A Blog About Everything That Makes The Truth Worth Sharing – Founder and CEO of Honesty Stockholm
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Wow. My friend and mentor Magnus (@trendymagnus) just spoke at TED. I’m sorry, but this is as cool as it gets for any speaker. Read his backstage account on his blog. VERY cool.
Looking forward to hearing the debrief on our Wednesday lunch Magnus.
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“I did not have sex with that woman… miss Lewinsky” is not a good strategy. Why? Because it’s untrue. If you think back at the Clinton/Lewinsky-affair, the big issue wasn’t really that Bill was unfaithful, but rather that he kept lying himself into a corner. Tiger Woods did the same thing.
In Sweden we have a politician called Fredrick Federley who is using the exact opposite approach. He’s being brutally honest and says precisely what he thinks about anything.
Here are some examples: He has admitted trying cocaine and pot, opposed the FRA-legislation, is homosexual and dates a person from the Let’s Dance jury, has an alternate drag persona called Ursula, parties hard and is pretty open with this in a variety of images. For example this one:
Imagine being a politician trying to get away with all this while lying! Pretty hard, right? Now however, with the brutally honesty approach he has, it all just blows past. In fact, it actually strengthens his brand. Honesty works.
On top of this, Fredrick Federley is a social media natural. He is very active on twitter and on his blog, and does it incredibly well. I you know Swedish, you should look and learn. Also, check out this amazing performance in a television interview. This is how you do it!
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This isn’t brand new by any standards, but it reminds me (and perhaps you) that sometimes, bad ass is just… bad ass.
The Subaru also seems to carry a bit more fun & punch than those german Volkmobiles, wouldn’t you say? 
Thanks to Juha for sharing.
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Great news!
We have now finished our first round of expansion at Honesty and now have four of the six partners here full time! Fantastic!
Honesty will be divided into three units, each responsible for their own area of expertise. The three areas are Management & Strategy, Digital Business Development, and Creative Studio.
Two of the new partners, Martin Marklund and Petrus Kukulski, take on the roles of creative directors, and will head the Creative Studio. Martin and Petrus are two of the most experienced creatives in Sweden with a truckload of awards and plenty of amazing characters to their credit. We’re very proud to have them with us.
The Management & Strategy unit will be headed by me (Managing Director) and another of the new partners, Emil Clase (Client Director) who is also extremely experienced in handling client relations. Emil is also a completely amazing person to have on board, and also great lunch company if you’re in the mood for discussing your business with us.
For the Digital Business Development unit, we have two new partners which will be disclosed in two phases. The first one, our new expert on traffic generation using search and social media, will join us on Monday 9/11. Stay tuned for more info on him. The second one, our new edge in digital business strategy and conversion, will join us later this fall.
If you know Swedish, you can learn more about all the news on our Honesty site. We’ll have an English language one up shortly. You can also read about us today in Dagens Industri (4/11).
Now that we’ve launched stage one, I promise to become a better blogger again.
See you soon!
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Those stubborn bastards! It took me hours in the live chat with several different support people, a bunch of emails, and even flashing a bit of the famous Walter rage to get the USA-based web hosting service Host Gator to listen. But finally they did. Here’s the story:
I was working on a Wordpress Thesis site that was going to be hosted in two versions (Swedish and English) in two different countries (Sweden and the US) and couldn’t get one of the scripts (TimThumb.php) built in to Thesis to function properly on the American server. The Swedish version, which is hosted on Binero worked just fine. After digging through some documentation and forums, I deduced that the error must be that the mod_security settings on Host Gator were set to tight.
I wrote about this to the people at Host Gator and simply asked them to whitelist these rules for the domain in question. They said that they would love to do that, but not if they hadn’t seen the error triggered in their logs. In other words – they refused. I got a bunch of answers from them, here is one:
(5:36:34 AM) Nathan Mo: I’m sorry but I’m unable to confirm this issue for you. We do not provide support for third party scripts.
After a few hours of fruitless nagging I got a bit pissed and wrote this:
With one install (at Binero.se in this case, but it works equally well at other hosts) we get the desired results. At Hostgator we do not. To me, having spent 8 years in an institute of technology, this is an equation with one (1) unknown. Just because we can’t see the unknown (that’s why we call it an unknown) doesn’t mean we cant deduce it from said equation. I can’t help you with your methods of debugging, but I CAN help you with deduction.
(Ok. I really “only” spent 4,5 years at LiTH, but exaggerated for effect).
Finally I get this answer:
I whilsted your domain for those three mod_security rules. That should not make any change because I can see from the logs that the domain has never triggered those rules.
So… finally I got them to do what I asked them to do from the beginning. Did it work? Drumroll…
…BOOM. Everything fallls into place and works perfectly. Only with about a day down the drain because of the stubbornness of Host Gator support staff. In the end, courage to try things will prevail.
(Ps. If reading this as a tutorial, don’t forget to set cache permission to 775).
