About one year ago I was one of the keynote speakers at Webbdagarna, one of Swedens biggest events on Internet, technology, communication, media, mobile and more.
My subject when I spoke last year was ”2012 The Year of the Swedes” and except for the 2500 people who listened live, another 33491 people has watched my keynote once again on YouTube. A fairly good number considered it’s a Swedish speech. If you haven’t seen it yet, go ahead. I still think my points are most valid. (For you english speaking bloggers I’m sad to say that this speech was done in Swedish.)
This wednesday it’s time again. This year I wont be speaking but I’ll definitely be there both on wednesday and thursday. So if wanna catch up, feel free contact me.
Usually when I don’t like something I try to give constructive feedback. But in this case there’s just to much of a history involved. About 9 years ago I tried to pitch ideas on Saab. Partly because I really wanted to work with a car brand and partly because they were Swedes. Already back then were the account managed by Lowe Brindfors. I thought Lowe did a shitty job then and obviously they do a shitty job now. Will they never learn? (That goes for both SAAB and Lowe)
Today, as was writing a blog post about integrated communication (soon to be published) I decided to do a quick video analysis of the current SAAB presence online. And let me tell you…it sucks big time. Sorry for the shitty English. But it serves the purpose.
I don’t get it. Aren’t car brands supposed to senior managers employeed that knows their shit? These guys sell products that costs a fortune and they can’t even product a simple site that will convert people into buyers. It scares me.
The first thought that comes to mind is that the marketing department don’t know what they’re doing to the brand, and that’s of course true, but then I think about it a little bit more. This is not a marketing department problem. This is a management problem.
Jan Åke Jonsson and the rest of you ‘silverbacks’ way up in the hierarchy! SAAB is not an industrial company – it’s a B2C product oriented and brand driven car company backed by great technology but emotions and brand comes first. And Jan, don’t come telling me this is a thing for the marketing department. Branding and marketing should be your, the management group and the board of directors first priority. It’s what your future is all about!
So. Jan Åke and the rest of you managers at SAAB.
You’ve sold SAAB to another company outside Sweden, but the a large majority of the cars are still being built in Sweden and lots of peoples incomes rely on you and your management team taking the right decisions. In the long run even I will be affected if you close down. And trust me, if you don’t stop acting like fools when it comes to branding issues (cause personally I think there are more problems than the site) you’ll close down anytime soon. It’s time to stop loving your history and focus on the future!
Last summer I got on a train leaving Stockholm for Gothenburg. Together with freelancing project manager, planner and colleague Caroline Karlström I had a meeting set up with diving brand Poseidon. This was the start of a project where I truly had the opportunity to work with all aspects of branding and creative communication.
A dream project.
Ingvar Elfström, the founder of Poseidon back in 1958.
The Background
Back in 1958 this brand was founded by a young Swedish diver, Ingvar Elfström. Since then the brand has become famous for unique, different and great products. However over the last couple of years they’ve lost speed when it comes to innovation and marketing initiatives.
But then something happened. The company was bought by a small group of investors three years back. Headed by visionaire Kurt Sjöblom they set out on a journey – to develop the first ever automated rebreather for recreational divers.
This was why we were there. About a year from launch Kurt and his team felt they needed to do something about the brand. And after a successful meeting that actually started with me diving [click to continue…]
Today Google launched their latest resource called the Google Internet Stats. It contains industry facts and insights from across five different areas – Macro Economic Trends, Technology, Consumer Trends, Media Consumption and Media Landscape. This is a great resource for us who are trying to make people understand what the future is all about.
I bet that we can expect more in the near future. Anyway it’s a great little tool for people like me who want more ammo in the fight for change. Here’s a little something that gives you an idea about what to expect:
5% of all time online is spent on Facebook.
By election day, fully 25% of people who pulled the lever for Obama were already connected to his campaign electronically
early three in five (57%) of youth consumers logged on to YouTube to watch a music video in the last 12 months, compared to 56% who watched a music TV channel
Social networks have a penetration of nearly 75% among European Internet users
According to Nielsen, 67% of the global online population visited a “member community” site in Dec 2008.
20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
För någon vecka sen stod jag på en brygga ute i skärgården och lade till med båten när Jenny Stiernstedt på Dagens Nyheter slog en signal och undrade om jag kunde uttala mig lite om människan, internet och framtiden.
Whatever you do online, make sure you provide a value that is relevant to people who might want to use your service. By doing so you’ll generate more traffic, more buzz and finally a higher SEO ranking.
Box UK, a web consultancy agency, are living by this simple rule. The blog on their website is filled with ideas on how to succeed with your online presence. The old school marketing generation would say their giving their competence away. I beg to differ. One of the problem when it comes to digital communication is the competence on the buying side. Most brands won’t buy what they don’t understand. So either you lower yourselves to their level or educate them and thereby also provide a value.
One of Box latest post is an excellent one. It’s called ‘Monetizing your Web App: Business Model Options’.
