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!

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).

It was more than eleven years ago that I started my academic career at the M.Sc.-program for media technology at Linköping Institute of Technology. Way back then, the web was completely different, Google didn’t exist (it was actually founded the same year), and ICQ was the name of the game for communication.

But it wasn’t too long ago that I went to ad school, and now that I think of it, I find a few things about my education there quite strange. While I was there I did a bunch of interesting stuff. Formally, I was a copywriter student at Berghs School of Communication, but in reality I was more into strategy, and I also did one of my internships as an art director at BBH New York (who also have an SEO-questionable big Flash-behemoth as their site by the way). I have always loved trying different things, and this was certainly a great opportunity to do that.

Oh, nostalgia. My desk at BBH New York.

But the copywriting education itself was flawed in one key way – whoever put it together didn’t seem to be aware of something called “the internet”. I never once in two years heard anyone talk about web copy, much less give a lecture on SEO. I’m not sure how it is there today, but if they don’t dedicate time to that, I think it is very strange.

But the problem isn’t just in the schools. I read an article recently in the Swedish advertising magazine Resumé by a young and successful copywriter who said that web copy doesn’t differ very much from traditional copy. This is what he said:

“Jag ställer mig också ibland frågande till definitionen av webbcopy. Skillnaden är inte så stor, det är bara de dramaturgiska förutsättningarna som är lite annorlunda. Men i grunden handlar det om att kunna skriva intresseväckande”.

or in my own humble English translation:

“I sometimes question the definition of web copy. The difference isn’t that big, it’s just the dramaturgical premises that are somewhat different. But basically, it’s all about writing to awaken interest”.

Assuming he was quoted correctly, I find this strange. We can of course have different perspectives on what constitutes a big difference, but I would say that the difference is definitely significant! And more importantly, most copywriters don’t have any knowledge of, or experience from writing for search engines.

Google isn’t like your normal target audience. For one, Google doesn’t read between the lines. Humans understand that a passage like “…the dark mysterious pulse of the the night…” refers to, say, dance or sex, but can Google understand that? Google does, on the other hand, read around the lines, takes context into account, weighs remote links, clusters and evaluates what others have written – stuff that humans have a harder time doing.

I tell copywriters “to write for the hearts of men and the mind of Google”, and that is much harder than just doing one or the other. Good copywriters will need two sets of skills, and will be harder to find, harder to educate, and much more expensive to buy, simply because of the upcoming imbalance between supply and demand of this skill combo.

[EDIT: Sorry. My bad. Was a bit quick there. The true result for this post is position 4, not 3. Thank you Simon Sundén for your correct result].

Correct results from Simon Sundén.

Didn’t mean to return to the Lowe Brindfors case, but since I got a few comments in defense of ignoring SEO, saying that Lowe Brindfors don’t need an optimized site “because people will simply search for lowebrindfors” I just wanted to show you a demonstration of why you still need it. Here is a screen shot from Google on exactly that search.

Did I say that WordPress and Thesis are fairly well optimized?

This is the English language search where my site ranks higher because it is in the English language, but it’s working it’s way up in the Swedish results as well and is now on page two. You can imagine what would have happened if my site would have been in Swedish, right?

And if you think that I should have searched for Lowe Brindfors or “Lowe Brindfors” instead in my experiment above, you can click the links to see those screen shots intstead. Basically the same result.

Simply put – poor SEO puts you at the mercy of pain-in-the-ass-people like myself.

Now do you believe me?

If they only knew what a great idea they really had! Forsman & Bodenfors just came up with a new site for Svenska Kyrkan (The Church of Sweden) where you can submit your prayer to the site. The prayer is then keyworded on the site so that you can find other prayers on the same topic.

What makes this idea so great is that it suddenly makes The Church of Sweden relevant for a vast number of current topics like swine flu or economic crisis. Just like the church is relevant across a broad spectrum of topics in real life, it becomes equally relevant online. It also produces thousands of pages with relevant cross links. Brilliant.

Unfortunately this is also where the brilliance ends and it becomes apparent that Forsman & Bodenfors haven’t understood what a great idea they really had. Why is that? Well – much of the power of this idea, say a potential 20-50% of visits to the site, comes from the fact that the church becomes a relevant hit on Google for so many different topics. Or would have become just that, if they would have been at all visible to Google. And they aren’t, simply because F&B don’t know Google. Forsman & Bodenfors have chosen Flash as their technology for this campaign, which in it’s standard form isn’t indexable by Google. And they haven’t done any of the standard workarounds to make it so. To Google, this looks like thousands of identical and uninteresting pages with different names. Google looks at it, scratches it’s head, and throws all of them in the garbage without indexing anything. Let alone indexing on a wide variety of topics.

You can see above what the site looks like. You can see the selected prayer in the middle with keywords in different colors and the share buttons. Pretty, but utterly useless from a Google perspective. Because if you take a look at how Google sees http://svenskakyrkan.se/be, this is what Google sees:

Google sees three pages instead of the potential thousands. One containing the main page containing the Flash file, the Flash file itself described with this beautiful text: “txt Header instructions txt1 txt2 txt3 txt4 Header instructions txt Header instructions txt txt Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, …”, and the fail page “the prayer doesn’t exist”.

In plain English this is a complete failure, and an awesome display of the problem most agencies are facing – they are smart, but they live in the past.

