One of the major benefits of my line of work is that I get to work with a lot of amazing people from all over the world. They are consultants, designers, copywriters, strategists, marketing managers, logistics experts, event people, translators, web developers and all kinds of other specialists. Here are three of the more impressive people I’ve had the benefits of working with so far:

Magnus Lindkvist – Trendspotter, Strategist & Professional Speaker (Sweden)

Trendspotter, brand strategist and speaker of the year in Sweden 2009 Magnus Lindkvist is a one of a kind personality. He’s big, loud, intense and always carries either a big smile or a concerned analytical look that mostly resembles a human supercomputer. Magnus can see the matrix.

I worked with Magnus during my time at Identity Works in Stockholm and had some of the best strategy discussions I’ve had to date. Magnus has also been a great mentor for my own career as a speaker.

If you ever get the opportunity to sit down for a coffee with Magnus (could be hard as he does a couple of hundred lectures per year, including TED 2009) you are more likely to learn something about yourself than about the world. That’s how he approaches things. And that is also what makes him interesting. As a trendspotter, he will try to make you see for yourself rather than telling you what the future will be.

If you have the chance, go listen to one of Magnus’ talks and check out his book “Everything We Know is Wrong – a Trendspotter’s Handbook”.

Stefan Sagmeister – Designer (Austria/USA)

If you’re even remotely interested in design, Stefan Sagmeister doesn’t need any further introduction. He’s one of the great graphic designers of our time, and also one of the easiest people to work with that I’ve met. During a very intense two day workshop in New York a few weeks back we got more work done than I have in a long time, and what I realized is that there is a very productive and rare combination in being a great listener and being very clear in voicing your opinions. And being fun to be around. This is what Stefan is, and it’s a winning combination.

Stefan’s work includes stuff for Lou Reed, Rolling Stones, Adobe, Talking Heads and much much more. He’s also a frequent TED speaker with three different appearances to his credit.

Markku Mäntymaa – Producer (Finland)

You may not have heard of Markku. Yet. And he’s the only one of these three people who hasn’t spoken at TED. Yet. I traveled to Manila in the Philippines with Markku for an amazing week of work where we tried to figure out how on earth to pull off one of the most challenging tasks in my career, and he pulled through meeting after meeting like a machine with seemingly endless energy. I guess it figures that it is this guy who pulled off to get permissions for and produce an extreme sports event for Red Bull on… wait for it… Red Square in Moscow! How many producers do you know who could do that? Not many. I promise you. This is a hard working guy. The fact that he’s also a professional drummer with 20 or so years experience just makes him even cooler.

Today the “Sweden’s most swedish job”-campaign that I was involved in with Syrup Sthlm and Bizkit earlier this year came to an end. Calle Engström, who has been traveling around Sweden blogging, filming and tweeting about his experience, arrived to Stockholm and the STF hostel Af Chapman after posting 82 YouTube-films, 371 blog posts and 762 tweets.

In the early stages we received a lot of comments, both positive and critical, about the project. Most comments have been about the “plagiarizing” of Cumming Nitro’s “Best Job in The World”-campaign. And like I’ve said earlier, you can all start by removing the quotes around “plagiarizing”. Because even though the campaign in itself is perhaps not so similar, honestly tagging on to the very successful “BJITW”-campaign has been crucial in powering the campaign. We actually needed to make it sound more similar than it actually was. And we did. Those of you who have seen my lectures on social media strategy has heard me talking about 7 different techniques, of which one is referred to by me as “Sailing”. And well – this is exactly what sailing is about. Find a good gust of wind and tag along with it.

Anyway – today we can evaluate and look at the sheer numbers. First off we’ve had major media coverage in basically all media of significance in Sweden. From the big ones to the local press. But more interestingly the traffic to the STF website has increased by 70%. And for a client where the website is so absolutely crucial, this is not bad.

Check out Calle in the clip below or on his STF-site.

I encourage everyone to cut out and frame today’s editorial in DN. It’s one of the strangest editorials I have read in a newspaper of a democratic country, and it will probably be worth money some day. Since it was an editorial, I actually considered cancelling my subscription. But then I read this article, which is more balanced and actually shows quite clearly a couple of interesting points.

