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Thanks for stopping by, but I’ve moved my blog to Posterous. Follow me at http://www.frjohnsen.com

“The end” for GCI Communique

Yesterday, it was made official that my employer GCI Communique in Norway will be discontinued, and the employees will be allowed to pursue other opportunities. In other words, I’ve been laid off, and to put it mildly, it sucks bigtime.

GCI Communique was established a year ago, as the first PR agency in Norway specializing in digital media, combined with traditional PR background. In the meantime, GCI Group and Cohn & Wolfe have merged, and with us being owned by a third WPP agency, Burson-Marsteller, that has raised some problems, combined with the current global financial situation.

To get this message is obviously a shock, but we’re recovering fast. Our intention is to establish a new agency as quickly as possible, to take our philosophy to the next level and to new clients. In fact, this will open a lot of opportunities for us, and we’re looking forward to running after new clients for ourselves.

Digital media is the fastest growing niche in public relations in Norway, and we’re determined to continue where we left off, but this time on our own, as opposed to a part of a large, global behemoth. We’re obviously more than interested in talking about cooperation with other small agencies, in Norway or globally, and look forward to taking our clients into the digital era.

Thank you to everyone that has supported GCI Communique the last year. It was fun while it lasted, and we’re taking the fun with us.

Updates on our progress will follow shortly.

How can a company understand Twitter?

Dave Peck has an excellent post entitled “Companies just don’t understand Twitter,” and I absolutely second his opinions.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve enjoyed my vacation, but I’ve been checking in on my email and Twitter account occasionally, always to find that someone has started to follow me, even though I haven’t really tweeted much for a while. A lot of these new followers are real persons (Hello to all!) who I’ll follow back, some are bots that add nothing at best to the conversation, and a few are companies that I have never heard of. Companies, mind you, not people working for companies.

Now, I won’t out these companies, just give them a good advice: SEEK HELP! You obviously don’t understand the dynamics of Twitter, or the dynamics of social media in general. There are plenty of advisors (my good friends and colleagues at Cohn & Wolfe Digital, among others) who can set you up with monitoring tools, a mindset, and a strategy, which will all help you be able to implement measures yourselves.

Now, where’s my beach towel?

Meme: Passion quilt

I’m not usually good at following up on memes, but when Angela Maiers tagged me for one, I just couldn’t resist. This project is called the Passion Quilt Meme, and is the brainchild of Miguel Guhlin, who I really don’t know much about.

Of course, Angela’s in the learning industry, which is a bit different from PR. Then again, PR is all about educating our clients, so maybe we’re not so different after all.

Here’s how it works :

• Post a picture from a source like Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what you are most passionate about for kids to learn…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

I took this picture myself, and I think it illustrates how we as communicators have to encourage our clients to take the plunge into unknown waters, or digital media as it may be. In Norway at least, more and more companies are realizing the value of being where their customers are, and we’re there to help them figure out how to reach these customers.

Of course, this meme isn’t limited to the education or PR industries, so to pass on the challenge, the following are officially tagged. And my apologies if any of you have received this before.

• Marius Eriksen (My colleague here at GCI Communique. This could be a good time to breathe life back into PR Visions)
• Connie Bensen (Can’t leave out the Midwest)
• Chris Brogan (For putting me on the list of Rockstars)
• Brian Woodward (My GCI colleague in Copenhagen)
• Martin Lindvall (My GCI colleague in Stockholm)

To boycott or not to boycott the Beijing Olympics

The Olympic flame was lit in Greece last week, at the same time as China cracked down on protests in Tibet. This sparked demonstrations in Greece, followed by heavier demonstrations in London yesterday and Paris today. Here in Norway, and I’m sure in other countries as well, there is a public outcry to boycott the Olympics, either alltogether or at least the opening ceremony.

There should be no doubt that the Chinese government has a completely different attitude towards values such as freedom of speech and democracy compared to the western world. I think many will agree with me when I say that the way the Chinese treat the Tibetans is unheard of as well. Arrested bloggers and dissidents, as well as the “great firewall”, which stops people from visiting whatever web sites they want, are just a few concrete examples.