Besides the Google perspective, there is also the perspective of user behavior. Users want intuitive interaction. It is not intuitive to use an embed-code to embed text. For video, there is a purpose for the embed code, but for text? No. People naturally want to be able to copy and paste the text directly, preferably with links and colors and everything. That way we also get relevant links all over the web linking back to the Church of Sweden site on relevant topics. THAT would have been brilliant.

Conclusion – This is really an excellent idea, but the excellence is there by mistake, and is not taken advantage of at all simply because of lacking knowledge of basic SEO. It’s really sad. Especially since it would have been so easy to solve by using DHTML or even underlying indexable content.

One thing puzzled me though. How could something like this receive thousands of entries? Truly a mystery. At least until I switched on the television in my hotel room and saw television commercials for the internet campaign! Advertising for… advertising! What on earth?! To get traffic to the site you try to buy this traffic with television dollars?! A site like this one should get at least 20-50% of its traffic via search, which would have been free, self regenerating, and incredibly easy to achieve.

Suggestion – (Hi friends at F&B, I know you’re reading this and you know I love you, but I HAD to write this, since it’s such a great example to learn from. Please accept my free advice here as a return favor).

What if you would have used existing and established services such as Facebook status updates and Twitter posts (#whatever) to complement your web interface as a way to input prayers?  And an email adress (spam filtered of course) and an SMS-service (free of course)[edit: they have SMS-input]? What if your output of the prayers would have been much more flexible, mashable, widgetized and projected at the churches of Stockholm? Or whatever. Make it bigger. Give it presence.

But more than anything – learn SEO. Optimize that thing! Optimize it! Because really, what you came up with, apparently without realizing it, was a really good idea! You have great brains! But by implementing it the way you did, you created a bomb without a fuse.
For some reason, this image comes to mind.

Yeah, we're down with social media.

[Edit: Article about the site in Swedish: ]

Simon Sundén’s presentation on SEO was one of the best presentations of the entire SSWC-conference. Despite the fact that there was no projector for him to show his prepared presentation on, he still managed to present this fairly technical topic really well.

Now his presentation is translated to English and presented on Slideshare. Oh, how I would love for all marketers in our country to watch this, and perhaps even book a lecture with Simon. It would make my job so much easier.

Enjoy:

Microsoft delivered today. There were two excellent talks, the first one being by Nick Bailey of AKQA. It was a fairly traditional presentation of some very good work. Fiat’s Eco Drive, an in-car-USB-powered Nike+ for cars. Cool. Though I think that it would have been even cooler with an industry-wide call to action where Fiat could have become an environmental industry leader all of a sudden. Still cool though.

AKQA seem to have a fairly extreme “big head” perspective, rather than a “long tail”-one however. That sounds sketchy in my ears.

Then something happened. Naoki Iko came on stage. Naoki is the creative director of GT Tokyo, and a wonder of calm appearence, and apparently of creative genious. His entire talk is in English, even though he doesn’t speak the language (!). In the unprepared interview and debate afterwards, he has an interpreter. Impressive.

His entire presentation is fantastic. He shows very cool cases like The Uniqlo March, which is absolutely beautiful in concept and execution.

He also shows the Love Distance campaign for the condom brand Sagami Originals. Very complete, and very impressive work. I recommend doing a Google search on it for the complete story. I highly recommend it actually. If you don’t believe me, watch this:

All in all, Iko was the pinnacle of this weeks seminars.

In the debate afterwards he drops a line that should be framed and put on the wall of every agency and every marketing department:

“When we become quiet we start to think – what is the other person thinking”.

Amen.

My mind just went blank. I couldnt’ for the life of me remember wether Michael Dahlén’s new book Nextopia was in Swedish or in English. I just couldn’t.

But before I ended up in this situation, the following happened.

Last night I went down to the new magazine Distill’s launch party on Strandvägen. I flipped through the pages, realizing that this is truly a magazine of our time. It sums up the best of the fashion press and presents it in a slick format. Because, really, who has the time to plow through all the glossies anyway?

So, Distill is perfect. Or at least the idea is. Because as much as I love the concept, I do think that this issue falls a bit short on selection. It didn’t quite seem to be the best of the best. To me anyway. But that said, it’s a wonderful concept with great potential. It’s the perfect mag for me, and I hope that they will expand the concept into more fields. There should be Distills for more genres than fashion.

For anyone of you who have read Michael Dahlén’s Nextopia, you’re familiar with the concept of minisodes, where short versions of shows are distributed by Sony, because we simply don’t have time for the original intended durations. Distill is a concept along these lines, and that’s why I ended up in an animated discussion on the topic with Distill’s managing director Christopher Lockwood. I issued my warmest recommendations for him to read the book, only to realize that perhaps the book was in Swedish after all. Turns out it was. Sorry Christopher. You’ll just have to wait for the English translation. In the meantime, you’ll have to settle for the Nextopia blog.

Thanks for a great party!

The poll regarding the language of this blog ended up fairly close to a draw. And considering only 35 people actually voted, I conclude that the rest of you don’t mind English (or don’t understand it, haha!).

So, ladies and gentlemen, dear readers, the court rules in favor of keeping the blog in English.

By the way, the score is tied at 9 to 10 in the vote on if this blog should be in English or Swedish. Make your voice heard and vote in the right hand column.