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Lowe Brindfors Copy the Forsman & Bodenfors SEO Mistakes

by Walter Naeslund on September 15, 2009

Last week I wrote about how Forsman & Bodenfors don’t understand how the internet works. In absolute terms, the description was fair, but in relative terms, they are not worse than most of the advertising business. Yesterday we got another painfull piece of evidence to that effect.

I’m talking about the brand new website of Lowe Brindfors. But to discuss the site we need to separate two things: Design and communications efficiency.

Design

It’s a matter of taste of course, but I think this page is very well designed from a print designers point of view. It’s excellent print design, but awful interactive design. Because it is not interactive. It’s like designing a very pretty car with only passenger seats. And just like such a beautiful but useless car, this site belongs in a museum. Which leads me into point 2:

Communications Efficiency

This thing is a very pretty printed catalogue in digital format. It’s what websites were in the late 90’s. The entire thing is a big Flash-page, with text that you cannot copy, films you cannot share, posters that you can download as PDFs (!) but not share with anyone, and invisible coworkers that you can only reach via email or telephone. No wonder they have this disclaimer on the site:

Apparently they think that the elusive internet out there is about technology and gadgets, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Because really, these new technologies are VEHICLES of ideas. Nothing else. But the ideas have to be made for a world of transparency, not to fill expensive media plans. And for you to come up with such ideas, you have to know how this transparent world functions.

Search and SEO is ONE important aspect to understand in order to get people “to spend time with the brand” (to use Lowe Brindfors’ own terminology), and this is what the brand new Lowe Brindfors site looks like to Google:

According to Google, what’s most interesting about the new Lowe Brindfors site seems to be their webmail (!), followed by pages from their old site, and a PDF press-release from August 2008.

Disclaiming your way out of obvious lack of knowledge about the psychology and behavior on the internet with something general like a “Hey, boy slow it down”-disclaimer becomes embarrassing when confronted with clients who know the internet – something that becomes more and more common every day thanks to knowledgeable rebels and speakers on the topic like Johan Ronnestam, Simon Sundén, and Björn Alberts, just to name a few. [Edit: + Jesper Åström]

Things don’t improve when I read what Peter Willebrand our Swedish ad-business press Resumé has to say about the new site:

“Resume.se thankfully notes that the trend is the same as in other digital communication: simpler, faster, and more head on”.

This statement is very general, and also wrong. The site isn’t fast. It’s a heavy Flash film with a loader from hell. The trend of the internet is not “simpler, faster, and more head on”. The trend, or rather the permanent shift, is to social participation in dynamically coordinated institution-less groups, which means that a site needs to support that behavior. You need to love people, not just say you love them. The new thing about the internet is not that people can now talk back to you, it is that everybody can talk to everybody and coordinate discussions and topics without necessarily involving you. If anything, this is more complex, not simpler. Grasping the entire strategy for this more complex system requires a more diverse skill set ranging from behavioral psychology to technology.

The bottom line is that you can have the prettiest house in the world, but to make friends, you have to meet them. Or else you’ll end up being very lonely.

Is Spotify the Darth Vader of Music?

by Walter Naeslund on September 8, 2009

As Spotify launched their iPhone app, the crowd cheered. The talented SEO-expert (and comedian) Simon Sundén publishes the follwing graph of Spotify Premium sales that went viral amongst us nerds. Half us us thought is was true, and who knows, it may be.

But even if this graphic joke isn’t true, it illustrates something quiet scary. Something scary that starts with an “M”.

Let me tell you a story to explain:

Chapter 1 – The Music Industry

Think for a minute about how the music industry works. This is an industry that has built it’s entire business model around their monopoly on information distribution. Largely, the monopoly has been built on the control over distribution of plastic circles. In recent years, as silver became the new black in the plastic circles industry, the information started to find other ways of distributing itself over the internet, and the monopoly of distribution started to break down.

Desperately, the record industry tried everything to stop these new an superior modes of information distribution by trying to sabotage them with destructive and inefficient “inventions” like DRM. When that didn’t work (because Darwinistic innovation always gravitates towards the efficient), they cried foul, and tried to persuade their friends “in Washington” to legislate and punish anyone who had the audacity to use these new and efficient modes of distribution instead of using theirs.

