The project is dubbed Curators of Sweden, and in just about a month of existence has more than doubled the country’s official Twitter presence.

Here’s how it works. Every week, a new Swedish citizen take the wheel of @Sweden, the official Twitter account of the country’s tourism initiative. During that week, the average, everyday citizen gets to converse with other Twitter users and share their thoughts on the country. They also have the opportunity to share photos and tidbits about their favorite places to go and things to do where they live.

The idea with Curators of Sweden is that each curator will share both their own and relevant third party’s thoughts, stories, information and other content that is somehow linked to Sweden. The idea is that the curators, through their tweets, create interest and arouse curiosity for Sweden and the wide range the country has to offer. The expectation is that the curators will paint a picture of Sweden, different to that usually obtained through traditional media.

The project, an initiative of the National Board for the Promotion of Sweden (VisitSweden), is basically looking to market travel with the human element. Ask anyone who specializes in social media marketing – they will tell you that the more personal and human-like you can make your company’s social media accounts, the better. Sweden hopes that by giving people the chance to see the country through vastly different sets of eyes, they will inspire curiosity.

The initiative started on December 10th, and the first “Curator” was a writer and editor named Jack Werner. Since then there have been 5 other faces of Sweden, ranging from an advertising exec to an organic sheep farmer. The current voice of Sweden’s Twitter account in Hanna, who describes herself as an “average lesbian truck-driver.”

As you can see, the content of the account is pretty personal. The Swedes who run the account appear to face little to no censorship, as not all of the tweets coming from @Sweden praise the country and not all of the tweets would be considered “PC.”

Former tweeter Hasan Ramic tweeted that “the current Swedish welfare system is a bad joke compared to what it once was” and current tweeter Hanna had this to say regarding a certain archaic medical practice that’s still alive in her country:

So the @Sweden Twitter account feels like a mishmash of personal reflections, public declarations, and tourism promotion. And I guess that’s what the folks at VisitSweden want.

"As press interest in Groupon has grown, I’ve found myself increasingly uttering two words that have always annoyed me: ‘no comment,’" says Mason. "We like to be as transparent with our customers as possible, but, just as people don’t walk around naked, there are some things that we as a company don’t talk about (for obvious reasons)."

"While we’ll clam up when asked about…business-y stuff, we’ll always be straight forward about things that affect the experience we’re creating for customers and merchants," he says. 

So what will Groupon not talk about? Plans related to capital-raisng, IPOs, pre-announcements of new products, the competition (which is growing rapidly), statements on core business metrics, margins, profitability, projections about revenue, growth rates, and other financials, and strategic transactions/partnerships with other companies. 

In other words, we’re going to have to work harder to get any of that stuff.

Back when all the rumors of a possible acquisition by Google were going around, Groupon simply told us,  "One day, we will have to choose to stay private, go public, or sell. We want to continue to build a great company exactly the same way we’re building it today. Recently there has been a lot of press about these exciting possibilities, but currently there is nothing new to report."  

In December, Mason told Charlie Rose Groupon was adding about 30 cities a month, had 40 million subscribers, and just added 3 million subscribers the previous week.  While these numbers have no doubt grown significantly since then, it does show that Mason may open up a little bit from time to time. 

Just within the past week, Groupon launched in the United Arab Emirates, and GaoPeng (the Chinese Groupon) made its debut. 

BusinessWire says these microsites were developed specifically to help corporate communicators and investor relations officers house and maintain information for journalists, bloggers, investors, consumers, analysts, key influencers, etc.

"There are many benefits to employing these content management solutions," explains BusinessWire VP of Web Communications, Ibrey Woodall. "One of the main reasons the online newsroom came into existence was because public relations representatives were having a hard time getting cooperation from their technical, or IT department, when they needed a press release posted quickly. Investor relations officers also needed a means by which they could get the most recent financial news and data to their company’s investors and analysts."