Henrik Pontén’s quote is, for example, really entertaining. Especially when he claims that this verdict will lead to “reasonable content” on the web.

We can see in this article how this is a war between conservatives and innovators. Researchers are sceptical to these controlling behaviors, while corporations making money off of the old system want to retain the status quo. I guess one can’t blaim them. Humans are inherently afraid of change.

More interestingly, Viasat’s CEO Hans Skarplöth, whom I have discussed here earlier, is in this article as well, calling the false sense of security derived from this verdict and the IPRED-law “naive”. Brand-wise we can now start to see one of the big winners, and I think that Viasat’s moral courage will be in the marketing textbooks and lectures of the future. As will the ruined brand name Metallica.

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.

Yesterday Spotify announced that they are removing songs from their database, and imposing country restrictions on others. Again, we see the record labels showing off their power. But it’s really a dangerous game to play.

As I’ve said before, both in lectures and on this blog, the only way to properly fight piracy is to provide a BETTER service than the illegal one. And this is exactly what Spotify has been so successful in achieving. With Spotify you don’t have to host huge amounts of data yourself, and you have a shared library with your friends so that you only have to share links.

But there are potential weaknesses in Spotify. One important weakness is if the database of music is too limited compared to pirated alternatives. Then piracy will start gaining momentum again.

Thus, seeing the labels forcing Spotify into actions like the ones of yesterday is alarming. Are they aware of the long term risks of taking action in this direction, or are they blinded by short term greed?

Rock n’ roll is dead, order and neatness is here. The economic downturn puts us all in a different spot. And what does it mean for our business? Well, reason would suggest two things – first, people will need to change their priorities. New business will be a tougher job, and there will be less cash in each gig. This will leave less time for activities like blogging. Unless of course the blog is a source of income, which is not the case for most. I can see this in my own blog. There is less luxury time to give away thoughts for free. But I promise you I will try my best. Second, more efficient activities like Twitter will grow bigger. Tweets
are shorter and take less time both to write and to read. And when looking at it, Twitter is rising very quickly in Sweden right now, pushing competition like Jaiku and Bloggy out of it’s way. (Again, it’s not efficient to have more than one microblogging platform).

For our own agency, this crisis also means two things. Our product is better positioned than before (with it’s relatively high cost efficiency), but there is a smaller total bag of gold in client budgets. This means we have to be very good at informing about what’s going on, and what we can do to boost relative ROI. This is in conflict with what I said above about less time for blogging and lecturing. So I guess this means I’ll keep putting in long days working, but also lecturing and blogging. I promise more frequent updates.

For lectures there is one at Berghs coming up, one at a major Swedish corporation and one at a conference on the west coast. Perhaps I’ll see you there!

In the taxi on my way to the airport. The plane for Stockholm leaves in one hour. Last night I gave another lecture on social media, this time at the Hyper Island school of digital communication.

I love giving lectures for several reasons. One, obviously is that I learn from the participants. Another one, just as important is that I learn from myself. By forcing myself to structure and communicate my thoughts, they become clearer and more useful. I often leave a lecture with the feeling of having learnt something new from myself.

This particular audience was what Hyper Island refers to as a “Master Class” – an international audience of professionals with several years experience of communication – digital or otherwise. While I can appreciate on occasion to talk to a novice audience, meeting one with more experience, such as this one, is even more rewarding. The questions are more challenging and they catch on much quicker. All in all this was a very good audience, and I hope they (you?) made yourselves over to our blog here. Thank you for listening.

Good morning. This has been a very interesting weekend of lectures, conferences, and talks that I have attented all over the world. Saturday was concentrated around the San Fransisco Bay area while sunday was more evenly spread out between New York, London, Tokyo, Sao Paolo and a few other places. This morning, my body went for a run around Hammarby Sjöstad while my head went to Mountain View California for a talk by one of the leading Social Media gurus at the Google Headquarters.

I Love YouTube.