Why so desperate, you may ask? Well – this was all they knew. It was not them, but the musicians who created the music. What they, the record industry, had to offer was marketing and distribution. And when their monopolized mode of distribution was suddenly outdated, and marketing was suddenly taken over by the music itself, it’s own viral distribution, communities like MySpace, and crowdsourced services like LastFM, the music industry was suddenly cut out of the loop, unable to provide value. And like the dinosaurs before them, their fate looked sealed.

Chapter 2 – The Innovators

But the file sharing systems, though hugely more efficient than the plastic circles, was not perfect. Billions of redundant copies of the information had to be kept on harddrives where you wanted to access the music, sharing the music meant sending over entire files, and meta-information was incongruent. Instead, thought a group of innovative individuals, one would like to take the route of the semantic web and have ONLY ONE instance of every file, with congruent meta data, stored in ONE place so that we could share it by only sending links pointing to the specific files. Then each of us could have access to all information and create a hugely efficient market for sifting out the very best. A more efficient model to be sure, and as we know, Darwinistic innovation always gravitates towards the efficient. The group of geniuses created and productified this new and superior mode of distribution. And they named it – Spotify.

Chapter 3 – The Cartel

And here, the music industry saw it’s chance. In one of the weekly meetings of The Cartel, the organisation they had set up together “to act for the common welfare of artists everywhere”, one executive stood up and said – “we can’t stop every single individual on the internet, but we can stop one company! We can threaten to destroy their new value, and claim part of it as ransom! We can regain our distribution monopoly by using their own value against them! But we have to act quickly! If more inventive companies emerge and compete, like Chilirec for instance, we will loose this last chance for survival of our kind. Sure, Chilirec will try to sue us, in fact, they already did, but that’s no match for our lawyers. We have our own people in the courts”.

One young assistant’s assistant, who had observed them in silence from the end of the table, mumbled quietly “but what value will we contribute? How will we make things more efficient? Will this not stifle competition and put an end to innovation?”? BE QUIET! Roared an executive at the end of the table. THEY NEED US! THEY WILL SUBMIT OR BE DESTROYED!

Said and done. The Cartel cheered and applauded. “If we all agree to let Spotify use our music, and let Chilirec use none, we can cut any deal we want. They have no chance to do this without us. We can use their new invention to return to the times of the distribution monopoly! We can be rich! Maybe we can even keep all new releases within Spotify and NEVER NEVER NEVER release the files to anyone else! Trying to hack Spotify and batch down these files will be easy enough to stop! We couldn’t control the data on the plastic circles, but we CAN control the data on the Spotify servers! We can even demand to own part of Spotify“! The room went silent as his words resonated through the spines of The Cartel directors like a chilling wind. Own the only source of music… on the planet.

Epilogue

When Apple realized what hit them it was too late. A year earlier, soon after The Cartel’s spirited meeting, Apple had given away their last line of defense and allowed the Spotify client on their iPhone. As the power of the iTunes store faded away, Apple tried in a last attempt to launch their version of Spotify, called iTunes Unlimited. The service was impeccably polished, integrated into their brand new Wild Cat operating system, and could play songs while texting on the iPhone, something that the Spotify client couldn’t. But what was the use of all this if they had no music. Or at least, just enough music not to be able to compete with Spotify. The number of Spotify exclusive songs and artists soared and left the rest of the industry in rubble. A lot of people said that “we should have seen this coming when Spotify restricted the iPhone app to paying premium users”. But now it was to late. The war was over. They won.

At least until the rebels on the far moon of MySpace started their indie music rebellion. But that is a whole other story.

Forsman & Bodenfors and Svenska Kyrkan Don’t Know Google

by Walter Naeslund on September 1, 2009

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: ]

What the World Will Look Like in 25 Years

by Walter Naeslund on September 1, 2009

When I went to ad-school I felt that the school was in many respects molding people into replicas of what ad-people were supposed to be. Now I feel that this is perhaps about to change. The other day I got interview questions from Hyper Island regarding digital trends, and today I got another question from Berghs School of Communication regarding “what the world will look like in 25 years“. And despite the fact that a question like that is hopeless in terms of giving the correct answer, I can try to provide some humble thoughts on the subject.

