Norway

Adlibris

1. Marius strikkebok; klassikere, historier og nye oppskrifter

2. Made by me; sybloggernes beste oppskrifter

3. Kathrine Gregersen: Strikk til nøstebarn
3. Børnetøj 4-7 år

Lindex

1. Kåpe

2. Bukser

2. Lue

Nelly.com

1. Elise Ryan / Melanie Open Back Dress

2. Jeffrey Campbell / Lita Shoe

3. Elise Ryan / Melanie Open Back Dress (white)

Collstuff

1. Polaroid 300

2. Objektivkruset

3. Blåseape Negletørker

Footway

1. Sugarfree Shoes

2. Emma

3. Ugg Australia

Gymgrossisten

1. Gourmet-Pro, 900 ga

2. Ripped Hardcore, 60 caps

3. Stor fitnesspakke for jenter!

Yves Rocher

1. Løst perlemorskimmer

2. Øyenskyggepensel

3. Brun-uten-sol spray for kroppen

Denmark

Saxo.com

1. Max Bollinger & Pavel Kostin: It’s Time

2. Susan B Anderson: Itty Bitty Toys

Nelly.com

1. Issue 1.3 / Lou Sweater

2. Jeffrey Campbell / Spike

3. NLY White Label / I Love

Coolstuff

1. Chokolade-fontæne

2. Pusteabe Negletørrer

3. Polaroid Z340

Yves Rocher

1. Løst perlemorsglans

2. Øjenskyggepensel

3. Kropspeeling

Finland

Adlibris

1. Kirsi Etula, Sunna Valkeapää-Ikola: Mekkotehdas

2. Alexander Gullichsen, Hanna Gullichsen: Safkaa

3. Pyy Outi: Trashion – Tee itse huippumuotia

Lindex

1. Kaulakoru

2. Yöpaita

3. Viitta

Nelly.com

1. Dr Denim / Plenty Denim Leggins

2. Jeane Blush / Leah Parkas (blue)

3. Jeane Blush / Leah Parkas (white)

Yves Rocher

1. Varjostussivellin

2. Itseruskettava suihke vartalolle

3. Kuivaöljy

The most popular product among bloggers in Sweden 2012

Eld by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren at Adlibris.com (105 incoming links from blogs)

The most popular products among bloggers in Sweden 2012 by categories

Most popular book

Eld by Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren at Adlibris.com (105 incoming links from blogs)

Most popular shoe

Jeffrey Campbell / Spike at Nelly.com (31 incoming links from blogs)

Most popular clothing

Oneness / Sofie Dress at Nelly.com (25 incoming links from blogs)

Most popular cosmetics product

Eleven 66 Colour Lip Palette at eleven (23 incoming links from blogs)

Most popular movie

Prometheus (Blu-ray+DVD) at CDON.com (39 incoming links from blogs)

Most popular game

Call of duty: Black Ops 2 – Nuketown Edition (Xbox 360) at CDON.com (18 incoming links from blogs)

Most popular fun gadget

Dough spreader for cupcakes at coolstuff.se (13 incoming links from blogs)

Most popular accessory

Envelope bag at Lindex (10 incoming links from blogs)

The most popular products among bloggers in Sweden 2012 by selected stores

Nelly.com

1.  Jeffrey Campbell / Spike

2. Oneness / Sofie Dress

3. Elise Ryan / Melanie Open Back Dress

Eleven

1. Eleven 66 Colour Lip Palette

2. Smashbox Heartbreaker Eye Shadow Palette

3. Macadamia Natural Oil Deep Repair Masque

CDON.com

1. Prometheus (Blu-ray+DVD)

2. Call of duty: Black Ops 2 – Nuketown Edition – Xbox 360

3. Rasmus Lenefors – Amatören

Lindex

1. Cape

2. Envelope bag

3. Envelope bag (leather)

We wanted to know: Who should have a corporate blog, and how should the content look like? To get the answers, we asked Anna Loverus from the Gothenburg-based agency Matter a couple of questions. As Content Strategist and Creative, she works with these kind of topics on a daily basis and as seen both the good and the bad of corporate blogging. She offers some great insights which might be inspiring for our very own Twingly blog as well.

It’s 2013 and there are many different ways for companies to reach out via social media. What part can a company blog play in that communication mix?
I often feel that a lot of communication in social media takes place because it’s possible, not necessary or valuable. Just because we have the opportunity to talk doesn’t mean we have to say something. I believe that most companies who are blogging today shouldn’t have a blog considering what they publish. Because of the Internet we now have access to pretty much everything we want, any time. This means that your customers, users or fans have the whole Internet to choose from when they consume content.

