Dear Susie...

CEO, Erik Ekholm

This was our first day visiting a company; we went to Skapa--a marketing advertising agency. We met with the CEO, Erik Ekholm. He founded the company with his wife in 1996. There are two "divisions" of the company, communications and marketing and web, technology and development. Skapa means to create in Swedish. The communications and marketing division is like an advertising agency and does online media. Skapa’s customers include: ABB, WirelessCar, Volvia, Volvo Penta, CAT (Catepillar), Easy-Laser, AkzoNobel, GVA, and Skanska. Skansa is a construction company that helped with Ground Zero construction. Skapa mainly has customers that are in the B2B market. The social media that Skapa works with mainly is Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Erik, the CEO, provided us with some very interesting statistics about each of these social media sites:

·                          Facebook

o   1.2 billion active users

o   720 daily active users

o   870 million mobile users

·                         Twitter

o   500 million active users

o   500 million tweets per day

o   It is mainly a social network used in the U.S., but it is starting to grow in other countries

o   It is a way to get people to a company’s website

·                        LinkedIn

o   8.5 billion USD in 2012

·                       YouTube

o   Over 1 billion active users

o   100 hours of video are uploaded per minute

Then he talked to us about social media campaigns; he showed us a few examples. The first was from Melbourne Metro, the video was a safety announcement to people about riding the tram. It actually decreased accidents and deaths by 21% in the last year.


The next video was was a YouTube video for Volvo Trucks called “The Epic Split featuring Van Damme”. He was doing splits between two Volvo trucks. Volvo also had a video called “Hampster Test”, which showed how good their dynamic steering was by having a hampster drive the truck up a mountain. The next was a company called BeOn. They help people and companies get traction for videos…basically make a video go viral. Erik mentioned that you can buy likes or views, which I didn’t know you could do. This makes it possible for advertisements to go viral. I also learned that in order to create a viral video it encompasses having emotional appeal, engagement, and/or a surprise element. He showed us the “Hump Day” YouTube video, as well as, Evian’s dancing babies video, and the “Devil Baby Attack” video. Erik said that some of the most difficult things about doing social media for clients is overcoming their objections and engage internally within companies to get people to help blog and write content. Some trends include: mobile, the China market, taxi applications, connected and wearable devices, and user generated content such as Netflix. Overall, I had a great time meeting with Erik, I learned a lot about social media that I didn’t already know and it was fun to see how modern the office they worked out of was. It was basically all white with lots of windows.

Our next stop was at the University of Goteborg. We met with Professor Claes Alvstam. His presentation to us was about Swedish business. He gave us some basic geographic, political, economic, and business information. I found it very interesting that roughly 70-80% of Swede’s costs of their homes are what they have in the bank. So if their house is worth $100,000 they have $70,000 or $80,000 in the bank. We also met with Martin Oberg, who discussed Swedish Retail Trends, Dr. Cheryl Marie Cordeiro and Johan Jacobson who were PhD students. 

Then our group, the “Super Six” (Megan, Alycia, Tyler, Joe, Paddy, and I; thanks to Tyler for coming up with that creative name), went to dinner at Dubliner. It was a pub and grill. We had burgers and beers…that cost $40 USD!!! But the burgers were really good, so it was worth it. But it was kind of awkward when we first walked into the restaurant because no one greeted us so we just pulled some chairs up to a table and sat there for about five minutes contemplating if we should walk across the street and just eat Burger King. Then all of a sudden the waitress showed up so we stayed. Alycia was having some bad luck tonight…she spilled the sample of beer all over Paddy, zipped Tyler’s jacket up that it cut his lip he started bleeding all over the place when we were waiting for the tram—it caused a scene and people were staring at all of us. And then there was some beer we put in Alycia’s backpack that exploded and made a mess. Needless to say her bad luck “should” be over, but we will see!

Some random things that I forgot to mention previously are that I’m surprised there aren’t as many blondes as what people said there would be. But once we got to the university there were more blondes. Another random fact is that the cafes and restaurants have tables outside with blankets and pillows for people to eat at, even during the winter. And there are candles at all the restaurants, businesses, cafes, and retail stores. Lastly, when we took the bus tour we learned that Goteborg consumes the second highest amount of coffee, which is about three cups of coffee a day per person.