Today my chronicle for the Swedish version of Metro Teknik came out (pdf). It was a challenge to have so few characters to play with. I’m more used to be able to write as long as I like, at least in our own trend reports. After a lot of “killing your darlings” I finally made it under 2600 characters. I tried to follow my own five golden rules:

• Make it personal
• Don’t be boring
• Have something to say
• Try to stick your chin out
• End well!

Whether I succeeded or not is of course up to the reader to decide, but for being a first time chronicle-writer I think I made it pretty well. So what was it I tried to say? Well we at Urban Lifestyle often get the question when visiting a client or holding a seminar if we have any good examples of Swedish brand doing something innovative within the new media landscape. A lot of you out there have probably heard about classics like “Dell Hell“, the Jet Blue incident, how Zappos use blogs and other social media tools to involve their clients and not to forget Blendtec with its brilliant campaign Will it Blend. These are all american cases and I must say I don’t have that many Swedish ones that I can think of. Sure a lot of them have blogs and use microblogging services like Twitter, they might even have their own YouTube channel but there isn’t a lot of them doing something really interesting. This is what I tried to say in my column, it’s time for companies to dive into the the ocean called Internet and to swim around! Not only to take the safe trip with the same boat as every one else already have done. People try out different web services and play around with them every day. I wish companies weren’t so afraid to do the same thing. But then people out there also shouldn’t be so quick to judge if not everything goes as planned. The important thing is to give it a try don’t you think?

Enough with all this social media talk, all I want is for people in Sweden (not only companies) to do more interesting stuff on the web. There are things happening but I still think it’s going to slow so come on surprise me!