In the social media industry there’s always a lot of talk about Twitter Trending and many companies and organisation try very hard to get trending on Twitter.

I always get the question “Hey, how do we get trending on Twitter” and that’s probably because I’m one of the Co-Founders of Lissly, which is a company where we have a monitoring tool and we help customers with their Social Media Monitoring & Analyzing.

As many of my friends know I love StarCraft2 and this morning it was the final of Global StarCraft League November, the most prestigious tournament in the world when it comes to StarCraft2.

This final was so popular that it got trending topic on Twitter, so with my love for this game + my love for Social Media Analytics, why not publish some stats about this Grand Final of this event?

GSL Twitter data during 3/12 2011

Keep on reading the whole blog post →

There have been a lot of talk lately about blogging and that Social Networks and platforms like Twitter are killing the blogging.

In some extent this is true, but more in the way that blogging itself is changing and we use other platforms for it.

But blogging is not dead. Here in Sweden we have one of the most active blogospheres in the world and we are still bat-shit crazy when it comes to blogging.

Let me just simply show this by taking Swedish TV show Idol as an example, which currently is the most popular TV show in Sweden.

I have analyzed how many people mention Idol during the day of the weekly finals of the show and this last friday I found something very interesting. With Lissly I checked which kind of social media that mentions Idol the most:

In detail there are two interesting things here for 11th november Friday:

• 1317 tweets
• 1123 blog posts (!)

The amount of blog posts this day was really crazy – especially compared to Twitter. Twitter is starting to grow in Sweden but if you look at it compared to blogging it’s still very small in Sweden.

To write a blog post takes a lot more time from the user than a simple tweet and the content and effort for these blog post can’t really be compared to Facebook or Twitter – that’s why this is so impressive.

During the Idol finals there were 228 blog posts from 20.00-21.00! People simply talked about the Idol weekly final, what they did and what they thought about at the same time they were watching it.

1123 blog post does not seem so much in a country like USA but you have to remember that Sweden is a small country with 9.3M people – that’s what makes it so amazing.

So when you hear someone say that blogging is dead and you should totally switch your focus to Twitter & Facebook tell them to think again: In Sweden blogging still kicks ass!

This post is a translated post from my Swedish blog about DreamHack. Many people asked for translation so here it comes with some updates!

A couple of months ago I got an invitation from DreamHack to speak at their event and also to visit and get to know DreamHack and what it really is.

It didn’t take me long to decide and therefore I packed my bag and took a train down to Jönköping to visit my first DreamHack ever.

I deeply regret that this was my first time there – because when I was there I realized something – DreamHack is one of the most magnificent and biggest events in Sweden, and also probably even a national symbol that we Swedes can be proud of.

WTF is DreamHack?

“Isn’t DreamHack an event whee 15-year old geeks who’s doing piracy and drinks Coke and smell bad?”

NO! It’s time to kill this myth once and for all. I was there – so let me explain what DreamHack is for those who does not know about it.

DreamHack can be explained as an event with three pillars:

1. Culture/LAN
2. Festival/event
3. eSport

Keep on reading the whole blog post →

A couple of days ago I held a presentation at Scandinavian Super Affiliate Summit in Sweden about WordPress and SEO. I promised the participants at the conference to publish the presentation on my blog.

So without further ado – here’s the WordPress SEO presenation:

WordPress plugins mentioned in the presentation:

• CustomPress
• Google XML Sitemaps
• HeadSpace
• Yoast WordPress SEO
• CrossLinker
• Broken Link Checker
• RSS Footer
• Related post plugins (YARPP)
• Disqus (WP-plugin)
• WP Redirection
• WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache
• Smush.it

Anything that you thinked I missed in the presentation? Please let me know in the comments below.

Yep, you heard right – this is a story about how a major newspaper in Norway over a night lost 5 000 incoming, natural links… per month.

What is Twingly and what has it to do with links?

To get all of these things right we have to explain some things about Twingly and why it’s one of the best tools to have on a news site to attract links from blogs. Twingly have a lot of products but the most interesting I’m going to talk about here is their blog widget that you can add to any site/page.

Here’s an example on how it looks on SvD.se in Sweden:

And here’s an example on how it looks on the newspaper Telegraaf.nl: Keep on reading the whole blog post →

You might have heard a lot from your fellow Scandinavian friends lately. You know, we tend to win a lot of golds in the Olympics when it comes to Cross-Country Skiing and other winter sports. But we do not only kick your ass in hockey and skiing, we also kick your ass when it comes to Facebook usage!

I have recently studied statistics from Facebook when it comes to demographics and growth. I’ll publish the whole thing on monday on my Swedish blog but in the meantime it’s interesting to look at some statistics for Scandinavia and the Nordic countries.

40% of Scandinavia have Facebook

If you compare Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark) with the rest of the world we have a lot more users in % of population than the most of the countries in the world.

If we compare the Facebook data with official population statistics we see that almost 40% of every living person in Scandinavia have Facebook. Keep on reading the whole blog post →

I love Matt Cutts videos on YouTube. They are good and for webmasters they can often be quite educational when it comes to SEO.

