Nikki’s View On The World

It’s summer and very hot in Oslo and therefor (besides moving…) I need to have a summer project. And it will kind of the impossible one, which and who are the best 100 albums in history, with the limit to pop and rock’n roll.
I’ll guess it will change from day to day – but so far I’m starting with what I feel today – and the first no 1 is Bowie’s the Man Who Sold The World.
I’ll promise you, I will get back in this matter!

I have commented it other places like Twitter, but it was kind of amazing to see that Lucas Glover played so well in the end, I thought that Ricky Barnes would hold on to it, the the pressure must have been too much, so he kinda’ collapsed at the U.S. Open….
And, I really liked that David Duval is back, was it a one-timer, or will he ever get back to his old form, he was no. 1 in the world for a while…

This hearse times demands creative and good marketing, isn’t that so? And it might come down to how to market yourself. Here are a list over 30 very creative ideas where humbleness and how-to-read-them isn’t the focus….
I wouldn’t know if this is the best way of presenting yourself searching for a job within the financial business, but have a look for yourself! This is just one of example, look at this site at webdesignerdepot and decide for yourself.

At a presentation I held today my idea is that social multitasking is the future on the net! Why?

In short: the explosion of applications, widgets and services on the net needs someone to ‘hub’ it! Services like Eventbox, Flock and SecondBrain is aggregation tools, and the need of someone to facilitate it will just increase. The need to control and manage all your social profiles from one place will we necessary, in particular if you will transform this into the business area. I’m very well aware of all the services to do this out there, but I’m thinking of the value for the non-geeks out there…

The use of Internet will increase, but I do think the traditional surfing will go down, we need relevant information, delivered from one place. The ones who could solve this, organization and integration, they have a fantastic business potential.

According to Jupiter Research, two thirds of the European advertisers will use viral marketing during 2009.
The low cost of doing this makes in more and more popular, especially amongst smaller advertisers.
You’re opinion?

As the most talked news ‘technology’ (which in itself I feel is wrong), Twitter is growing here enormously here in Norway, and you can read about almost everyday in the papers and therefor new people are joining and using it for new reasons. As such it’s a great environment for brands to experiment and to see what works for them. And if you are going to experiment, three ways that organizations are using Twitter are as follow.

1. Be personal for your brand!
This is what a couple of big cooperations in the US (like Starbucks) have done so well. Taking a large brand, that to many has seemed faceless, and putting people centre stage. Using Twitter as a way of putting a face to the brand and providing a route for people to engage. There are many benefits of putting a public face to your brand, overally it provides a personal connection and helps build the emotional relationship with your consumers that can be so useful, especially in the current economic climate.

2. Sand and target different groups
Set up a variety of Twitter accounts that are used by different people to engage different audiences about different things. Twitter is a great search tool – you can monitor and analyze the different conversations people are having about your brand. Start to understand the segments and the give them different messages using different accounts. The marginal cost of another Twitter account is practically zero and so it’s a great way to engage different people in different ways.

3. Using Twitter as a hub
The best use of Twitter can be as part of a hub-and-spoke model of social engagement. Use it to engage people in Twitter just as you might engage people in Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other social networks and online communities. Then provide your own site or online community that you can take people to. It is when they are on your own community that you can really work with them, share and discuss ideas with them, get a better understanding of who they are and what they think. And bringing them to your own space makes them feel special. You move from interrupting them where they are doing something else, to providing a direct line to engaging with you.

