Since I drew the first napkin sketch of the Honesty agency in February there has been a lot of toil, sweat and tears. Today I can finally say that stage 2 is completed with the recruitment of Jesper Åström as the final piece of the puzzle. Jesper joins as new digital director alongside Simon Sundén and also the last of the six planned partners in the company.

Jesper has an impressive track record and has been working with everything from hardcore gambling traffic generation and conversion at WGP to making designer campaigns take off at H&M, we’re Jesper was responsible for social media and SEO globally. In short, he is like a combination of a special forces soldier and your best friend – a great guy with a lethal skill set.

Now is not the time to kick back and rest, and we’re all basically working around the clock, but there will be some kind of celebration. Perhaps a more luxurious lunch on friday.

It’s just a really happy day for me!

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!

I‘ve done quite a bit of thinking about how the social web will make the world a better place. I’ve written about it, and also lectured about the social web, good, and evil.

So when a talk by Evgeny Morozov popped on TED on the topic of how the net aids dictatorships, I was naturally interested. Was somebody going to put up a good argument against my theories?

The answer is yes. And no. Evgeny argues beautifully for the ideas, but simultaneously shows how the dictatorships actually start using the web to reach out and communicate, much like I think companies should. They are proactive, the contribute, they engage, and they are present. They DON’T try to cencor stuff, because they have realized that participation is more effective. And I tell you – if dictatorships do this successfully, companies should too!

Then, of course, these dictatorships abuse their power to flood the system with government biased comments and spam, and commit evil acts, but I’m not as sure as Evgeny is about how effective this is. Compare it for example to this example from the very well designed guidelines at Intel for how to effectively use the social web:

Be transparent. Your honesty—or dishonesty—will be quickly noticed in the social media environment. If you are blogging about your work at Intel, use your real name, identify that you work for Intel, and be clear about your role. If you have a vested interest in something you are discussing, be the first to point it out.

This is not a guideline that the dictatorships exactly follow. On the other hand, perhaps other commenters don’t dare use their real name either for fear of physical abuse, so this way It may actually work for government agents to blend into the anonymous crowd. Again – we see an example of how anonymity leads to evil and abuse.

Incidently, the campaign led by The Cartel to hunt down file sharers also leads to anonymization of the web, making laws like HADOPI and IPRED all the more troublesome – and also promoters of more serious evil.

I love to theorize about social behavior and how it relates to our behavior on the internet. But sometimes I get the urge to be just a little more practical about things. How can we actually use all this theory? Before we dig into what I call The Hang Glider Theory, let’s gossip a little.

The Anatomy of Gossip

It seems reasonable to me that gossip evolved as a tool to manage coordination of larger societies. It was a way to trade the social currency called reputation. Reputation, in turn, was a way to govern collaboration between individuals where you neither had a close enough common interest in genetic propagation, nor first hand knowledge of the individual’s contribution or withdrawal from the common pool of value (stash of nuts, Mammoth meat, whatever), nor a strong enough reason to hurt or kill the individual in question. Gossip was a more granular way to control behavior so that it wouldn’t become abusive. Killing individuals for stealing a banana makes society somewhat unstable, but so does letting banana theft run wild, right? Gossip and reputation worked really well here as a way to make societies more stable, to enable rudimentary trade over time and distances, and support larger scale collaboration in general. Societies using this tool prevailed and individuals mastering social behavior thrived. If this wasn’t true, we wouldn’t be doing what we are doing today. Apparently, those who stayed behind in their caves and didn’t interact perished. Maybe somebody should tell this to marketing execs who don’t think they need to engage in social media.

Positive and Negative Gossip

If this is how gossip evolved, one can imagine why negative gossip is so much more common than positive gossip. It was more valuable to know who not to trust than knowing who to trust, simply because it was more expensive to be ripped off or killed than to miss out on the benefit some good social interaction. This could explain our approach anxiety and also why our reflexes for spotting danger is so much quicker than the mental process of spotting something good.

