Media Culpa

An interesting story has erupted on the microblogging site Twitter. Apparently a large number of moms reacted strongly towards an online ad for the pain killer Motrin that was posted Saturday on the company’s website. The advert discusses the pain supposedly caused by carrying around babies in various types of slings.



The moms voiced their opinion on the Motrin ad campaign and tweeted their thoughts on Twitter using the tag "#motrinmoms" so that conversations easily could be tracked. Within 24 hours a video was also created, showing tweets and images of moms carrying their children - without pain.



The volume of comments on Twitter is so high that there currently are several tweets per minute about Motrin, which now is the highest ranked term on Twitter, #motrinmoms being in second place.

As is often the case nowadays, bloggers joined in and then traditional media too. This is an extremely interesting case and I am sure we will read more details in the coming days. But it might not be so bad in the end for Motrin. Tonight there is a message on the front page of Motrin.com that states that the company has listened to the negative feedback and pulled the ad. All in all, perhaps there can even be positive effects on Motrin as they get credit for listening to customers?



Tags: motrin, twitter, motrinmoms, twitter. Ping.

British-Portuguese artist Mia Rose became an instant hit on YouTube after uploading videos of herself singing. The twenty-year old singer quickly grew a large dedicated fan base that loved her songs on YouTube, which has now been viewed many million times. Her channel on YouTube has more than 150,000 subscribers. Her popularity got her a record deal with a major record label, which she now has left for an independent label in order to be more in control over her career.



Mia performed one of her songs today at SIME in Stockholm and attended a panel together with Stefan Glaenzer, founder of Last.fm and Ulf Ekberg of Ace of Base. Last.fm according to Glaenzer "is the last destination you need in your life".

Swedish pop combo Ace of Base might be the next succesful example of the future of the music business. Ulf Ekberg showed how the band is preparing for a comeback after more than a decade in retirement. This morning the band launched a widget on its website that lets users remix and change the band's songs. People can share the widget with their friends on Facebook, MySpace, Piczo, Bebo, Blogger, hi5 and other social network. There is a sequencer where users can create their own remixes of both old and new Ace of Base songs, buy new loops and materials to add to the remixes. The band will also use the best remixes and put them up on the site. By engaging fans to make their own versions, Ace of Base creates a number of new revenue streams.

The former four man band now has three members, but as Ulf Ekberg stated:
- The fourth member of Ace of Base is now the consumer.

Tags: sime, mia rose, ace of base, sime, ace of base. Ping.

British-Portuguese artist Mia Rose became an instant hit on YouTube after uploading videos of herself singing. The twenty-year old singer quickly grew a large dedicated fan base that loved her songs on YouTube, which has now been viewed many million times. Her channel on YouTube has more than 150,000 subscribers. Her popularity got her a record deal with a major record label, which she now has left for an independent label in order to be more in control over her career.



Mia performed one of her songs today at SIME in Stockholm and attended a panel together with Stefan Glaenzer, founder of Last.fm and Ulf Ekberg of Ace of Base. Last.fm according to Glaenzer "is the last destination you need in your life".

Swedish pop combo Ace of Base might be the next succesful example of the future of the music business. Ulf Ekberg showed how the band is preparing for a comeback after more than a decade in retirement. This morning the band launched a widget on its website that lets users remix and change the band's songs. People can share the widget with their friends on Facebook, MySpace, Piczo, Bebo, Blogger, hi5 and other social network. There is a sequencer where users can create their own remixes of both old and new Ace of Base songs, buy new loops and materials to add to the remixes. The band will also use the best remixes and put them up on the site. By engaging fans to make their own versions, Ace of Base creates a number of new revenue streams.

The former four man band now has three members, but as Ulf Ekberg stated:
- The fourth member of Ace of Base is now the consumer.

Tags: sime, mia rose, ace of base, sime, ace of base. Ping.

The theme for this year's SIME event is the DNA of Change. This morning Joi Ito, the CEO of Creative Commons, talked about the different levels of change that has brought us the social internet of today. Creative Commons is the non-profit that hands out licenses for a new type of copyright. Ito described how copyright used to work, and to a large extent still does. If you want to use someone else's copyrighted work you have to ask for permission and then you need a written agreement. But today when all the tools online are available for users to take content and remix it into new work, there is a strong need for a model that makes content available for reuse without running the risk of getting a letter from a lawyer. And therefore Creative Commons have created a number of licenses that lets content owners approve in advance what users can do with their work.

Ito then went on to describe how a CC license can be used to drive sales. For example when the band Nine Inch Nails made their latest album available as a free download. Then on the site customers could buy different versions of the album and extra material. The music in this case was merely seen as advertising. In one week the band sold for 1.6 million dollars without almost any distribution costs.