Not surprisingly, there were little about the EU elections in the Norwegian media. Mostly, the discussion was about two things, right-wing extremists joining the European parliament and the Swedish Piratpartiet taking place.
The most interesting I think is the total collapse for the social democratic side, I was kinda’ expecting the opposite, looking in the capitalistic disaster-mirror for the last year, I you would’ve guess that the parties standing for that kind of politics getting a real blow, but no.
Given voter anxiety and anger at the misdemeanors of bankers, rising joblessness, failing mortgages and a worsening economic crisis, there were expectations that voters would lash out at incumbent governments, blaming them. This would have disproportionately hit the centre-right parties dominating the countries of the EU, the European parliament, and the political appointees running the European commission. It did happen to a small degree. But centre-left governments in power in Britain, Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Austria suffered much bigger losses – the Hungarian socialists, the Austrian social democrats and Gordon Brown’s Labor slumping to historic lows.
And there was no refuge in opposition. French, Italian and Polish social democrats were thrashed. The two social democratic parties that are junior coalition partners in the Netherlands and Germany also returned their worst ever results.
The poor working-class white vote is going from social democrats to the anti-immigrant extreme right in the Netherlands, Britain or Austria, while middle-class liberals and public sector workers who used also to vote centre-left are turning to the Green.
It’s time for the pro-European to step up in Norway, and start having this discussion, what is our role towards the union in the future and what should be done! It’s only a matter of time and we should join as soon as possible!

It’s interesting to see that a major company in the US, Anheuser Busch, brand Bud Lite, is using porn as a mean to market it’s products. Is this a trend coming towards us?
If you looks in the newspapers and on TV the answer must be yes.
It seems to mark some kind of cultural tipping point, where pornography has soaked so far into the fabric of mainstream culture that it’s no longer seen as a stain. Our whole world is getting more pornified, so it’s up to us to decide if we like it or not, by buying or not buying the products they try to sell to us.

Sometimes, or I should say, way to often, I don’t have the time to read all newsletters coming in to my mailbox.
Late last night I read a couple of them (still have a couple of hundreds unread…) – and this one is well worth reading – written by Yann Gourvennec.

Here is the start of the article:
In our previous article about social media, we have described the 8 reasons why managers love social media and we have also debunked a few commonplace myths. In this new instalment we’ll look at the flip side of corporate social media perception, the negative one, and we will also discuss the rationale behind each of these arguments. The rest goes here

The same discussion as we have in Norway about the use of social media in politics is still under heat, this time in Sweden, for the upcoming EU-election. But, and I don’t know if this the world famous ‘jantelov’ (a Scandinavian expression) – both consultants and researchers agrees what has gone wrong .

The message is one-sided and they forget to listen, the same arguments that we have heard here in Norway. The interesting thing, will the political parties do something about it for the elections in September, or have they carved they communication strategy in stone. It will be interesting to follow.

In an article today in AdAge, Microsoft is aiming it’s guns at Google, launching a campaign, somewhere in between $ 80 and 100 millions. Microsoft has tried a lot of tricks, almost everybody in the book, to grab a bigger market share in the search business. The results don’t match the efforts! Microsoft’s search query share keeps declining. In order to jump-start its search business, Microsoft attempted to buy Yahoo, but fail. It had bought a search startup, called Powerset, and is trying to build a whole different experience that will allow it to win market share.
A lot of people will argue that no amount of advertising Microsoft throws at the product will make a difference – the quality of search results is the only thing that matters. And that may have once been true; after all, Google built its brand on the back of a great user experience, results that were markedly better and zero ad support.

ShoZu are describing theirselves as “is the leading provider of mobile social media services that connect mobile consumers with their online social networks, personal blogs, photo storage sites and other Web 2.0 properties from the handset.”

So far, I’m just very impressed with what they are doing and how to use it!

When most people think about viral videos, they think of a crazy idea (often funny) that is irrelevant to the brand and put out in cyberspace -- all too see what will happen! The field has gotten much more crowded in the past 12 months but the behavior of sharing video is more common and bloggers help create more space for that.
The video above is really funny in it’s one way, you do have to excuse the explicit language, but it’s American so…

The T-mobile campaign is another good example of this one, you’ll find here on my blog.

Do you have some ideas of what will work, I’ll be happy to hear from ya!

