We now know the deeper truth about Sweden: Dumb people live there, too. What a revelation. Let's visit!
Almost half a year ago, the country's tourism brain trust came up with the idea of handing control of its official Twitter account to a different citizen each week and letting these individuals "paint a picture of Sweden" as they so chose. They dubbed them "curators" and 24 of them have so far held the reins, the latest being a 27-year old mom named Sonja who decided to ruminate about how hard it is to identify Jews. Actually, those were her more cogent tweets.
This has prompted some people to question the program, but its spokesman Tommy Sollen has said there's no problem with the campaign since it's intended to feature "...the multifaceted people that Sweden is composed of" without censorship or selectively deleting posts. At least one observer lauds the entire shebang, saying that it "...demonstrates how digital crowd sourcing can produce an exciting product and shows how fun Twitter may be when people tweet honestly instead of parroting rote public relations talk."
For all the striving the social media world does for respect and additional funds from the C-Suite, wouldn't it make more sense for us to admit that the @Sweden experiment is stupid, and help its hapless owners fix it?
There was never any reason to believe that the splatter from everyday voices would tell us anything interesting about Sweden, that anybody would pay attention long and consistently enough to catch something if it did sneak out or, even if it and they did, that the outcome would have any relevance to tourism (which was the avowed purpose of the entire endeavor). Swedes go to work, deal with their kids, get indigestion and are, at the community level, no more special than Norwegians, Belgians, Thais, or Americans. The languages and window dressings of cultures change but the lowest common denominators of humanity are decidedly generic, and they're quite uninteresting.
For that matter, the very premise of "social" upon which the campaign is based is flawed. Social isn't the mechanism of conversation -- there's nothing social about posts or responding to them, as in "Whoever is in charge of @sweden today really digs puke and diarrhea. LOL," says SeampunkMuppet, and Sonya replies "I've got pretty small kids!" -- but rather what's social are the substance and purposes of conversations. An inane reply to an inane comment is still inane, no matter how heartfelt or furtively "followed" by viewers. It's simply call-and-response. I wonder where puke ranks on topics of interest to potential tourists, or who'll pick up that thread.
Nobody is going to vacation or start a business in Sweden because its citizens are as consistently average, occasionally entertaining, and rarely (if ever) insightful as people pretty much everywhere else in the world. Pleasant order and lasting meaning don't emerge organically out of crowds. Instead, what we usually get is nasty, brutish and short. @Sweden is less a marketing or communications experiment and more of a car wreck waiting to happen. Sonja's recent blathering about Jews delivered the accident. Exciting, fun, and honest? The program could have simply focused a webcam on a loaded revolver held to the head of a puppy and dared people to miss the inevitable execution. The people at dictionary.com should send a cease-and-desist letter to the Swedes demanding that they stop using the word "curation."
If we could talk as honestly and openly as our social liturgy expects, we might help the Swedes out of this muddle. So I'm hereby launching a campaign to come up with ways they could modify their Twitter experiment to make it more useful as a marketing communications tool. I'm sure they're monitoring this site as part of their social media tracking, so we can presume they'll pick up our thinking as we post it.
Here are a few thought-starters:
- What makes Sweden different? How about challenging regular citizens to riff on what makes Sweden special, not in an abstract marketing-speak sort of way but to them, personally? Each day could be a Tweet (or many) to which followers could agree or disagree.
- Battle of the regions. Give residents a chance to promote their own area, perhaps even in competition with others? Stockholm and its environs vs. Falun. Maybe have citizens rate favorite dishes (pickled herring vs. reindeer), or offer survival tips?
- Engage with current tourists. Why not come up with some fun and motivating reason for tourists who are in Sweden to tweet while they visit? There could be some running narrative of their visits (perhaps get their family and friends to sign up for some sort of sanctioned "Look at me, I'm in Sweden" tweets).
- Debunk-o-rama. The tourism folks could propose various myths about Sweden and ask citizens to confirm or refute them. So "everyone is blonde" could prompt lots of pics from brunettes, or "it's always cold" could get some funny answers about midsummer.
As I've come up with these ideas I'm still having trouble linking even mildly moderated or focused tweets with a tourism/business purpose. Assuming you agree that the @Sweden campaign is mildly entertaining but otherwise stupid, what do you think would make it better?