Ito also described tecnobrega: "one of Brazil's most thriving pop scenes: tecnobrega, a musical movement that's expanding exponentially thanks to musicians and producers who see copying as a marketing tool rather than intellectual property theft."



Photo Credit: Dennis Stefani

Another example was when singer Gwen Stefani hired a photographer and shared a photo of her newborn baby under a CC license. Normally famous artists would sell baby pictures exclusively to traditional media for very large sums, but Stefani chose to take control of the process and use the photo as a way to get fans to talk about her and build engagement. Barack Obama also published personal photos from election night with a CC license.

Tags: sime, joi ito, sime, creative commons. Ping.

David Sifry, founder of blog search engine Technorati, today officially launched his new venture Offbeat Guides at SIME in Stockholm.

When he went on a trip to Dailian, China, he didn't find a travel guide that covered this "tiny" city (about 6-7 million inhabitants) in more than a page or two. So he got the idea to create a company that sells travel guides for all the destinations that today are not covered in such publications.

Offbeat Guides produces up to date travel guides that also use personal photos published under a Creative Commons license. The guides are customizable so that it contains only the information you are interested in and you can choose what pages you want included. Then you can order the guide as a book (USD 24.95) or as a downloadable pdf (USD 9.95).

The site is currently in public beta.

Tags: sime, david sifry, offbeat guides, sime, resor. Ping.

David Sifry, founder of blog search engine Technorati, today officially launched his new venture Offbeat Guides at SIME in Stockholm.

When he went on a trip to Dailian, China, he didn't find a travel guide that covered this "tiny" city (about 6-7 million inhabitants) in more than a page or two. So he got the idea to create a company that sells travel guides for all the destinations that today are not covered in such publications.

Offbeat Guides produces up to date travel guides that also use personal photos published under a Creative Commons license. The guides are customizable so that it contains only the information you are interested in and you can choose what pages you want included. Then you can order the guide as a book (USD 24.95) or as a downloadable pdf (USD 9.95).

The site is currently in public beta.

Tags: sime, david sifry, offbeat guides, sime, resor. Ping.

The theme for this year's SIME event is the DNA of Change. This morning Joi Ito, the CEO of Creative Commons, talked about the different levels of change that has brought us the social internet of today. Creative Commons is the non-profit that hands out licenses for a new type of copyright. Ito described how copyright used to work, and to a large extent still does. If you want to use someone else's copyrighted work you have to ask for permission and then you need a written agreement. But today when all the tools online are available for users to take content and remix it into new work, there is a strong need for a model that makes content available for reuse without running the risk of getting a letter from a lawyer. And therefore Creative Commons have created a number of licenses that lets content owners approve in advance what users can do with their work.

Ito then went on to describe how a CC license can be used to drive sales. For example when the band Nine Inch Nails made their latest album available as a free download. Then on the site customers could buy different versions of the album and extra material. The music in this case was merely seen as advertising. In one week the band sold for 1.6 million dollars without almost any distribution costs.

Ito also described tecnobrega: "one of Brazil's most thriving pop scenes: tecnobrega, a musical movement that's expanding exponentially thanks to musicians and producers who see copying as a marketing tool rather than intellectual property theft."



Photo Credit: Dennis Stefani

Another example was when singer Gwen Stefani hired a photographer and shared a photo of her newborn baby under a CC license. Normally famous artists would sell baby pictures exclusively to traditional media for very large sums, but Stefani chose to take control of the process and use the photo as a way to get fans to talk about her and build engagement. Barack Obama also published personal photos from election night with a CC license.

Tags: sime, joi ito, sime, creative commons. Ping.

I will be attending SIME (Scandinavian Interactive Media Event) tomorrow and on Thursday in Stockholm, Sweden. Hope to get to listen to exciting speakers such as Joi Ito, Technorati founder David Sifry and Kris Hoet from Microsoft. I also look forward to hear about Mohammed El-Fatatry talk about Muxlim - the world's largest muslim community. If you will be there, do say hi. Hopefully I will get time to do some live blogging as well.

Tags: sime, muxlim, sime, stockholm. Ping.

I will be attending SIME (Scandinavian Interactive Media Event) tomorrow and on Thursday in Stockholm, Sweden. Hope to get to listen to exciting speakers such as Joi Ito, Technorati founder David Sifry and Kris Hoet from Microsoft. I also look forward to hear about Mohammed El-Fatatry talk about Muxlim - the world's largest muslim community. If you will be there, do say hi. Hopefully I will get time to do some live blogging as well.

Tags: sime, muxlim, sime, stockholm. Ping.

Microblogging site Twitter today unofficially passed the 1 billion mark when someone posted the 1,000,000,000th tweet. According to this blog, the first ten digit tweet belongs to a user with a private account, so the information is not public. The following tweet was published by a bot here.

Tags: twitter, billion, miljard, twitter. Ping.