If you are to going to Sweden during the next month or so, which I presume a lot of Norwegians do (especially those who are living in the eastern part of the country), here is some ideas what you can buy when you’re there, and how to enjoy!
Have a wonderful wine spring!

Dagens Industri
Dagens Nyheter

And it was, well, relaxing. I have use the last days playing golf with my friends at Friends Golf, the Friends Ryder Cup, this year held at Lyckorna GK in Bohuslän, Sweden.
Now I am really swamped in work, and will document some exciting projects going on! And yes, I admit, a completely unnecessary ad for Peugeot…

The University of Agder, together with the Kristiansand based company 4AM, arranged a seminar about the use of social media in the forthcoming Norwegian elections.

A lot of interesting people said a lot of interesting things, here is the link to the program (in Norwegian) and I will get back to ya with some interviews from NRKs Kulturnytt.
My part of it was to take the temperature of what the parties has done so far within communication and social media, so far in my opinion, Høyre and Rødt is in front. I will write more about it tomorrow, it’s late and it’s time to go to bed

I’m sure many of us criticized Apple’s first generation iPhone as sorely lacking in the technology department. However, no one can doubt the buzz the impending launch of the iPhone OS version 3.0 has created. On the flip side, if we can look through the marketing, we can see that there is a very clever strategy at work here.

Kontra from the very excellent Counter Notions blog has a great analysis of Apple’s iPhone Strategy and how it has evolved from a device into a platform.
In summary, the first iPhone generation introduced us to a device that could pull in all your Stuff in a logical manner. The 2nd generation 3G iPhone created a platform where, by leveraging on the iTunes store, you could download all your Stuff. Finally with the release of iPhone OS 3.0, (very apt don’t you think?) Apple plugs up most of the holes we have been complaining about and almost perfects the product. Thus making it.

Kontra writes:

Apple consolidated its gains, marked its territory of 30M users+25K apps+800M downloads and built a very deep and wide moat around it. A moat so formidable that there’s not a single smartphone player capable of overcoming it.

Apple also methodically eliminated the vast majority of iPhone’s “missing” features: copy and paste, landscape text entry, global search, notifications, MMS, voice memos, new calendar format, Notes sync, stereo Bluetooth support, extended parental controls, browser auto-fill and anti-phishing… pretty much anything else that may have given potential customers a pause previously.

Another thing I like to add is that great products do not have to be 100% right the first time. Getting a product shipped that 80% right but with a 100% intrinsic benefit to your user is a lot better in my humble opinion. Just make sure to reiterate and improve your product very quickly after you have launched it.

This strategy is like a good baseball swing. You need to have a good follow through after you take your shot. Unfortunately the follow through is what many companies are just not good at doing.

I would highly recommend you read his analysis in full, both part 1 and part 2, to get the full course dinner!

A couple of brilliant days:

Probably the best commuication event in Norwegian history, so I agree with all my Twitterfriends! I’m really looking forward to next year, but I wonder, can they really match this years line-up?

Yesterday, in one of the biggest rivaliries in sports, the game between by Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, the centerfielder from Boston Red Sox Jacoby Ellsbury, stole homeplate! This sure is a rare thing – and it’s so fun to watch!
Now I’m just waiting for the speedsters in Oakland A’s to do the same thing…

According to Øyvind Solstad at NRK Beta there is somewhere between 20 000 – 40 000 Twitter users in Norway.
The last figure I’ve heard was 6 500, and that was three months ago. Could this be true? If so, and amazing developoment.
Below is the twitter between Solstad at and the journalist Hege Ulstein at Dagsavisen, who wrote an article about Twitter in todays edition, saying Twitter as a place for the elite.
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osol @hegeulstein Vi diskuterte Twittertall i går, @ninanord og jeg. Og heller til at det er mellom 20 000 og 40 000 på Twitter i Norge.
friday apr 24 13:08:22 from Tweetie in reply to hegeulstein
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