First, the world will be what we make it. That may sound like an empty phrase, but it’s really quite the opposite. It is a way of living, of working, of acting, and of thinking. If you live by this belief, make decisions and take action, this will not be an empty phrase, but the best estimate of the future that we can produce.

But aside from this answer, I will try to give you an answer to your question that is a little more pragmatic. Looking at what communications will look like in 25 years we can try on two scenarios.

In scenario 1 we make the internet asymmetrical. We let legislation rule what can and cannot be sent across the internet. Material which is not permitted (like “pirated” information for example) will move underground and will be sent using stealth technology. Much of the information flow of the internet will be encrypted jibberish, undecipherable for any sense-making technology wanting to make use of it and invisible to human senses that could otherwise have been used for collaborative sense-making and coordinated collective intelligence.

The goals of those wanting to control certain information based on their nostalgia of the times when they had a lucrative monopoly on distribution will not be reached because of ever improving speed and convenience of stealth technology. Instead, the huge resources that will be put into creating these technologies (love of music for instance is a powerful incentive) will be of great benefit to those who have truly evil intentions but smaller resources, notably terrorists and criminals. Since the only way of stopping “piracy” will be to do so at the infrastructure level (service providers can be real and effective gatekeepers!) this is where we’ll eventually end up, banning encrypted traffic altogether. And presto! The internet as we know it is destroyed.

Also in this asymmetrical scenario, we will start charging for the use of bandwidth. Me, being a strong believer in free markets and competition, opposing this kind of asymmetrical access to the internet based on resources may sound incongruent, but it really isn’t. Much in the same way roads and equality to the law are the basis for efficient competition (imagine the transaction costs of paying different prices for different levels of use of different roads), I think that access to the internet should be considered public infrastructure that will benefit competition, production, innovation, and market efficiency. But in the asymmetrical scenario, this will not be true anymore, and instead old business models and old distribution monopolies can be recreated by content companies using their funds to squat certain infrastructure lines and only provide access to their content through these. This may perhaps sound fair, but what will happen is that the abundance paradigm of the internet, the free flow of information, the “to each according to his ability” (the reverse of the famously Marxist slogan), and the rise of man through collective intelligence will stop.

I’m an optimist. I don’t think that this will happen.

In scenario 2 we retain the symmetry of the internet. We treat it like infrastructure in place to make markets and information flow efficient. Like a great system of streets and water pipes. In this scenario innovation will flourish because we can all do what we have always done, build on each others innovations, but we can do it with unprecedented efficiency. We can try and fail to a very low cost, we can learn from the mistakes of others, which boosts human efficiency enormously. This increase in efficiency, just like earlier technology leaps such as industrial farming, will create vast amounts of cognitive surplus that we can use for further innovation and production. Note that even resources that seem to be wasted on chatting with friends and Twittering create value in the form of information coordination and add to the collective intelligence. We can learn how people talk, we can cluster information, we can find new synergies and draw new conclusions.

Gossip will become hugely more efficient in this transparent world of efficient communication. This will lead to vengeance and gratitude being distributed with much more precision in answer to bad or good behavior and will make us all behave better and cheat less.

Digitally replicable products will not be products, they will be marketing for products where there is still tension between supply and demand. Musicians will try to get their music redistributed as quickly and widely as possible in order to fill venues and cut deals with brands, authors will do the same with their audiobooks to get speaking opportunities and sell hardcovers, filmmakers will use their films as vehicles for brand building and profit off of their brand, while also providing vehicles for other brands. Ludicrous legislation regarding this will be laughed at in 25 years. So will the crude methods of product placement of our age. The cinema experience cannot be pirated and we will see huge product development in terms of widening this experience. Their temporary monopoly on the film itself has made them lazy in this respect.

There will not be a difference between our digital identity and our physical one. All interaction with us will be permission based, and we will grant permission to those that we like and receive value from. Interuption marketing will be long since dead. The notion of publicly reachable phone numbers and email adresses will be laughed at as cute relics of the past. Our identity will be our identity and we will call people, not numbers, by whatever means is most efficient at the time, voice, video, text, images. By default our precense in the digital and analogue world will be publicly available. The benefits of this will outweigh the drawbacks. At times we will switch this off, just like we close the door when we want to sleep.

