Marketing Safari

Next courses in Internet Marketing

For my Icelandic readers, I'd like to announce that I've got three two day courses in Internet Marketing lined up in Iceland in the comming months on the following dates:
24.-25. September
22.-23. October
26.-27 November

More info in Icelandic can found on Náðu árangri á netinu!

Cheers
Hjörtur

Do we retweet, reface or echo on Facebook?

Now that Facebook has enabled the linked mention of a Facebook friend in Facebook status updates, we are left with a crucial question. How do we repeat what others have said?

On twitter we are used to retweet our friends' best tweets. And when the space runs out, we rt. When we're on Facebook, we can hardly retweet, since the status updates are not tweets, they're status updates. So the options we are to reupdate, restate or reface. Reface does sound a bit brutal though.

What are your thoughts? How do we retweet on Facebook?

Hjörtur
@hjortur

Dating Viking Women

Karen's viral video was stopped because it wasn't authentic. But believing it was authentic is what made it go viral. If it was marked as an ad from the Danish Tourist Council or VisitDenmark, it wouldn't have gone viral or the publicity it did. So it leaves us with a moral question, how far can we allow is faking "authentic" viral material? When is it worth the risk or the negative publicity that follows?

Icelandair has gone similar ways in their marketing efforts in the UK and sometimes sparked heated debates back home in Iceland, like when they advertised "One night stand in Iceland" on the London Underground. Something that hit a sensitive spot among women in Iceland, not because it wasn't authentic or true, because often it is, but because they thought it was humiliating for Icelandic women (no male complained though which tells us that they either didn't take it as pointed to them, or they don't mind having one night stands with visiting women).

I just saw a video posted by a friend on Facebook which includes tips from Icelandair on what to expect when dating Viking women:

OK, the nose thing in the end was maybe a little exaggerated, but other than that, be prepared ;)

Cheers
Hjörtur
@hjortur

Who's your daddy? - Karen's video stopped in Denmark.

Karen is 26 year old, living in Denmark. Last Thursday she posted a video on YouTube where she was sitting with her 9 month old baby boy August. The reason she is posting the video is that she's looking for the baby's father, a tourist she met one night on the town in Copenhagen. You can watch the video here:

Karen has got a lot of support and the video has really taken off. When I saw it on Saturday morning it had gotten 350.000 views in only two days and Sunday afternoon the views had passed 600.000. People were supportive, hoping the pretty Danish girl would find the father of her child.

Some were skeptic, thinking this might be a teaser for something, a campaign against promiscuity, unprotected sex or something similar. But it wasn't a part of a campaign for anything like that.

A Danish newspaper revealed the true identity of Karen as Ditte, a 29 year old actress, and found the "father of the video" - VisitDenmark.com. I guess she's an example of Danish "accommodation". It has been very criticized in Denmark, but not for promoting promiscuity in Denmark or Denmark as a destination for one night stands and sex tourism, but for creating a "fake ad". "They shouldn't have lied and played with peoples feelings" they say. It was removed Sunday evening.

I can picture the brainstorming meeting when they came up with the idea:
"How the can we do something greater than Tourism Queensland did with "the best job in the world"?"
- "Well, that's easy. We'll just do "the best fuck in the world!"

Nice try :)

Hjörtur

What would 9/11 have been like, if twitter was there?

We can't help thinking to that day in 2001, to those who suffered and what we experienced then, whether we were there or across the ocean. I was interviewing an architect in Sweden when I heard about the first plane via text message. When I got a message about the second plane I realized this was no coincident. I finished the interview and got back to Copenhagen where I lived at the time and spent the rest of the day watching CNN.

Recently a plane crashed in the Hudson river in New York. I heard about it via twitter, and I bet many of you who were on twitter at the time did so to. It was Janis Krums who broke the news with those tweets:

and a link to this now famous pic on twitpic:

I can't help but wonder how we would have experienced the events if twitter was there. Would have been more real? Would have been too real maybe, reading tweets from the people in the towers, with no chance of survival? Would have been any better or worse? What do you think?

Hjörtur
@hjortur