Two Swedish Eyes on Media and Public Relations
Both Expressen and Helsingborgs Dagblad have added Facebook functionality to their websites, writes Medievärlden. Users can now easily add content from the two papers to their Facebook profiles.
Update: Sydsvenskan too, says Pelle.
Update 2: And Nerikes Allehanda. Thanks Nicclas.
Update 3 (Oct 29): And Eskilstuna-Kuriren and Norrköpings Tidningar.
Today’s Aftonbladet had one of those frontpages that PR professionals have nightmares about: “Rotten garbage transported with [supermarket chain] Lidl’s fresh food”. And since I happened to visit my local Lidl store today, for about the third time ever, I had to check if they had the paper on display or if it was sold out (as in “thrown in the dumpster”). But there it was, right next to the check-out, screaming out its unfriendly message. Probably not an ideal situation for the poor cashier, but it earned Lidl a tiny bit of kudos in my eyes.
Tags: lidl, public relations, lidl, pr, public relations, krishantering. Ping.
Daily newspapers in southern Sweden will start to link articles to blog comments with the Twingly service. At least if Joakim Jardenberg gets his way. Jardenberg is Managing Director of Mindpark, a new development corporation owned by Bonniers in Skåne, Gota Media, Helsingborgs Dagblad and NWT.
– We should take the blogosphere seriously. SvD (Svenska Dagbladet), DN (Dagens Nyheter) and IDG have all seen positive effects of using Twingly, he tells Medievärlden.
Joakim Jardenberg also says he believes strongly in mashups with existing services developed by other sites like Google, Facebook and Wikipedia.
Flirting with blogs and social networking sites may lead to a significant boost in traffic. Ask British fashion retailer TopShop.co.uk. Five percent of the traffic to its online store came from its MySpace profile, which meant it was the second biggest source of traffic and “more than twice as much traffic than was received from MSN and Yahoo Search combined”.
Mainstream media can also benefit from the links that for example bloggers provide. In May 2005 I checked the number of incoming links to a number of Swedish media sites and found that Dagens Nyheter had the highest number of incoming links (via Technorati) of those media sites and blogs. Today we can see a huge increase in incoming links to media sites, and the increase for Expressen, for example, has been more than 3,000 percent.
Dagens Nyheter has not been able to maintain its top position. But recently both DN, Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet have started to publish blog links next to their articles and a follow up in six months time will show if that has had any effect on “link love” from Swedish bloggers.
Tags: technorati, sweden, expressen, svd, aftonbladet, svt. Ping.
Who killed the newspaper?, the Economist asked last year. This was just one of many death sentences the last few years for the newspaper as we know it. But WAN, World Association of Newspapers, is not ready to throw in the towel. New data from WAN show that newspaper circulation is growing and new newspapers are being launched “at a remarkable rate”.
– Global newspaper circulation up 9.95 percent over five years and 2.36 percent over twelve months
– Daily newspaper titles surpass 10,000 for first time in history
– More than 450 million copies sold daily
– In excess of 1.4 billion paid-newspaper readers
– Total free daily circulation more than doubles in five years
Sweden’s leading daily newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet have started to include links to blogs who comment on articles on the papers’ websites, Washington Post-style. Blog posts are tracked via a tool called Twingly and a list of the most blogged articles at DN can be found here. Example at SvD here. Twingly was just recently launched and has currently indexed about 2.8 million blog posts, which of course is a small number compared to the 1.6 million blog posts that the blogosphere spits out daily. The accuracy will of course improve over time as more and more blogs are tracked by Twingly.
Currently, the Swedish blog portal Knuff is far better att tracking blog links than both Twingly and Technorati. Here is a comparison between the three services and how they track the five top blogged articles at Dagens Nyheter.
| Article | Twingly | Technorati | Knuff |
|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | 24 | 19 | 26 |
| #2 | 1 | 10 | 23 |
| #3 | 2 | 2 | 18 |
| #4 | 0 | 6 | 13 |
| #5 | 2 | 4 | 10 |
UPDATE: The comparison above is a bit unfair, as Martin from Primelabs explains in the comments to this post. Apparently DN does not show all the incoming links that Twingly has in its database. In the Help section on the site, DN writes that you can find “a list of all blogs that link to an article on DN.se”. For some reason DN chooses to list only a selection of links. If this process turns out to filter out negative articles, then I expect an uproar in the blogosphere when bloggers find out they are being “censored”. Should DN continue to leave out a large part of the conversation they will most certainly open up for criticism.
Tags: Technorati, tracking, Knuff, Twingly, Dagens Nyheter. Ping.