Today Newsdesk, a great Swedish site for publishing press releases, is launching Twingly. We think this is an important step in corporate communications. We’ll describe Newsdesk below, but first let’s remember how companies used to talk to people, and not with them (actually most still do).
There’s been quite a revolution going on within corporate communication the last decade or two. It’s easy to forget how authoritarian and secretive the CEO:s of yesterday used to be. And of course, how obedient and humble mass media and people in general where. Just ask your grandmother or someone else in their 70’s, and you might be surprised about the respect they used to have (or still have) for bosses, doctors and professors of all kind.
Since then things have changed. It started with traditional media getting bolder towards leaders of all kind, followed by the evolution of social media. It doesn’t necessarily make all companies open and honest, but there’s definitely another kind of pressure on them. Now everyday people have the means to influence large organisations. Anyone can start up a blog, and shout out loud when something’s really rotten – and reach out to the big crowd when doing so! This might not always be easy for the companies to handle. For example: the Swedish company IKEA created a video-community for interior decoration, but had to handle uploaded material that discussed the IKEA-founder Ingvar Kamprad’s past as a nazi-sympathizer.
When Newsdesk now launches Twingly, you will be able to either comment on press releases directly on a company’s press desk, or get a link back when writing about it in your blog. Through this, strictly controlled corporate information will clash with the opinions and knowledge of the blogosphere. We’re quite thrilled to see which of the companies choose to open up for bloggers this way. And of course we hope that as many as possible will see the great opportunity in this – because the shady days are long gone, right?
Here is a blog post on Newsdesk about the Twingly-links (see Google Translation). Kristofer Björkman, founder of Newsdesk, have also blogged about it on his own blog (Google Translate).
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