Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Sweden’s football team faces Hungary tonight in an important World Cup qualifier. Hungary’s national coach Lothar Matthäus is not a shy man, and why should he be, considering his outstanding career? His advanced website includes a wide range of information for his fans, including a gallery of current and previous wives/girlfriends. Does the current Mrs. approve, one wonders. The layout of the gallery is also unfortunate, almost implying there’s room for one more…
I’m a huge fan of Audioscrobbler, the service that tracks what music you are listening to and then compiles it into different charts. It has a lot of other features and I haven’t tried them all out yet. Anyhow, Audioscrobbler recently made a major redesign of the website and can now be found at www.last.fm.
My charts can be found here and the 10 latest tracks can also be found at the bottom of the right column of this blog, courtesy of RSS Digest. Other well known Swedish bloggers with Audioscrobbler is for example Rasmus of Copyriot. His profile can be found here.
Want a helping hand to come up with a marketing stunt that doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg? How about this one from BBDO, promoting the last season of the Sopranos on HBO? [Via The Hidden Persuader.]
Bonus link: Playboy cake (worksafe).
Via Researcher I find an article on AdPulp about brand evangelists who intentionally or unintentionally promote different brands on Flickr. Phew, yet another area where the marketing department needs to monitor the brand. By checking Flickr tags for brand names, you can find out stuff like that Saab outnumbers Volvo, for example (867/530).
I was reading this post on Whatsnextblog about how disgruntled former employees use the internet for revenge. A few minutes later I stumbled onto this website, saabdisaster.com, which is a blog that was “created because Saab Sweden and it’s agent in South Africa are having big problems for the last six months, and we, Saab owners, are the victims of that!” There seems to be at least 17 Saab owners committed to the blog and they claim to have had 9000 visitors during the last week.
The initial reaction is of course that this is a public relations disaster for Saab in South Africa, but because of the viral nature of blogs, these things have a tendency to spread. One post was made on the subject in a discussion forum at UK Saab owners club and traditional media reported about the site too. One wonders if Saab has a strategy in place to monitor if and how this spreads through the blogosphere?
For the record I have a Saab 9-5 and I’m very satisfied with it, but then again, I’m not in South Africa.