The semantic web will be obvious, and we’ll look back at how the internet was and smile at how we had so many copies of everything and how inefficient everything was. Of course each object will only be available in one absolute, so that any update will only have to be done once. Of course each of these will contain data representations fit for each semantic understanding of that particular data. We will be able to search, deploy scripts to ask questions and make calculations, and switch between real time representations and the historic dimension. This will all be very intuitive.

Since you are asking me to describe what the world will look like in 25 years, it is a bit ambitious to think that one blog post will answer it all, but these are some ideas of how things will be. If that’s what we decide to make them into. Because still, I think that my first answer is the best one – the world will be what we make it.

5 Questions and 9 Answers About The Future of The Internet – My Hyper Island Interview

by Walter Naeslund on August 27, 2009

A couple of days ago I was contacted by students at Hyper Island for an interview about the future of digital communication. Here are their questions and my answers:

1. What do you think will happen in the future regarding digital media? For example real time applications, Flash, Adobe Scene 7, Motion Graphics, Mashups?

Innovation Will Gravitate Towards the Efficient
It is always difficult to say anything about the future. Even the inventors themselves can rarely tell how their inventions will be used. Remember for example that Twitter was created as a way to let people know via SMS where the party was. Their invention then took on a life of its own in the hands of the users. On the other hand, this kind of “Darwinistic” innovation is a key feature of the digital technologies. Especially when it comes to innovation in the realm of open source and open APIs.

What we can say is that innovations will gravitate towards increased efficiency in different fields. And this realization is useful. Whenever you come up with an innovation or a campaign, ask yourself: will this make things more efficient? If the answer is yes, the innovation will stand a chance of succeeding, if not, it may at best become a short lived hype. In particular, innovations making collaboration and coordination more efficient are interesting when it comes to the internet since they promote themselves.

Good Bye Flash, Micro Sites & Poor Indexing
Real time applications will be important because they’ll make things more efficient. “Awesomely cool” but utterly useless Flash-based micro sites have always been a bluff and will increasingly be called as such by clients with a deeper understanding of the internet. Such sites make nothing efficient. Perhaps some people will disagree with me here and start arguing that I’m way too rational and that people buy with their emotions, but my bet is that these critics don’t understand the social web. What is often inefficient about these Flash-porn sites is that they are SOCIALLY inefficient. There is no way for me to efficiently share and discuss the content with my friends.

Recently we have started seeing “share”-buttons thrown into the mix, but these usually don’t tap into the actual behavior of people, and are just there because “social-media-is-the-new-hip-thing-and-therefore-we-need-share-on-Facebook-button“. Again, ask the question – will this make things more efficient in some dimension? They are also often inefficient in that they’re not indexed properly by search engines. The question then is, what are they good for? For inspiration? As some sort of interactive film? Very recently (like, right now) I saw one such campaign where they were actually showing commercials for the campaign on television! Making advertising for advertising must be the ultimate proof of failure and inefficiency.

Flash in general will get fierce competition as we will want sites to be more application-like, fast, optimized and useful. HTML5 will be a primary technology and may well put Flash and Silverlight in the shade.

Mashups & Commoditization
Mashups will continue to be super important because the idea of mashups resonates with the basic idea of innovation: take the best of what’s around and make it better. Since the costs of interacting with other open API innovations are so low, the total value of all parties in a mash up interaction will increase. We all benefit from mashups. If somebody has made the best map, like Google Maps for instance, there is not much point in using energy making a copy of that, but rather put our energy into innovating a new service and use their map. They win, and we win. More than anything, users win.

A lot of what required coding before are now commodities that you can pick up and just connect to something else through an open API. Smart people can thus create quite cool innovations by just putting pieces together. An internet-innovator friend of mine said that he’s very reluctant to try anything that he can’t build a first prototype of within an hour. He’s one of the most interesting and successful innovators of the new web in Sweden.