Communication today is not about your brand; it’s about your readers. You have to find something that is of true value for the people you want to reach, and if you do, you will build a long-term relationship. Find out what your readers really care about and think of content they would find valuable. Sometimes this can be quite far from your field, but it’s still valuable for the people you want to reach with your communication.

The blog format has amazing qualities. Compared to other communication tools a blog can handle many types of content like photo, video, sound and illustrations. It’s easy to create interaction and you don’t need any advanced applications to get started. If you keep in mind that no one will care about your company as long as you’re only a company, you can create real relationships with the blog as a powerful tool.

Anna Loverus

What distinguishes a good from a bad company blog? 
If you’re not able to publish regularly, don’t start a blog. How many times a month you must publish content depends on the type of zontent but two times a month is an absolute minimum. Visiting a blog where the latest post was written three months ago won’t make anyone want to come back. Like I said, readers choose their consumption of media on the Internet today. It’s not too likely that posts about your new collaboration or employee will become a traffic magnet. A really good company blog isn’t about or for the company. The good company blogs know their audience; they publish relevant content for the audience at a regular speed that suits their readers.

What’s the best and most cost-efficient way to get started, if a company decides to try it?
Finding out what is valuable for your audience takes time. Producing valuable content takes time. But time is pretty much the only thing you need to invest in when starting a blog. Start with asking your organization if they have any experience of blogging or writing, photography, video making or any other content production. There are many free and easy tools for anyone who wants to start a blog. WordPress is a blogging platform that can be either self-hosted or hosted by WordPress.com, Blogger is another free tool and Tumblr and Squarespace are other alternatives. Make sure to choose a tool that is easy to work with even if you’re just testing.

Start with asking yourself why your company wants a blog? Is it because you always get the same questions to your support? Because you want to find new customers? Is it because you need to get your team to work more together? When you have an answer, focus on that particular cause. You should get yourself a publishing plan and some simple blog formats. Blogging isn’t just about what’s in your head when you feel like writing, especially not when it’s a company blog used as a communication tool.

One large difference between communications in social media compared to traditional media is that we often lack a plan or format. Just because you can publish directly into social media when you have an idea doesn’t mean you should. Make a list with subjects you think people actually want to know about from your company. It could be everything from common support questions to how your web shop products look on real people. Use this list and create some simple formats with guidelines that make it easy for all writers to contribute easily. Instead of giving one person at your company the responsibility to write the blog, give them the responsibility to be the editor of the blog. Engage people from different parts of your organization when you’re collecting and creating content for your blog.

What are the risks of having a company blog and how to handle them?
I would say there are several risks with blogging. There’s always a risk to get negative comments or people not liking what you do, but as long as you meet them with respect, it’s not too much to worry about. But one thing that many companies are afraid of is the lack of control over a blog, just like with all social media, since you can publish directly and without thought. I think this is why it’s important to create some formats and a publishing plan instead of just telling someone to post whatever they want.
Another risk with blogging is that you start to measure success in numbers of readers. Your company blog shouldn’t focus on lots of readers; try instead to focus on the value for your audience. Try to measure the value in other KPIs than readers only.

Do you have some examples of really outstanding company blogs?
I have two company blogs that I believe do a great job in targeting their audiences. Mutewatch is a small start-up company that has created a nice balance between valuable content and business focus in their blog. The blog, called Timetank, focuses on time management and behavioural psychology.

IKEA has a very successful blog called Livet Hemma (life at home) where they post high quality interior photos with IKEA products. The goal is to inspire people to decorate with IKEA products. The design blog community is Livet Hemma’s target audience. IKEA creates great content for the bloggers to share. Take a look at livethemma.ikea.se.

Blog posts in Swedish per year

Being based in Sweden, a country of early adopters where blogging took of many years ago, we wanted to know whether blogging has peaked here or not. So we used our blog data to find out. The clear answer: It hasn’t! With almost 17 million posts published on blogs in Swedish in 2012, blogging activity has been tremendously bigger than in the year before, when less than 14 million posts appeared on Swedish blogs. The highest number of blog posts per month was published in October, with about 1,8 million.

Blog posts in Swedish per month

Analysing the number of bloggers we found that almost 400.000 people wrote at least one blog post in Swedish in 2012. Among them, 172.178 were active bloggers, meaning that they wrote at least one blog post per quarter.

Number of active bloggers in Sweden

We also had a look at how 2013 started compared to 2012, and even there we witnessed an increase in blogging activity: The number of blog posts published in the beginning of 2013 was almost 26 percent higher than in early 2012, and we saw more active bloggers during the first month of 2013 than in the same period of last year.