Microblogging site Twitter today unofficially passed the 1 billion mark when someone posted the 1,000,000,000th tweet. According to this blog, the first ten digit tweet belongs to a user with a private account, so the information is not public. The following tweet was published by a bot here.

Tags: twitter, billion, miljard, twitter. Ping.

The Society for New Communications Research has published the results (see pdf) of a survey of the ROI of Online Press Releases. The survey is based on 423 responses from marketing professionals, PR professionals and small business owners.

Respondents said that both traditional media and new media/bloggers were the top two most important audiences they hoped to reach with their online press releases (given 4.16 and 3.88 on a 1-5 scale, respectively).

The survey also showed that very few respondents used social media release formats (26.3 percent) and even fewer reported adding video (12.8 percent) or audio (9 percent) enhancements. Of all multimedia elements, photos were the most popular, used in online press releases by 49.5 percent of respondents. However, as more and more social media release services are launched I am sure that more businesses and organizations will start adding multimedia content to their press releases when it adds value.

Via In Front Of Your Nose.

Tags: social media release, pr, pressmeddelanden, sociala medier. Ping.

The Society for New Communications Research has published the results (see pdf) of a survey of the ROI of Online Press Releases. The survey is based on 423 responses from marketing professionals, PR professionals and small business owners.

Respondents said that both traditional media and new media/bloggers were the top two most important audiences they hoped to reach with their online press releases (given 4.16 and 3.88 on a 1-5 scale, respectively).

The survey also showed that very few respondents used social media release formats (26.3 percent) and even fewer reported adding video (12.8 percent) or audio (9 percent) enhancements. Of all multimedia elements, photos were the most popular, used in online press releases by 49.5 percent of respondents. However, as more and more social media release services are launched I am sure that more businesses and organizations will start adding multimedia content to their press releases when it adds value.

Via In Front Of Your Nose.

Tags: social media release, pr, pressmeddelanden, sociala medier. Ping.

The popular photo sharing site Flickr reached 3 billion hosted photos this afternoon (at about 6 PM CET), at least if the numbering of the photos accurately reflect the actual amount of photos on the site. The growth has been steady during the last 12 months. It took six months between 2 billion and 2.5 billion, and then another six months to reach 3 billion photos.

Photo number 3,000,000,000 can be found here.



Previous posts about the growth of Flickr: 2.5 billion and 2 billion.

Data set used:

22 Oct 04: 1000000
20 Apr 05: 10000000
15 Feb 06: 100000000
22 Sep 06: 250000000
15 May 07: 500000000
19 Jul 07: 850000000
20 Aug 07: 1180000000
06 Oct 07: 1500000000
13 Nov 07: 2000000000
17 May 08: 2500000000
03 Nov 08: 3000000000

Update: Confirmed by Flickr.

Tags: flickr, flickr, foto, bilder. Ping.

This is an interesting initiative from Starbucks to get more people to vote. The company is giving away a free cup of coffee to anyone who voted in U.S. election today.



Via jangles and John Winsor.

Tags: election, starbucks, election08, obama, mccain, usa, usa-valet. Ping.

This is an interesting initiative from Starbucks to get more people to vote. The company is giving away a free cup of coffee to anyone who voted in U.S. election today.



Via jangles and John Winsor.

Tags: election, starbucks, election08, obama, mccain, usa, usa-valet. Ping.

Following up on my previous post, I have now read through parts of the World Internet Institute's new report about how Swedes use the internet.

Some of the more interesting findings are:

- 350,000 Swedes have a blog (estimate), or 6% of the online population.
- 1,900,000 Swedes read blogs (estimate), or 33% of the online population. That means that there are more than five times as many blog readers as there are bloggers. Possibly a good argument against the common view that "nobody reads blogs".
- Young women between 16 and 25 years are frequent blog readers, see graph below. As many as 52% of all girls 16-18 years that are online, read blogs.



- There is a big difference in which types of communities that attract women and men. Women are more frequent users of social communities while men are more frequent users of hobby and professional communities, see graph below. In my BlogSweden 3 survey the responses indicated that women are more motivated by social interaction than men, which was also a result from a study by Kaye Trammell: "Female bloggers, however, were somewhat more motivated by social interaction (67.1%) than were their male counterparts (51.3%)."



Tags: sweden, wii, bloggar, tjejer. Ping. Följ min blogg med bloggkoll

The popular photo sharing site Flickr reached 3 billion hosted photos this afternoon (at about 6 PM CET), at least if the numbering of the photos accurately reflect the actual amount of photos on the site. The growth has been steady during the last 12 months. It took six months between 2 billion and 2.5 billion, and then another six months to reach 3 billion photos.

Photo number 3,000,000,000 can be found here.



Previous posts about the growth of Flickr: 2.5 billion and 2 billion.