To this day, negative gossip dominates. Even though I can’t show you any conclusive evidence, I think we know it intuitively from our everyday lives. Just look at a rack of gossip porn… sorry gossip magazines.

Gossip and Brands

This is also true for brands. It’s so much easier to go viral on some negative spin than on some positive one. There are tons of examples, the “Disgusting Domino’s Pizza Clip” being only one.

But wait a minute – if this is built in to our minds from thousands of years of evolution, and the internet makes this kind of gossip ultra efficient, will this not happen to us all the time? Yes, my dear Watson, it will. And for that reason, strategies to handle it will have to be part of our management models, but also part of our strategic communications thinking.

How to build it into our management models is crucially important, and includes things like corporate guidelines, empowerment of employees, etc. It is outside the scope of today’s post, but I promise discuss it further some other day.

Instead, today, I’ll propose a model for building it into our strategic thinking. I call it The Hang Glider Theory:

The Hang Glider Theory

If the domination of negative gossip is human nature, then we have a downward gravity of gossip on our scale from attraction to repulsion. So what if we could do what hang gliders do and use this force of gravity to gain speed and create lift again? To nurture warm upwinds and gain even more lift, eventually ending up turning negative momentum to positive lift?

What EA-Games did to handle a bug i their Tiger Woods ’08 game is an old but clear example of this strategy. The bug was that you could walk out on water in the game, which created quite a bit of buzz in the gaming community. But instead of doing something boring, like fixing the bug, or just keeping quite, EA put on their hang glider and used the momentum. This it what they came up with:

Now, I’m not saying that creating a funny film will solve your problem, make sure you hear me now. For Domino’s for example, that would probably have been disastrous. But this film is a clear example of the theory at work.

But even for the Domino’s case much could have been done. Cool campaigns could have been created for recruiting 2 new employees (implying that there were in fact only 2 people involved), or you could have taken these two individuals in to help out with improving working conditions at Domino’s (they were obviously the two most dissatisfied employees in the country), or you could have turned the restaurant in question into an institute for food freshness and employee care, making the incident a turn around symbol. Or whatever. Just not this:

…which is boring, and guilty sounding. It’s also very similar to the “a few bad apples”-defense used in the Abu Ghraib trials. It sounds like you throw out and indict two employees without changing anything in the system, thus leading us to wonder if there aren’t a thousand others just like them out there, being just as dissatisfied and disloyal, only waiting to sneeze on my mozzarella sandwich.

So – this is The Hang Glider Theory. Try it out. Tell me what you think of it. Have fun!

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:

Contrasts are what make life interesting. Yesterday I woke up here:

…from the sound of sheep walking around outside my tent. Today I woke up and threw myself into a cab to Arlanda to fly off to Oslo and Strömstad for the Bring Dialogue Conference ’09.

When I got here I realized I’d be staying here:

…at the luxury spa resort in Strömstad. Slightly different from camping – haha! It’s actually even nicer than what the picture shows.

But conferences are all about the people. The people at Social Web Camp were the elite of social media – almost like Sweden’s own R&D-department of digital communication. Here we have a similiar number of people from the business elite (at least from what I can tell so far). Probably as smart, as passionate, and as creative, but in slightly different fields. Also, we have some amazing speakers like Kjell A. Nordström, Micael Dahlén, Magnus Lindqvist, and Jan Bylund. Only to name a few. (Note that all but one are striking the same knuckles-in-chin-pose).

And then I haven’t even begun talking about the shellfish buffet that is planned on Koster for tommorow night.

Those of you who attended my session at the Social Web Camp got to see a preview of the talk I’m doing here. Stay tuned for Slideshare presentation that will be posted shortly. I’ll be discussing the evolution of gossip, good, and evil, draw parallels to social media, and also present thoughts on strategy for approaching this new breakdown of brand privacy.

See you soon!

Just delivered a 78 minute social media talk in Finland. Apparently somewhere close to the Russian border. I’m not sure. Slept all the way here. Now totally beat and desperately need to get some rest before the sauna madness starts, as it apparently usually does.

I’ll write more about it later. Over and out.

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/

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.