Eyes open. My hands reach for my iPhone. Damn! The Night Stand app tells me it’s only 5:15 AM and I’m already awake.

Ever since I was a little kid I’ve been waking up early. As the brain slowly comes to life I’m performing my morning routine on my iPhone. First a quick check on my mails to see if something happened. I don’t like walking of to the shower wondering if there’s something I should have attended to. Echofon quickly brings me up to date on Twitter and potential mentions or messages. Sweet, @MIACOTH and @pellewiman has pushed some traffic my way. It brings a smile to my face. I head into the Facebook app to see what’s up the. As usual most friends are asleep at this time. Even Joakim who usually is my partner in crime when it comes to waking up early. Jerry on the other hand just got to bed while listening to Spotify. I pay a visit to my Mint statistics account to get an idea whats been go. A couple of hundred visitors have passed by my blog during the night. About 60 of them unique, that’s an honor. As the day passes another eight hundred people will come by if things are normal.

Hmm, my tapping on the iPad keyboard wakes my two and a half year old daughter up. Dressed in that sweet Pippi Longstockings night gown she goes “Dad, I wanna paint on the pad” She says. Not now darling, go back to sleep! It’s 5:45AM. Doesn’t work. I hand her the iPhone and she quickly navigates to the Sketch Book Pro app by Autodesk and starts painting what looks like a house.

I get up.

Off to the bathroom. A quick shower. The Aquafitness shower gel from Biotherm does the job and turns me into a shiny star. After having dried myself with a fluffy Lexington towel I cover my face in Gilette Fusion Hydra Foam and grab hold of my electrical razor from the same brand. A quick shave and some Clarins Men Gel Hydratant Moisture Gel turns my skin soft and young, or at least the ads said so.

Mr Frank Dandy makes sure I’ve got the right underwear on. Today they’re sort of military green. I quickly jump into a pair of LEE jeans I bought a while back at Åhlens in Stockholm Town. Socks from Happy Socks and a t-shirt with some sort of mad bunny bought at the TSHIRT store and I’m of to eat breakfast.

I’m not much of a breakfast lover except for when I stay at hotels. Radisson, now there’s a breakfast for ya! But, back to my non-hotelly looking breakfast. A slice of Pågen LingonGrova with some Bregott butter and a slice of Falbyggdens 1878 cheese on top. Brämhults freshly squessed juice ad at least a little bit of that Radisson breakfast feel to it. I finish off with a freshly brewed cup of Nespresso.

07:05 it’s time to clean up the mess left behind by my daughters and drink a glass of water poured from our Alessi tap and put things back into my LG fridge before heading go the daycare center. I pay a quick visit to the toilette to brush my teeths. Still tired from waking up early I watch my self steering the Braun 3D Excel covered with some Colgate toothpaste over my teeth. Before leaving the bathroom I’m adding a little bit of shape to my hair using the REF333 that my hairdresser recommended the other week. Almost done.

07:42 I pull on my WE Jacket and a pair of Converse sneakers bought at Sneakers’nStuff. On my shoulder – my Timbuk 2 cycle bag containing my Macbook Pro, a specially ordered notebook from the Behance Network called the Action Book, the iPad and a small remote control from Logitech that I use for presentations.

I’m out the door. Kids packed in to my Audi A4 and a new branded day begins. Or, continue that is.

This is the world you wanna squeeze your brand into.

Yesterday I was sent an email from The Economist through their social communication agency We Are Social. The mail presented their latest campaign – Thinking Spaces. A campaign presenting a number of opinion leaders and their ‘Thinking Spaces’. One part of the campaign contains a social component where they’re asking bloggers to contribute with our own stories alongside those of the leading personalities already featured like movie director Claudia Llosa, musician Jamie Lidell and Spotify founder Daniel Ek among others.

The campaign piss me off cause they’re asking me to contribute with quite a lot of content and traffic generation without really giving anything back. On top of that it’s clear that Spotify is featured for more than one reason as there’s obviously a hidden marketing component where I’m asked for my favorite Spotify playlist. (I would know since I’m running a Spotify playlist site on the side)

Dear Economist, let me tell you a little bit about me and MY thinking space.