Real Time & Concurrent Editing
Technically, real time and concurrent editing will be important. I don’t know exactly which implementations of this will be the killer apps yet, but true real time collaboration is efficient and will become very popular. Not least by means of Google Wave. But we may well see other applications than these. For example live use of scripts for different purposes. There are a gazillion imaginable uses for such live scripts, but to get an idea, imagine a script being uploaded and run on a users iPhone returning different data depending on conditions such as position, battery status, orientation, in call status, who else is around, etc…

Real time and social search is very interesting and is an area where Google is lagging hopelessly behind. Here, Facebook and Twitter rule.

Mobile
And of course, mobile will be important, but there will be less difference between mobile and non-mobile. What is non-mobile today anyway? The iPhone is not a mobile phone with computer capabilities, it’s a computer that you can make calls on. And it has very comprehensive sensory systems like camera, video, positioning, integrated internet connection, gyro, accelerometer, compass, etc… Laptops have most of these too, but are lacking a few things like positioning and true mobile internet. The next generation of MacBooks will have a SIM-card slot and positioning. Mark my words.

Short answer: Real time. Mash ups. HTML5. Mobile.

2. What is the next big thing? (The new Facebook/Twitter for example)
The next big thing is Google Wave and all the amazing applications that will be built on top of it. Twitter will probably tip over and become mainstream in Sweden, but I’m not sure of it. Facebook with their aquisition of Friendfeed and their new search functionality is becoming very powerful as well.

3. Which trends do you see in digital media?
See question 1.

4. What qualifications will the media industry require?
Great rebels. Great thinkers. Great designers. Great writers. Great system designers/programmers. Great digital networkers. Great storytellers. Amazingly great leaders who can make all these other people love to work together. People who are not afraid to fail. People who can make the current Swedish labor legislation go away. Howard Roark.

5. What is the biggest challenge for the future in the media industry?
There are a lot of people today with power, who’s power relies on a monopoly of information and information distribution. These people will fight hard to stop anything that will remove their power. It’s very natural. They will eventually loose, but they will destroy a lot of value as they fight in increasing desperation. The music industry is the obvious example of this. It will be a perfect rerun of what happened when free-to-air radio was introduced.

Another challenge is our labor laws. Many agencies today have to fire people, but the law forces them to fire the newcomers, and the newcomers, on average, know more about digital communication. Also, for the same reason, they won’t be able to recruit the people their clients demand. This will create a downward death spiral. In nature, those who are able to change in accordance with the changes in nature survive. We are no different.

For me and for Honesty, this is good news of course, since we will be able to recruit the right people from the start.

The Very Best of Social Web Camp. And a Bus Crash.

by Walter Naeslund on August 23, 2009

The mini bus died. All of a sudden we feel the stench of burnt clutch, and minutes later everything just stopped. But more on that later. First a brief report on the highlight of the year so far for me – The Sweden Social Web Camp!

Anyone who has ever read Ayn Rand’s epic novel Atlas Shrugged will understand what I’m talking about. In the novel, the most talented, creative and productive people gather in what they call Galt’s Gulch to get away from the world of politics, envy and empty words. This event was just like that. Everywhere you turned you could talk to intelligent and interesting people with a ton of knowledge in different areas. Rarely have I enjoyed a conference this much! Sleeping in a tent was the final and perfect touch to the weekend.

The entire Saturday was filled with sessions on all kinds of topics related to the social web – most of very high quality. One of my absolute favorites was SEO-expert Simon Sundén’s talk on SEO.

But the most valuable aspects of SSWC was perhaps after all the informal interactions taking place all over the island. I could name several here, but notably Dan Carlberg of Bloglovin who is one of the brightest people I’ve met. I picked up a bunch of great ideas and hopefully contributed with a few. Check out #sswc on Twitter to tap into the conversation.

And what about the van? Well – no trip is complete without failure, right? Ours came when our van broke down on the way back to Stockholm. With a smoking clutch the van died just outside of Norrköping. After hitching a ride with one of Simon’s friends, we got on the train in Nyköping. And that’s where I am right now, writing to you.

Thank’s to all involved for an amazingly successful weekend, and a special thanks to Thomas Wennström who put it all together for us!

