Social media doesn’t change the game

The GameThe Game, the husstle, the folding of the sleves, the pick it up from the ground and brush it off. There is nothing with social media that changes the basics of YOUR daily work. It is what’s around you that has changed. I made an analysis of social media the other day and I sort of stumbled over a way to describe this change that everyone is talking about.

I decided to split it into three areas of interest or historical context. The production of media, the consumption of media and what influences us as human beings.

The evolution of media production
By now you know the story. When speaking of the change social media has brought upon the world, most people speak of media production capabilities. Production was first controlled by who ever had a pike and some power to hack a message into a stone wall. The posibilities of media production was then adopted and controlled by church and state. Then the area of “mass media” came about with the introduction of the printing press, later radio, later tv, later internet 1.0.

Mass media has however never been MASS media as the production has been primarily controlled by institutions such as news paper, religious institiutions, churches, corporations etc. Production has been expensive and has thus been in the hands of those who have had the money to produce. Reach reach reach reach. If someone starts talking bach you reach a little bit more and you simply crowd them out. In some instances, you enforce rules to control the production.

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Yet another post about Lowe Brindfors, perhaps in their defence…

I have somewhat been enjoying the emerging debate about the coexistance of beautiful and working designs that’s been regurgitated in the SWEnglish bloggosphere since a post by Walter Naeslund a couple of half weeks back.

Walter is a highly skilled copy and put his finger on a very open and visible wound in the Swedish Ad-agency/webb-agency sphere. Naturally, lots of bloggers followed, and all though I agree with most of what’s been said in these posts I would still like to flip the coin.

What I have to say in their defence
I am hurting inside as the static page experience of the web is starting to make me boored. When I know that inventions such as Prezi and Sea Dragon give depth to the web when treating it like one big – enormous – gigantic – surface rather than a collection of individual pages and urls. Especially when looking at

Read moreYet another post about Lowe Brindfors, perhaps in their defence…

Email and Social media

There has been a debate with regards to whether or not social media is the death of email or if the two live in a symbiotic relationship with one another. As an interesting piece to the puzzle, Nielsen Online published an article about one of their studies on how social media effects the usage of e-mail.

What they found was not quite what you might expect as they could see a clear positive relationship between the use of social media and the consumption of email. If you have time to critically examine this statement, then visit the article through the link above. All others – eat this table taken from that article.


Source: The Nielsen CompanyIs Social Media Impacting How Much We Email?

This relationship speaks in quite the contrary direction of what many hard core talkers in this field are suggesting. But how can they be so wrong? They are journalists, consultants and everyday users of these tools. Why is it that their analysis of what seems to be, or logically might become, in dire contrast with what the data tells us? I think the problem is that they are neglecting the shift in purpose for email.

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Viral Campaign – The ultimate How to

The title of this post might induce some critics, but I am used to them, and they teach me stuff they don’t even know about. So, I like the self indulging “ultimate how to” phrasing as it is exactly what I am going to tell you.

So simple, yet one of my biggest secrets. The viral campaign has allways been an element in my basket of tricks to pull out when I want to make something profitable. Some people are talking about viral videos, some people are talking about viral content. All they are really talking about is content that someone has either 1. got really lucky to get a lot of visitors too, or 2. something of quality that someone has payed someone to bump in order for the rest of us to enjoy. Actually, most of the videos that go viral and that have a commercial undertone are bought. There are several clans that both push stuff on digg, watch stuff on youtube or spam people on twitter. If you have good content enough, and you want guaranteed results in your campaigning.. then spam is not a bad idea to start from.

However, this how to is not about spam. This how to is how you get mediocre, highly commercial content to get shared between users.

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SEO for Flash Websites – SWFObject

Considering todays blog discussion at walternaeslund.com about Lowe Brindfors, and his previous posting about Forsman & Bodenfors, I will start a series of blog posts about how to implement Flash on a website that makes it:

  1. Accessible by people regardless of disabilities
  2. Accessible by Google spiders

As a person I try to find solutions and thus this is what I bring to the discussion table. A series of how tos’ aimed to solve a problem with web bureaus not utilizing all that is good with the web format.

SEO for Flash Websites – Using SWFObject
There have been some versions of SWFObject out there for some time. In the beginning, SWFObject was called FlashObject and was developed in order for you to put an alternate, HTML version, of your content as well as your designed flash content on your site.

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People, content and links between them – the history of the Internet

I meet people every day that try to make the web into something complex. They try to find new ways to name drop new functions on the web in order to charge others for what they do. Instead of focusing on what is successfull, they focus on retoric. Yesterday I wrote a post about that there is no such thing as a website. What it all boils down too is what the web is really about.

People, content and links between them
It is about people, content and links between them. That is all that the web is. From the beginning there was links between uploaded packages of information. Then it became links between content. Later we saw the emergence of content linked to people as PEOPLE gained access to project themselves on the web. What we seen now is that the web is being used to link people to people.

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There is No Such thing as a Website

One of the major misconceptions of the modern web is that websites still exist. Websites are institutions on the web, often depicted as an organizational scheme, never too seldom used to show the content of a domain with the name “sitemap”.

As modern web users we all know that this stopped being the case a couple of years back. Still however, we use these kind of images to depict our websites. Why? Well, my guess is, that it is easy and pedagogical within an institution to display its web “face” in the same fashion as the oranisational schemes people are used too. Fair enough. But with regards to SEO, this view of a website can be very hassardous.

Google as the startpage
Since Google decided to take over the web, it has become more and more important for oranizations to become visible on the search engine result pages. Simply enough this is due to the fact that people search, and they like to search. People like to compare and given the 10 options of a search engine result page, they are satisfied that they are given enough options to choose. Now, most people choose one of the first three choices in a search result, but they still find this as being a choice in front of the other nine that was out there to grab.

Read moreThere is No Such thing as a Website