This is MY thinking space.
If you would have respected my thinking space you would have started this campaign entirely different. I don’t get why you have created a flash site when you could have integrated the entire campaign on a blog platform. You could then have written a series of posts explaining your campaign to people and in that post also publicly linked to the blogs you asked to participate. This way you would have given us credit before you actually ask us to give you credit. Now the actual campaign leaves out social contributors.

The questions then?
I don’t want to answer a set of question about my personality that fit’s your campaign mold. On top of that I don’t get what Spotify has to do with it? (of course I do since one of your ‘leaders’ is the Spotify founder Daniel Ek). Why didn’t you ask participant to crowdsource your questions for you? Or give us one single question. One single question would have challenged my creativity. Now you’re more or less asking for my resume and an entire novel.

When you do social campaigns – give something back before you ask for support!
If a campaign like this would come from a brand like Kiva, Unicef, The Red Cross, Amnesty or another aid organization I’d love to participate without getting anything back. But a commercial brand like yours, The Economist, has to do better. On the campaign blog I read: “The Economist might feature your own Thinking Space on the site, along with those of the original featured personalities.” That’s not enough for me! If you succeed with this link-bating campaign I’ll end up in a long list of blogs that I don’t know if I want to be associated with.

Why didn’t you think social for real?
I don’t see why you didn’t choose 50 bloggers from around europe and built the entire campaign around us instead? I bet the budget you paid for this campaign and that flash site would have covered it. You also have access to something we don’t – a paper. If you would asked us bloggers for a unique story and in return done a piece on our blogs in your paper rather than on a campaign site you would have gotten fantastic content, trust me! And if you don’t then why bother asking for my participation in your campaign.

All in all. It’s good that you’re trying to go social with your campaigns – but don’t act like the dinosaur brand you are – think smaller, think friendly, think like you’re one of us and think social.

Finally.

I get that I’ve contributed to the SEO & link-bating part of your campaign. That is of course if people don’t decide to link to this post with the title The Economist Thinking Space campaign then I’ll be the winner.

Now I need to get back to spending my summer in the best possible way.

Best regards from the Swedish archipelago.
Johan Ronnestam

ps. Some blogs obviously got hooked. So far these blogs have joined the campaign:

Bibliobibuli, Chewytha scratchynutz: Tribeca, Code is poetry, The Curious Brain, Creative Bits, Creativity Online, Eskimon, Geoffrey Dorne, Lasse’s Findings, Marty’s Musings, Moleskinerie, Neoplayground, Nicola Davies, Notcot.org, Not For Paper, QBN, RA Forum, RiotInc, Rubbishcorp, Shawn Blanc, Theendofdecember, This May Be It, Unseen Said, Viva La Network, We Are Pop Slags, Wink at creativity

Today Swedish start-up Spotify has launched their music service that has been in Beta for quite a long time. In the morning they were spreading the news that they had signed groundbreaking licensing deals with companies including Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music Group, Merlin, The Orchard and Bonnier Amigo. 

Spotify is by far the best independent music service out there. The fact that you find most music you are looking for and that you can create your own playlists, share em’ etc makes it a killer application.

If you wanna get hold of the free version that features advertising you still have to stand in line for an invite. But the if you sign up for a Premium edition you get unlimited music access without advertising. On top of that, signing up for premium today allows you not only to jump the queue to get Spotify, but you will also get 2 invites to share with your friends.

I noticed the advertising in Spotify this morning when Ulf from McDonalds interupted me listening to Robyn. Not a pleasant surprise I must say. I haven’t really decided if I think Spotify will get the spread it deserves if they keep on interrupting music with adversing. 999:- a year is quite a lot of money for teenagers and they’re the source of spreading this thing.

But on the other hand, I’ve already taken the descision to sign up for a Premium myself. I would have liked to be able to pay with PayPal though.

Spotify Rocks!