Friends, vanity and Nova Barakel

by Walter Naeslund on August 13, 2009

There is a funny discussion going on about how people were fooled by the fictional Nova Barakel, who was really a marketing product for a new novel. Some people insist that you should only have “real friends” on FB, and not let people like this in, most seem to agree that this is really bad marketing because it is dishonest. But let’s not be so quick to judge.

There are different strategies for how to handle social media. And the different systems have somewhat different characteristics. While Twitter is an asymmetrical system where you don’t have to follow those who follow you, Facebook is symmetrical. So if you look at for example the Twitter account of Karl Lagerfeldt he has 79717 followers and is following 0 people. He uses his account as a broadcast channel. Some people use their Facebook accounts much in the same way but it’s a bit unusual since they become hard to use for the more intimate and personal stuff. I haven’t personally looked at exactly how many “friends” each of the accounts of the people who “got fooled” had, but if some of them were broadcast accounts, they were hardly fooled. And if they didn’t use them as broadcast accounts, perhaps they were just curious. Either way, why portrait them as vain flagpole sitters? I don’t think they are.

Regardless, we don’t all have to use these tools in the same way. Seth Godin has a quality-rather-than-quantity approach that he endorses in his talk below, that makes sense in many ways. But like I said, it all depends on what you are trying to achieve. Chris Brogan for example has taken the opposite approach quite successfully.

There ARE different ways to use social media because it’s just a platform. A tool. Sure, how you use it says things about you. If you are only following 100 people on Twitter, who those 100 are will say a great deal about you. If you only have 30 friends on Facebook, we can conclude that you are very restrictive about your private life or just very uninterested in Facebook. If you are following 50 000+ people on Twitter because you are autofollowing everyone, well, at least you have a good grip on who is following you, even if a lot of them are probably spam accounts.

You can befriend or follow people for different reasons. Here are a few ideas:

* Friend people you find interesting.
* Friend your customers.
* Friend your prospects.
* Friend your competitors (why not?)
* Search for friends based on interest (easy on Twitter, by using Twitter Search).
* Unfriend spammers.
* Unfriend folks who bother you.
* Unfriend people who talk too much if they’re swamping your stream.

(Suggestions from Chris Brogan).

Based on this list of ideas, there could be many reasons to befriend Nova Barakel, if only because you find here stories interesting. Like I said, I don’t think we should be quite so quick to judge. Personally I would love to make friends with George Orwell for example, even though I could probably guess that his account wouldn’t be entirely genuine because he’s been dead for 59 years, so that he could tell me what happened today in 1939. I can already do that actually by following his excellent blog .

And while I believe in Honesty, I don’t think that it is neccessarily dishonest to do something like this if what you contribute is fun or exciting or mysterious or valuable in some other dimension. If it is not, on the other hand, it’s just spam. And filtering out spam is actually just a click away.

Some links to the Nova Barakel discussion:
http://www.resume.se/asikter/claes/2009/08/13/jag-gick-inte-pa-nova-bara/index.xml

http://www.resume.se/asikter/viggos_dagbok2/2009/08/13/darfor-ar-nova-usel-markna/index.xml

http://www.resume.se/nyheter/2009/08/13/hon-blaste-kandisarna-pa-f/
http://www.resume.se/nyheter/2009/08/13/nagra-har-forsokt-dejta-mi/
http://www.resume.se/nyheter/2009/08/13/kandisarna-som-ar-kompis-m/

Let soak in for 2 or 3 minutes or until you see GOD!

by Walter Naeslund on March 26, 2009

People sometimes ask me what I mean when I talk about Honesty’s communication model. And in response, well, let me tell you a story:

Last night I briefly attended one of these cool VIP-ish happenings where you get a goodie bag upon leaving. Though not entirely aimed at me (mostly women’s beauty products in there), one of the products caught my eye. It was a “Chai Latte Soul & Body Wash” from Philip B.

Now, how different can these products really be? I mean, sure, it’s probably great and all, and it probably smells lovely of chai latte, but if we want scented cleaning products, there are probably much cheaper alternatives, right? Instead we want to buy in on the luxury dream. And that will trigger us to buy, which is good of course. But today I want to talk about what triggers us to communicate and talk to our friends, blog readers and Twitter followers about something. And this lovely product has such triggers.