All in all, at least when focusing on Sweden, blogging as a phenomenon might not create the same headlines anymore as some years ago, but the actual activity is still on the rise. Blogging can be seen as the foundation of social media, with all the other communication channels and tools based around it. That was the case back in 2009, and that’s even more the case today.

If you understand Swedish, here are some more thoughts about the state of blogging in Sweden.

Let’s blog!

Note that we also included a few events that already took place for 2013, because we expect them to happen again in 2014.

Online Marketing & E-handel
Stockholm, March 13 – 14 2013

Webbdagarna
Stockholm, March 6 – 7 2013
Luleå, May 30 2013
Gothenburg, September 26 – 27 2013
Malmö, October 26 2013
Växjö, December 4 2013
webbdagarna.se

Future Retail
Stockholm, April 17 – 18 2013
abilitypartner.se/future-retail-2013.aspx

Scandinavian E-Business Camp
Gothenburg, May 23 – 24 2013
www.jetshop.se/sebc

Nordic eCommerce Summit
Stockholm, May 30 2013
nordicecommerceknowledge.com/summit

Load
Oslo, September 19 2013
bring.no/load/forside

Ehandelsforum
Gothenburg, September 2013
More info tba on e-handelsbloggen.nu

E-handelskonferencen og Messe
Copenhagen, October 10 2013
hfdih.dk/events/konferencer/2013/okt/e-handelskonferencen-og-messe-2013

Distandshandelsdagen
Date & location for 2013 tba
svenskdistanshandel.se/events-2/distanshandelsdagen

Emeet
Stockholm, date for 2013 tba
www.emeet.se

Photo: Flickr/ inUse Consulting; CC BY 2.0 

We just took some time to go through the results of a fresh report about the e-commerce year 2012 in Sweden (the home country of Twingly), and we thought we highlight some of the most significant developments and trends in this blog post. Naturally the state of the e-commerce sector varies from country to country, but the general direction and outlook is similar everywhere: More people buy more stuff on the Internet, via traditional computers and increasingly on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.

If you want to work yourself through the full report in Swedish you can download it form here (PDF). Otherwise, have a look at the following bullet points which we think are most relevant for readers of the Twingly blog:

> In 2012, 40 percent of the Swedish consumers bought at least one Christmas present online.

> 73 percent of Swedish consumers have bought something online in the last quarter 2012.

> Only 8 percent of Swedish consumers have never purchased something online.

> The product categories that generated the most revenue in 2012 were electronics followed by fashion, books and sport/leisure.

> The list of product categories that most consumers have said to have purchased from in 2012 is led by books including audio books, followed by fashion, computers and computer equipment, home electronics, movies and CDs.

> The frequency of buying things online was almost identically between women and men, but there are some gender-specific differences regarding the most popular product categories, i.e. men buy more computers and women by more books on the web.

> 19 percent of all consumers in Sweden have at least one time purchased a product via tablet or smartphone in 2012.

> 3 percent of the consumers have made their latest product purchase after finding information about it in social media. The most common way of finding a product to buy is through friends or acquaintances, which led 17 percent of the consumers to their most recent buying decision.

> If being asked about the prefered source for information about products online, 54 percent mentioned comparison engines, 41 percent friends and acquaintances, and already 11 percent favour social media to find goods to buy on the web.

> 92 percent of the consumers named comprehensive and clear information about products as one important criteria for a good e-commerce offering – which is exactly why we offer our eTrade solution.

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We used this occasion to ask Kaja Braendengen, project manager at Bubbleroom, a couple of questions about the importance of the fashion blogosphere for Bubbleroom. She is also the co-founder of the Norwegian fashion website/blog Modette.no, so she is really an expert on this topic.

Why did Bubbleroom choose Twingly? What are your expectations?
We chose Twingly because we want to work closer with bloggers and it’s a really great service that benefits both us and the bloggers. Our goal is to get more links from bloggers and increase the knowledge of our brand. The links we’ll get will hopefully improve our search engine visibility even more.

How important are blogs for your business?
The blogs and especially the fashion blogs are very important for us – bloggers today have a lot of power in the fashion business and they have a major impact on our target audience, women 15-35 years old.

What would happen if all blogs would disappear from one day to another?
That would not be good at all, and we would lose a big channel that affects what people know about Bubbleroom and which also is a big sales channel for us.

How do you encourage bloggers to link to Bubbleroom?
We have a lot of collaborations with different fashion bloggers and they often write posts about us and our products and link to our site.