Sometimes the videos are just funny or sometimes you just ask yourself: Why did you put up this video on YouTube?

A couple of days ago Matt Cutts published a short answer from a person who asked: “Why do cats bums go up when you stroke them?”

Actually a quite interesting question where Matt Cutts answers the question with “I have no clue”, “Go and check a website” and somewhat indicates that you should just “Google it”.

There’s just one problem here. If you search for that exact phrase on Google you will find this spammy SERP:

Thanks to Matt Cutts and this video the first results refer to this video and do not answer the direct question.

If you search for results that were not published before this video you got this result:

Yep. You’re totally right. Matt Cutts just made a SERP worse

For the record: I love cats.

The art of Picking Up girls and boys have a lot of similarities with marketing, especially when you combine this with Late Night, which is one of the themes of this blog. So, why not a blog post about this? Let’s do it.

For those who know me I have the track record of breaking iPhones. I manage to drop them but like a miracle they still work even though the glass is broke – but they are not that pretty.

The first reaction you have when this happens is that you get sad. Your love no #1, iPhone, is broken!

But after a while you don’t cry that much anymore, simply because the broken iPhone has turned into a enormous tool with a lot of possibilities.

Why? It’s your perfect pick up tool! Forget all that’s been written about peacocking, dressing up like a rock star and everything else.

If you want the techy, cool, iPhone-loving girl or boy – all you need is a broken iPhone.

This is how you do it by the playbook:

Playbook – The Broken iPhone

1. Make sure you’ve got money to buy a new iPhone or a bulletproof insurance that covers it.
2. Smash your current iPhone so the display breaks (see pic above). You don’t want to break it too much, you want the iPhone to work afterwards.
3. Prepare an amazing story on how it was broken:
   “I was on safari in Africa last week and then a lion came and started chasing me…”,
   “I was at the release of the movie Shutter Island and at the party Leonardo Di Caprio and I had a drinking game. Suddenly…”
   - You can pretty much come up with anything. Just make sure the story boost yourself.
4. Find a girl/boy that have a nice phone. Preferrably it would be best if it’s an iPhone.
5. Walk towards her and stand next to her. Look important while you put up your iPhone so she/he clearly can see that it’s broken.
6. Wait for it… She/he will ask the question: “Oh, what happened to your iPhone?”
7. Game on! Start telling the amazing story with the lion or Leonardi di Caprio, lions or another amazing story.

That’s pretty much it. Now you’ve broken the ice and the rest is up to you.

There have been a lot of talk about that Twitter doesn’t grow that much anymore and that we are seeing the end of the hype behind Twitter. I think this is wrong in so many ways and there is one thing that you can look at that shows that Twitter is growing and that is Twitter Search.

During 2009 Twitter Search has become the natural place when it comes to real time search, especially during live events like Michael Jackson death, Iran election etc.

Search + Integrated Search = Twitter Search

One problem many people do when they try do analyze Twitter Search is that they only look at search.twitter.com which is a big mistake. In July 2009 Twitter launched their new site and there you could see something quite interesting. They focus with a big search box and every search made through the homepage are done on integratedsearch.twitter.com.

Many people just look at search.twitter.com and the they see that the traffic didn’t increase that much during the last couple of months.

Twitter growth 2009

To solve this problem I’ve added upp both search.twitter.com & integratedsearch.twitter.com to see how the growth has been during 2009. The data below is from the fantastic Compete.com where you can find good data for U.S.

As you can see in the graph the growth of Twitter Search have been quite amazing in the US during 2009. From December 2008 to December 2009 the growth is 457%. Twitter Search was launched during 2008 so we can only see data from July 2008 and forward, therefore you can’t compare whole 2009 with 2008 but…

If you compare Q4 2009 with Q4 2008 it’s a 586% increase in traffic.

It’s not fair at this point to compare the traffic with big competitors like Bing, Google or Yahoo Search but you can indeed compare it with niched search engines like Google Blogsearch, Technorati, Yahoo Images etc.

Here you can see the interesting regarding Twitter Search growth. In comparison with these Twitter Search has grown and today Twitter Search has 4 times as many visitors than Google Blogsearch.

Twitter Search may not be the largest engine right now, but if it continues to grow like it did during 2009 it will become an engine that marketers need to focus on.

Today I saw the video from Matt Cutts regarding 2010 Search Predictions and as always it’s good to know what comes out from the Google Plex. I don’t know if there were any good predictions in the video but I do agree with him regarding the problem with illegal Black Hat stuff.

But to get serious – there must be some other predictions regarding search than hacking, malware in 2010, right? Of course there are! Some weeks ago I wrote an article about trends within Search in Swedish. It was before I started this blog so now  I’ve taken the time now to translate it into English so you won’t have to use Google Translate all the time.

Some of the predictions in the original article are completely based on Search in Sweden, and it’s quite differenent internationally. Therefore some predictions have been taken away and some have been modified.

So here comes this weeks list: 10 Search Predictions for 2010 that not have gone through Googles filter: Keep on reading the whole blog post →