First, the name. Besides the Chai Latte scent association the “Soul & Body Wash” product description is just lovely. That alone is blogger friendly and cute. But the real magic emerged when turning the bottle. The directions on the back read: “…lather it up and let soak in for 2 or 3 minutes or until you see GOD! Rinse well.”

That kind of detail is JUST what people love to talk about. It may seem insignificant, but these things matter. Unless you want to try buying your way in using brute force and distribution. Who’s going to talk about the new Wella shampoo just because they have an expensive full page spread in an expensive magazine with an expensive sensual model shot by an expensive photographer with an expensive camera. You may get people to buy if you have enough cash to spend, but you won’t get people to talk.

I want to get people to talk. Because then you will get leverage on your marketing cash. And you will build equity in search engines by getting a lot of links and lot of buzz. How much equity do you get out of a magazine spread? Ultimately, we will have a much larger pool of people buying AND talking. And then you have a positive spiral and can get ready for the next product development.

This is what I talk about when i talk about communicative product development. It may well be a bigger innovation like a foldable car, but it may just as well be a small detail, like tonality in the directions on the back of the bottle.

Like they say – the devil is in the details.

Party Invitation!

by Walter Naeslund on March 2, 2009

For those of you who are in Stockholm on Wednesday (March 4), we’re throwing a creatives party at Collage (Ingemar Bergmans gata 2, behind Riche) 21.00-01.00. One of the pieces for the Friday night art exhibition at Berns will be created live at the party by you and the artist, my co-host Daniel Jouseff. Drinks + colored crayons + rock music= fun! (We’ve stolen a couple of cases of beer here to give away as well. We hear creatives like beer).

You will also get to meet my new creative director.

RSVP Here.

Welcome! Bring your friends.

The Bar Brawl of The Swedish Twittersphere

by Walter Naeslund on February 6, 2009

It all started when the fashion brand Acne started following Fredrik Wass of Bisonblog fame on Twitter. Fredrik felt spammed and wrote a heated post on his blog. Jesper Åström responded at his Online PR-blog. In essence he made very good points i think, but his angle was all crooked. Instead of heading into a discussion about the asymmetry of Twitter (which could have made a good angle) he heads into critique of Fredriks attitude which he describes as “shit, I’m so popular”. This is where I blow my offside whistle.

Because really. I think that Fredrik is off the mark in his analysis, but Jesper is off the mark in his attitude. There is nothing wrong with Fredrik’s general attitude (as far as I can tell). I don’t think he sounds too cool for school. So drop the bar stools guys. Let’s discuss the topic in question instead.

In my lectures my first slide in the strategy section has one word written on it in super large type – “Listen”. And I think that this is precisely what Acne is doing when they are adding Fredrik. They are listening to, among others, Fredrik Wass. Perhaps to have him reciprocate in following them, but I think rather to learn from him. He is after all one of the authorities in social media in Sweden. I think that this is a very sound thing to do.

While blogging has the drawback of not knowing exactly who listens to you (setting aside future endevours of Facebook Connect and Friend Connect), Twitter has that feature inherently. When it comes to Facebook, the adding of friends is a symmetric affair. You can’t just follow without being followed. This is a very important difference, and also what lowers the barriers of saying hello in the Twitterspere.

Where I DO think that Fredrik has a point is where he talks about brand names being anonymous. We all know that there is a person on the other end, but we don’t know who. And this is not cool. We don’t want to talk to a sign on the wall. But to me these are at least two different uses of Twitter. Both valid. For example I follow Jung on twitter, but I also follow people at Jung. For two different reasons.

The point that everybody seems to be missing is that of clarity. I think that every Twitter account (especially the professional ones) need a policy.

1. Be transparent about your intentions. What is this account for?
2. Never exceed 140 character in your policy description.
3. Be honest.
4. Follow your own policy.

And I know that this post is way to long. Perhaps I should keep my opinions to 140 characters.

friends

Is Spotify the Darth Vader of Music?

Chapter 1 – The Music Industry

Chapter 2 – The Innovators

Chapter 3 – The Cartel

Epilogue

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Let soak in for 2 or 3 minutes or until you see GOD!

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