But is this really enough to boycott the Olympics? I’m not really sure. As readers of this blog knows, I put freedom of speech at the very top of my list, and censorshop at the very bottom. So my gut feeling initially was “sure, boycott everything. Don’t transmit a single picture and leave the sponsors in the cold.” But then I started thinking. Will a boycott really change anything? Will we be able to put more pressure on the Chinese government by flooding the country with western journalists that won’t be pushed around? I really don’t believe the Chinese will be able to control neither the journalists or the content they spread.

If anyone can make a point, it’s the athletes competing. I wonder what kind of reaction they would get if they all turned their backs, literally, to the government officials present at the opening ceremony? Now that would certainly be heard around the world, regardless of what Chinese state controlled television would release to the Chinese people. But the word would spread, and if this was a success, how about similar acts of protest at medal ceremonies and the closing ceremony. It would be a public relations nightmare for the politicians, both to explain why this was happening, as well as why this wasn’t released to the public.

So let the games begin…

When do you delete a blog comment?

The headline says it all, and it’s probably a question most of us have asked at one point or another. A week ago, we got this dilemma at our company blog for GCI Communique (in Norwegian). The story is as follows:

On February 28, my colleague Nina Kersten Nilsen posted “Help! My child is online!” (in Norwegian), which sparked a bit of debate about children and internet usage. But a comment posted on March 15. restarted the debate. The comment was from a mother or father who had explained “everything” to his/her child at a very early stage, and seemingly proactively. The language cannot be described as anything but a bit creepy, and possible too graphic for a corporate blog. The comment shocked me, and I, along with my colleague Marius Eriksen, wrote a new post “When a blog comment makes you sick” (also in Norwegian), explaining why we didn’t delete the post. As far as we’re concerned, the debate it sparked, was more valuable than our personal discomfort.

But when is it right to delete a comment? Obviously, spam comments are removed as they are posted, but when a comment moves close to the border line of off-topic, do you leave it alone or remove it? If the language is too graphic, do you delete the comment? If the content is over the line, morally or legally, is it safe to leave it? Is everyone responsible for what they write, or is the blogger himself/herself to a certain degree responsible for what is written?

I’d love to hear your input on this.

Update: Shel Israel sent me the following link via Twitter: http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2008/01/time-to-repeat.html It deals with a similar problem. For the record, our commenter was also anonymous, but the content was probably too sensitive to have been written under full name. It would have identified the daughter of the commenter, which would not have been good. That also complicated the situation.

Riding the Twitter wave

Last week, Jeremiah Owyang published “Follow me on Twitter, and I’ll follow you back“, which I commented on. I didn’t take long until a bunch of people started to follow me (Hello to everyone!), several whom I really don’t know why I haven’t followed earlier.

In a few days, on March 3., it’ll be one year since my first tweet, and I just passed the magic 1,000-mark. Personally, I’m completely hooked on Twitter, and I use it in the same ways as Jeremiah describes in his post, but still a lot of people don’t understand what the big deal is.

To me, Twitter is the most comprehensive and yet most simple way to communicate globally with people in the same business as I am in. At times, I wonder if the PR and media industries are more wired than other, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are small Twitter-communities out there that connects people interested in welding, scuba diving, knitting or NASCAR.

So yes, I’m a Twitter evangelist, and for me it is a great tool to keep up with what’s going on in the social media sphere. That said, and Jeremiah points this out in an update as well: “Twitter is NOT for everyone, but those that want to be part of the early influencer conversation should look there. It’s true there is more noise than signal, but when the signal does occur, it often cascades to many other mediums.”

A lot of people write about Twitter these days, and thus it will probably gain even more traction. Lionel Menchaca from Direct2Dell (Dell is a GCI client) has written about his usage and Jeff Jarvis from BuzzMachine has dedicated his column in The Guardian to “Why short is tweet for the blogging community“.

I’m frjohnsen on Twitter, and if you follow me, I’ll follow you right back.

B2B and B2C are dead – long live P2P!

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had a discussion with some of my colleagues about how to implement social media strategies for B2B companies. It seems like many of the communications professionals and managers at these companies are reluctant to use social media measures to reach their customers.

As far as I’m concerned, the B2B (and B2C for that matter) term is outdated, and should be killed of. A company itself does not really sell anything, neither does a company itself buy anything. However, the people working for a company buy and sell all kinds of things, and this should be the main argument trying to pursue a communications manager to take a look at social media.