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Suddenly the news drop like a bomb. The big yearly price comparison on groceries organized by the National Penioners’ Association in Sweden was rigged by many of the store chains – and the one chain that usually wins was the worst offender. Suddenly no quirky traditional television commercial will help, because suddenly truth showed up at your door step. The point? Focus on what drives the bottom line, not what drives advertising awards. Oh, and never lie.
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I got an email this morning from Jung Von Matt Stockholm asking me to check out their new “optimized” site in the wake of the Lowe Brindfors debacle a couple of weeks back. I really don’t intend to take on the role of advertising agency website critic, but since they asked, and since I like the guys at JvM, why not give it a go.
The site is another in the long line of Wordpress installations showing up lately in the advertising world, like Farfar and Great Works for instance. And really – why do anything else? WP has become a kick ass back end. This one is also a very pretty WP-installation design-wise. I’m not absolutely sure about the usability flow for this particular design, but that could be just me.
The reason (i figure) that I got the email however is to check it out SEO-wise. Now – first off, I want to be clear that I am by no means an SEO expert. I am interested, and I do have a solid technical background, but let’s be humble and bring in the real Michael Jordan’s of SEO, because I do pride myself in understanding how to bring in the right people. After consulting one of my favorite SEO-experts Simon Sundén, these are some of the quick pointers one would like to fix, even though this site is playing in a completely different league than the all-Flash agency sites we have discussed here earlier. The following are just examples that popped up after five minutes of analysis and discussion during lunch, but feel free to continue in the comments or hire us for a complete audit. 
That said, it’s still a good effort! Congratulations on your WP-site!
By the way – for those of you who think I hate Flash per se, here is one site which uses Flash very well, and where it is motivated to use Flash (it’s a design hotel). Simon also wrote a great post about this today.
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I had a dream last night. In my dreams there are often all kinds of strange inventions and artifacts that don’t exist in real life. Most of the time, these are really weird and just plain dumb. But every once in a while something truly useful pops up. Last night was one of those times.
In my dream somebody called me on my phone, and when I looked at the phone there was not only the name of the person calling, but also the subject of the proposed call. Caller ID with a subject line. Just like with email. Wouldn’t that be really useful? If you’re anything like me, you often answer a call, even when busy, just to “see if it’s anything important”. With this functionality, that would not be necessary. You could also see on your missed calls what they where about. I think that would be absolutely awesome!
Wouldn’t it also be fairly easy to implement? At least in a service like Skype?
If you’re in a position to do so, please steal this idea and implement it. Consider it a Creative Commons license.
If you’re not, help me spread this idea so that we can get it implemented. I just want to see it happen. If you’re on Twitter, link back to this post and use #CallerSubject.
[EDIT: There seems to be some similar patent out there already. I guess that's why it isn't implemented. What can we conclude from that? And what should we call it? #ideasquatting maybe?]
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Here comes a short story on how not to answer customer complaints, a story that I’ve had the benefit to study closely over the past couple of months.
Long story short, my wonderful girlfriend got what we in Sweden call “värdelös service” (worthless service in English) from Elgiganten, a chain of stores selling consumer electronics. She had bought a MacBook there with an expensive insurance program, which Elgiganten didn’t want to honor when the computer died in an accident involving a glass of water. You can read the whole Elgiganten story on her blog. (It’s in Swedish, but hey, that’s why we have Google translate).
Anyway, after being met by rude people all over the place, and finally receiving an SMS where they try to make her pay more than the price of a new computer (!) for the failed repairs…
…she eventually loses her temper and writes the blog post above. But she also tweets about it…
Recently, I’ve had very good experiences with Twitter as a traffic driver. Retweeting of juicy content just works really well to boost a story. And nothing says juicy gossip like bad service. I don’t know why, but this stuff really pisses people off, and makes them really help out with RTs.
And Elgiganten are not there to answer. The closest thing I could find to Elgitanten is this…
…which doesn’t look so good (or genuine) to say the least.
Within a couple of hours, this thing has grown so big that Elgiganten’s head of service posts a comment on my girlfriend’s blog, personally taking responsibility for settling this affair and sorting out what has happened – complete with his phone number (again, foreigners, use Google Translate):
Hej Katja,
Mitt namn är Robert Jensen och jag arbetar som servicechef för Elgiganten. Jag blir uppriktigt sagt ledsen och besviken över att du som kund hos oss har fått en sådan dålig upplevelse. Detta går helt emot våra principer och policy om kundvård inom bolaget. Om du ringer 08-580 866 00 och söker mig och lämnar dina kontaktuppgifter kommer jag att kontakta dig under morgondagen för att hjälpa dig få ett avslut på serviceärendet. Det ska själklart inte behöva gå till såhär, varför jag också kommer att följa upp detta intert så snart jag har all information om ärendet.
Jag beklagar det inträffade.
Mvh
Robert Jensen
Servicechef
Elgiganten
Great response I would say, with one major problem: Being reactive is not a good and sustainable way of working with customer relations. What you (yes, I’m talking to you now Robert Jensen) are experiencing right now is just the beginning. You need to figure out a way to manage how you participate in the discussion about your brand, and you’re among the lucky ones to get an early heads up here. Take advantage of that.
Who did you say your agency was?
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