updated with graphs from Sweden tops the Climate Change Performance Index 2009 (pdf).

climateindex09a
climateindex09b
climateindex09c
climateindex09d

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80 Swedish businesses on Twitter

I started a wiki a long time ago with the ambition to build a repository for Nordic businesses and their use of social media. Now I have finally started to fill it with information and I would be very glad if more people would consider adding links to good cases from corporate use of social media in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland. To edit the Social Media Wiki you just sign up for an account at Wikidot.com and then join my wiki with the password “mediaculpa”.

Among the pages that I have started to build, the most extensive list is Swedish businesses on Twitter. It already contains 80 companies (or to be more precise, 80 Twitter accounts, since some companies run multiple accounts).

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Has Twitter reached a tipping point in Sweden?

I don’t know to what extent the use of Twitter during the Mumbai attacks has had an impact, but suddenly we can see a surge in the number of new Twitter users from Sweden. And not just individuals. Organizations are also joining. Today the staff behind the editorial pages of Svenska Dagbladet started an account at http://twitter.com/SvDledare, claiming to be the first Swedish media outlet on Twitter. Sydsvenskan has been on Twitter a while but only publishes a feed of links to articles. No conversation at all there.

Political parties are now also joining Twitter en masse.
– The Social Democrats can be found at http://twitter.com/socialdemokrat.
– The Left Party: http://twitter.com/vansterpartiet.
– The Green Party: http://twitter.com/Miljopartiet.
– The Centre Party is at http://twitter.com/Centerpartiet and its youth division CUF at http://twitter.com/cuf.
– The Moderate Party has protected updates and no followers: http://twitter.com/Moderaterna.
– The Liberals also have an inactive account: http://twitter.com/folkpartiet.

It’s still early days, but the opposition is ahead of the ruling parties.

Initiatives like this list of Swedish Twitter users and a hashtag for Swedes on Twitter (#svpt) will help grow the network quite rapidly. And my prediction is that by the time we move into election campaigning in 2010, Twitter will be a much more important micro blogging platform than Jaiku, due to the ease of use. The ability to easily re-tweet messages also makes Twitter far more viral than Jaiku, although I find it way easier to have meaningful conversations on Jaiku, it simply doesn’t scale the way that Twitter does.

Footnote: I am @kullin on Twitter.

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