Box has listed what they believe are the most successful ways to generate money from web applications. They’ve then taken their own list of possibilities and analyzed Webware 100 Top Web Apps for 2008. The conclusion then becomes a great check box model for monetizing your web apps.
The chart above shows the results of their survey: 34% use Advertising, 12% a Variable Subscription model, and 8% each for Virtual Products (typically digital downloads), Related Products (typically a large software company offering a free product to attract you to their platform) and Pay-Per-Use.
So, the question is. Do you wanna challenge the leaders within advertising financed sector or maybe penetrate the not yet so exploited areas?
Results?
They’ve provided their visitors with a great relevant value that will drive traffic, generate comments and create positive SEO effects.
Kevin Kelly, one of the worlds most respected digital gurus then picked it up.
Then it’s spread all over the world and I among many other will talk about it.
A couple of days ago ComScore published a Top Social Media Sites 2008 list. The list that I found on Techcrunch is an interesting read since I for one thought that Facebook and MySpace would be on top. But instead we find Blogger as the largest social media site in the world. Blogger and WordPress together actually outnumber Facebook and MySpace which means blogging is the number one social media activity in the world right now.
Blogger however is only a site while WordPress also provides an open source platform to bloggers who want to host their own blog (like me). This probably means that WordPress is up there with Blogger fighting for the number one spot.
It’s notable to see that Facebook is the one with the most positive trend. Blogs are showing a healthy growth too while Windows Live has taken a dive. Next years graph will show us if Windows Live has changed their trend with the new features launched in the end of 2008. I do however miss sites like Twitter, Digg and YouTube in the results. They’re just as much social media sites as Flickr, Scribd and Facebook.
Personal publishing remains strong and we can expect more people than ever getting involved with social media in one way or another in 2009.
Your advertising has to change
Reaching out to consumers however will require a more complex and advanced execution of communication than ever as people distribute their online behavior on more sites than ever.
Creative advertising that entertains your target group becomes more important than ever if you wanna stay ahead of your competition.
Ideas that don’t include a social spread are only half way there.
Understanding of technology is key.
Brands that focus on distributing their communication rather than trying to pull traffic to their own campaign sites will be the winners.
Making sure your content is relevant and close to brand and product is more important than ever.
One idea - visible everywhere in every way. (i.e. don’t place video in one place, place it everywhere.)
Make sure measurement and statistics is in place to show where to feed more money and where to cut the investments.
Change campaign set up on a daily basis in the beginning of the campaign.
Don’t forget the technical back end of the social sites – provide applications, widgets and code that supports your overall idea.
If you end up producing valuable content to the masses that have no relation to your products you’ll end up playing clown without getting paid.
I have spent the last hour looking through some of the latest additions to thefwa.com. What strikes me is how stunning most production are right now. The quality of the latest things released by agencies worldwide is amazing. Its also extra fun to see that a lot of the campaign sites has been produced by Swedish agencies such as B-Reel, Projector, KokoKaka, Northern Kingdom, Great Works, Daddy, Perfect Fools etc. The agencies behind these productions are considered some of the best agencies in the world and they all live up to the reputation!
Apart from the killer quality one thought stays behind – does this really work?
All the campaign sites I’m looking at takes quite a while to load (I’m on a 24mb fiber straight into my home) and when it’s loaded almost every site kicks of with an instruction on how to interact with the site; “Use your mouse to, use your keyboard to, click here to start interacting with, skip loader, etc etc” and very seldom is it the actual product that is being promoted that we are supposed to interact with. On top of this many sites lag – and I’m running them on the latest Macbook Pro released about a week ago.
As I’m sitting listening to people on stage talking about viral communication a great post flips by in my RSS reader. The post talks about 18 rules that the best web developers follow. The list is a great compilation of what’s important. Still I’d like to ad two rules. Hey, before you read – feel [...]
Den här veckan är jag bland annat på Stockholms Universitet och pratar om digital kommunikation. Därför hinner jag inte riktigt med att skriva så mycket som jag vill här på bloggen. Men, passar ändå på att bjussa på gårdagens presentation om Internets historia och framtid. Ett urval av viktiga händelser som kommer påverka hur vi [...]
Yahoo Pipes. A great tool. Right now I’m finalising my design RSS feed project where I’m putting more than 80 design blogs into a pipe and then after some filtering I can keep track of all 80. Sweet. Then as I tried it out today, out came a poster from a blog called DesignNotes. I [...]
Think Social Media is something strange that should be kept in the closet and not used for big business? Well, then think again. The answers above are taken from ‘Social Media in the Inc. 500′ - first statistically significant, longitudinal studies on the usage of social media in corporations. The new study is made by The University of Massachusetts [...]
This blog is written by Johan Ronnestam. He's widely regarded as one of Sweden’s leading speakers and authorities in the field of modern creative and conceptual thinking and skill of innovating brands and their communication. The readers of Microsoft Indikat has named Johan Swedens most influential authority within digital communication