"So, control was an initiating factor for this technological evolution," she adds. "Communicators needed to be able to post and organize content in a timely manner. They needed to be able to get their message on their website, and delivered directly to those who were interested in their organization."

Getting press coverage can mean a great deal of gaining traffic and overall exposure for your business. Providing the givers of press (journalists, bloggers, and even everyday consumers via social media) with as many resources for finding information as possible, will only increase the likelihood of coverage. Businesses may find  these new services from Business Wire quite helpful.

It also helps that the services come with some basic SEO features, which should further increase visibility.

Well, on December 9th, that union will be no more.

You can read the wordy Time Warner press release, but you’ll probably either fall asleep or your head will explode, before you reach the end. Instead, we’ll turn to trusty Reuters to translate the announcement into plain English:

Time Warner shareholders of record on Nov. 27 will receive an AOL stock dividend for every 11 shares of Time Warner common stock they hold…Based on the closing price of Time Warner’s stock at $32.35 and its 1.17 billion outstanding shares, the ratio would effectively value AOL’s market capitalization at around $3.44 billion…AOL common stock will begin trading on a ‘when-issued’ basis on the New York stock Exchange on Nov. 24 and will start trading under the ‘AOL’ symbol on Dec. 10.

Of course, it’s been almost 6 month months since Time Warner announced the AOL spin off, but now we finally get a date to watch. On December 9th, former Google exec and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, will get to show us what he–and AOL–are made of!

Comments

Well, it appears that The Associated Press loves carnival games as the NYT reports the news organization is determined to put an end to the scraping of its content.

Each article — and, in the future, each picture and video — would go out with what The A.P. called a digital “wrapper,” data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web.

Clearly, The AP wants to monetize the content that it’s worked hard to produce–you can’t blame it for that–but I fear it’s about to learn that its efforts will be futile.

You see, my experience tells me that the number of legitimate content publishers–the ones that The AP can actually hope to get payment from–will either stop publishing AP content, or likely never scraped it in the first place. The vast majority of the sites that are causing AP’s headaches are the spammers that set up dozens of Blogspot.com blogs, scrape vast amounts of content, then hide behind fictitious emails and WHOIS information. In other words, The AP’s not likely to reach these scrapers–let alone get a dime out of them!

Look, The AP is desperate. Traditional newspapers are cutting back, so the company has little choice but to try and earn revenue from those misusing its content. Unfortunately, I think they’ll find that when you play carnival games, the carnival always wins!

Comments

It is usually when I am actively seeking news on a certain company that I find their press pages, where their latest press releases (are supposed to) reside. I have noticed a lot however, that the latest releases are not always available on these pages. Sometimes I will have seen a release via email or a wire service, but that very same release will be absent from the company’s press page.

It makes the company’s press center an unreliable source for up-to-date information. Companies don’t always announce all of their news via press release, and often use company blogs instead, which is fine, but if you’re going to have a press center, shouldn’t you at least keep it up to date with the releases that have actually been constructed?

Another thing I notice is that many company press pages also do not have RSS feeds set up. Some offer different kinds of press alerts, but otherwise, they are relying on people to frequently check back to see what is happening. Google does it right. They announce a lot of their news via their wide range of blogs (which is a great strategy in itself), and while their press release section doesn’t get nearly as many updates, they offer a feed so that users know when it has been updated. They also provide links to other press-related resources where their latest info can be obtained.

Click to enlarge.

I realize that the wire services are probably the higher priorities because of the distribution element they possess. Lots of places pick up on releases from sites like BusinessWire or PR Newswire, etc.

Still, the source itself should have the information. There is more than one way reporters, bloggers, and other writers find news to cover, and if they are interested enough in what your company is up to, shouldn’t you feel obligated to make that information readily available? It’s all about marketing your brand right?

This may come off like a rant, but it’s really intended to be more of a wake-up call to businesses who are not giving the proper attention to their own press. I think businesses often get too caught up in the news going out (which certainly is important), that they forget to consider that attention might be going in as well. It’s something to think about.