How much time does the company invest into the work with social media in general and blogs in particular?
I work with both social media and blog collaborations. Every day we keep in touch with our customers and style setters through social media, it’s very important to get feedback from this channel as people are honest and direct, and we can respond quickly to their questions. I spend at least a couple of hours a day with these channels and in contact with bloggers.

In Sweden, many of the leading blogs are about fashion. Is it similar in Norway? What are the main differences between both (fashion) blogospheres?
Yes, it’s similar, all the biggest bloggers in Norway write about fashion as the main subject and that is the most popular theme. The blogospheres are quite similar is my opinion but the blog phenomenon is much bigger in Sweden.

Do you think that the impact fashion blogs have on the fashion industry and sales will increase even more in the future?
As more and more people get access to the internet, the blogs will become even more influential. Sales will depend on your visibility online so therefore it’s crucial to build loyal relationships with powerful bloggers.

A few weeks ago we announced a few initiatives to make our blog data even better so that our API clients can get even more compelling and complete insights into the world of the blogosphere. As we put it: Our goal is to have the best blog data in Europe in terms of coverage, quality and immediacy.

Now we again have good news for our API clients: Until recently we have only had 4 month of historic data available through our Analytics API. As of now, we extend that data to a full 12 month, with no extra charge. With that change, we can provide companies and organisation with even better, more complete data.

At the same time we also upgraded our search language which will make it possible to search for single characters. Previously two character words were the shortest query. This is something that our customers have requested and we are happy to finally release these features. This upgrade will also make the data available faster. Before it took up to 15 min from finding a blog post to making it searchable in Analytics, going forward it will only take seconds.

And by the way, our goal is to make all our data starting from 2006 available through our Analytics API, so there is more to come!

For all users of Twingly.com the upgrade means that the public blog search can provide 12 month of historic data as well.

We saw it coming, and now it is happening: Posterous, one of the first mini-/fast-blogging tools of the past years, is closing its doors on April 30. At the end of October we described how there were an increasing number of signs that suggested an upcoming shutdown. Half a year earlier Twitter announced the acquisition of Posterous. Already back then many observers saw this as a talent acquisition rather as a product or platform acquisition. With the official announcement on the Posterous blog that the team will focus 100 percent on its efforts at Twitter, this theory turns out to be true.

Even though Posterous was quite unstable and full of bugs back in October, the service didn’t provide its users with a proper backup tool. Fortunately, that has changed. All remaining Posterous users can go to https://posterous.com/#backup to access a .zip-File with all blog posts and comments. For everybody who plans to transfer their blog to WordPress, WordPress offers an internal Posterous importer. In our October post we explained how to use it in order to move all Posterous content to a WordPress blog.

The demise of Posterous does not say anything about the state of blogging. Tumblr, which launched during the same time as Posterous managed to grow exponentially and is going strong even today whereas Posterous never left its early adopter niche. An while Posterous will be history soon, a couple of new contenders such as Quora, Svtble, Medium and even LinkedIn have entered the blogging space in various ways.

Posterous lost because it couldn’t keep up with the competition. It’s probably better that Twitter finally pulls the switch instead of keeping it online while at the same time completely neglecting it.

We want to highlight one aspect which the Technorati report uncovers and which we find quite fascinating: On page 16 Technorati published a diagram showing which online services are most and least likely to influence online purchases (in the U.S.). The top spot goes to retail sites, where the likelihood that they influence a purchase for obvious reasons is very high, 56 percent. Brand sites do also influence people’s buying behaviour with 34 percent. But close behind, with 31,1 percent, come blogs. In other words: Blogs influence purchases on the web more than Facebook (30,8 percent), YouTube (27 percent) or Twitter (only 8 percent).

That is quite an astonishing result and proves once again the power of blogs.

Because of the relevance that blogs do have when people make purchasing decisions, the distribution of brands’ social marketing budgets doesn’t seem to follow any logic, as pointed out by Patrick Lambert on his blog. He highlights another chart from the Technorati report that shows the social budget breakdown of brands. The main share of brands’ social budget is being pumped into Facebook campaigns: 56 percent. YouTube and Twitter each get 13 percent of the total money spent on social media marketing, and only 6 percent are being put to use on blogs.

So while blogs have a bigger impact on purchasing decisions than Facebook, they only get a fraction of the brands’ advertising dollars.

That obviously doesn’t make sense, and it presents a big opportunity for all companies and brands that understand the power and relevance of blogs in the social media marketing mix.

All that means that 2013 could be the year when blogs get back into the brands’ focus. According to the statistics above, they should.

via Bisonblog