Data set used:

22 Oct 04: 1000000
20 Apr 05: 10000000
15 Feb 06: 100000000
22 Sep 06: 250000000
15 May 07: 500000000
19 Jul 07: 850000000
20 Aug 07: 1180000000
06 Oct 07: 1500000000
13 Nov 07: 2000000000
17 May 08: 2500000000
03 Nov 08: 3000000000

Update: Confirmed by Flickr.

Tags: flickr, flickr, foto, bilder. Ping.

SOM-institutet, the SOM Institute at Göteborg University, has released the results of a study about blogging - "Bloggers - who are they?". In my view, the researcher Annika Bergström has had a somewhat skeptic attitude towards the role of blogs in previous comments. In an interview in Dagens Nyheter in 2006 she said about our media consumption that "there are changes, but they are slow, there will be no revolution". She also commented to IDG.se that the differences in blog adoption between Sweden and the USA is due to strong Swedish tradition to read newspapers. - Swedes turn to traditional dailies online for information. And we don't get more time just because new media appear. A year ago she said that "not many people read blogs, and the ones that do are often the ones that blog themselves".

This skepticism is visible also in the "new" study. I write "new", because the data was collected during the fall of 2007. In the report, Bergström writes:

"The survey was conducted during the fall of 2007 and it is likely that the use of blogs have increased slightly since then, but if we look at what we know from the development of other areas of online behavior we should expect only small changes."

The study says that only 2 percent of Swedes wrote a blog each week and that 15 percent read a blog weekly. Good for us then that the World Internet Institute the other day released it's fresh report about how Swedes use the internet, so we have figures for 2008 to compare with.

WII says that 5 percent of the population blog and 26 percent read blogs, which according to me is more than just a "small change".

When respondents in the SOM survey were asked if they had read a blog during the last 12 months, 39 percent said yes. Still the final comment in the report reads:

"The previously mentioned debate about the importance of blogs, is to a high degree about what a small portion of the population engage in. With that said, there is nothing that says that single blogs can have a larger influence in society."

This old data seems to appeal to TU, the Swedish Newspaper Publishers' Association. On its site TU comments on the "latest figures" on blogging like this:

"Nowadays it seems like everyone is blogging. But it is not entirely true. Two percent of Swedes blog each week. And 15 percent reads what they write. The so called blogosphere is, in other words, smaller than the impression we get from the media attention."

Stats from WII suggests that 1.9 million Swedes read blogs so I think it is safe to say that blogs are starting to reach a significant portion of the population. In my view, this study is based on data that is too old to really have any real value, and it doesn't do newspapers any good to take these figures as a sign that blogs and other online channels are no big threat to them.

Tags: sweden, blogs, bloggar, tu. Ping.

SOM-institutet, the SOM Institute at Göteborg University, has released the results of a study about blogging - "Bloggers - who are they?". In my view, the researcher Annika Bergström has had a somewhat skeptic attitude towards the role of blogs in previous comments. In an interview in Dagens Nyheter in 2006 she said about our media consumption that "there are changes, but they are slow, there will be no revolution". She also commented to IDG.se that the differences in blog adoption between Sweden and the USA is due to strong Swedish tradition to read newspapers. - Swedes turn to traditional dailies online for information. And we don't get more time just because new media appear. A year ago she said that "not many people read blogs, and the ones that do are often the ones that blog themselves".

This skepticism is visible also in the "new" study. I write "new", because the data was collected during the fall of 2007. In the report, Bergström writes:

"The survey was conducted during the fall of 2007 and it is likely that the use of blogs have increased slightly since then, but if we look at what we know from the development of other areas of online behavior we should expect only small changes."

The study says that only 2 percent of Swedes wrote a blog each week and that 15 percent read a blog weekly. Good for us then that the World Internet Institute the other day released it's fresh report about how Swedes use the internet, so we have figures for 2008 to compare with.

WII says that 5 percent of the population blog and 26 percent read blogs, which according to me is more than just a "small change".

When respondents in the SOM survey were asked if they had read a blog during the last 12 months, 39 percent said yes. Still the final comment in the report reads:

"The previously mentioned debate about the importance of blogs, is to a high degree about what a small portion of the population engage in. With that said, there is nothing that says that single blogs can have a larger influence in society."

This old data seems to appeal to TU, the Swedish Newspaper Publishers' Association. On its site TU comments on the "latest figures" on blogging like this:

"Nowadays it seems like everyone is blogging. But it is not entirely true. Two percent of Swedes blog each week. And 15 percent reads what they write. The so called blogosphere is, in other words, smaller than the impression we get from the media attention."

Stats from WII suggests that 1.9 million Swedes read blogs so I think it is safe to say that blogs are starting to reach a significant portion of the population. In my view, this study is based on data that is too old to really have any real value, and it doesn't do newspapers any good to take these figures as a sign that blogs and other online channels are no big threat to them.

Tags: sweden, blogs, bloggar, tu. Ping.