I suspect a lot of companies define themselves as B2B out of habit, and haven’t really considered the definition for some time. Have you ever considered talking directly to the people that make the decisions? Maybe you’ve been doing that all along? In that case, why shouldn’t you try to build a social network for your customers?

This is not an issue just limited to Norway. My Danish colleague Brian Woodward has written about it on his blog (Un)spun.dk, and my colleagues in the States are trying to “crack the code” as well.

I think the business that manages to see beyond traditional B2B marketing philosophy has a great chance to become a thought leader in this field. I’d love to discuss this with anyone, whether you’re in Norway or anywhere else. Consider untraditional communication and be creative!

Censorship as protection?

In Norway, we’ve had a massive debate over the last couple of days about who’s responsible for the content published in the comments following stories in online media. I won’t bother you with links, since they’re mostly in Norwegian, but the short version is as follows: On the web site of Norwegian daily Agderposten’s discussion forum, rumors of highly sexual nature about soccer player and former Liverpool pro Stig Inge Bjornebye were circulating. The rumors were false, but were accessible for a long time. Today, Agderposten was found guilty by the PFU, the Norwegian press’ watchdog organization.

The case has raised some interesting questions: Are newspapers responsible for content published on their web sites? Should newspapers censor this content? Should everything published on the internet be censored? If so, who should do this? And is it possible?

First of all, it isn’t possible, as far as I’m concerned. If I want to publish something, I can. If not on the newspaper’s web sites, then on blogs or discussion sites in other countries.

Ironically, several newspaper editors have called for some kind of censorship of comments. Maybe it’s my background from an American university, but freedom of speech is an incredibly important value for me. In fact, just the word “censorship” scares me, and ignites nightmares of Soviet regimes from the past. Of course, a lot of countries censor web sites today, but I would not like to compare any of them to Norway, a liberal, western, educated country.

So who is responsible for content? How about making the content providers themselves responsible? I can’t remember the last time I wrote a comment anonymously, and I think that’s the trend. Anonymous sources have never been regarded as credible sources, and they won’t be in the future either. Besides, whatever I write is what I mean, so why wouldn’t I put my name on it?

If someone publishes something false, charge them with the applicable law. But censoring content is definitely uncalled for, as well as technically impossible without turning into a communication dictatorship.

Are we adult enough to have an open internet? Can we protect people from false rumors? Why can’t we all just be nice?

Being mobile in a third world country

As I’ve mentioned earlier on this blog, I was on vacation in Egypt last week. A beautiful country, with an incredibly friendly population, and I’m definitely going back.

In July last year, my late colleague Jon Barkan wrote a post on GCI Group’s Grounded in Reality about how great his cell phone coverage was in Israel. I suppose most people wouldn’t be surprised about that, but Egypt on the other hand, is probably considered a third world country by many. In terms of mobile usage however, the Egyptian population can’t be that far off the lead. For instance, on the way to a bedouin camp in the desert, our driver was constantly checking Facebook on his cell, and he wasn’t the only one. Geoff Livingston has written about this on Now is Gone as well.

But what amazed me the most was excellent coverage I had in Egypt. In October last year, I was in New York City, and I had to leave my hotel room to get a decent signal. In the GCI Group meeting room, I didn’t have a signal at all. During one week in Egypt on the other hand, I had continuous coverage, and I’m not just talking about regular GSM signals. In most locations, I enjoyed good 3G signals, and on many occasions I had 3.5G coverage as well, which, at least in theory, gave me a 3.6 megabyte per second download speed. In New York, I had neither 3G nor 3.5G – ever!

The ultimate mobile test was on a half-day quadbike trip in the desert. Two hours into the mountains from Hurghada, near a bedouin camp, in a deep ravine, I had full bars of 3.5G signals. A picture of the location is above this paragraph. I could check my email, Facebook, and could have sent a Qik video. The only reason I didn’t was that I had no idea how much it cost.

Now, I have no idea why someone would put up a cell tower to cover this location, but as far as I’m concerned, I’d rather be lost in the Egyptian desert than in New York City.

Finally, a big thank you to everyone I met in Egypt. It is truly an incredible country.