Why Sweden Was Right to Hand Over Its Twitter Account

June 12th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

On the Internet, as the famous New Yorker cartoon put it, no one knows you’re a dog. But if you’re a nutcase, that’s another story.

For instance, it became apparent pretty quickly this week that Sonja Abrahamsson is either a little unhinged or aspires to be a Sarah Silverman-style shock comic. Some evidence: a stream of controversial and ignorant statements about Jews, her photo of “strawberries with milk and urine” — and quotes such as this one:

People say all kinds of weird things on Twitter. But Abrahamsson did so in the voice of @sweden, that country’s official Twitter account.

[More from Mashable: Why Fans Share and How Brands Can Capitalize On It]

Last week, few people noticed what @sweden was tweeting about. But a June 10 New York Times story changed all that. The article, which detailed the Swedish government’s brave/foolhardy program to hand over its Twitter account to a different citizen every seven days, added about 10,000 followers. (At press time, there were a little more than 35,000 people following that account.)

Despite justified outrage over Abrahamsson’s Jewish comments, VisitSweden — the organization behind this 7-month campaign — is not changing course.

“It’s very important for us to let everyone take a unique viewpoint,” Tommy Sollén, social media manager at VisitSweden, told The Wall Street Journal. “Every one of our curators is there with a different perspective.”

Sollén does have a point. Marketers of all stripes are constantly being told to be transparent and take risks in social media and they’re constantly getting punished for doing so. The reason is simple: “Brand X Screws Up” will always be a better story than “Brand X Runs a Successful Campaign.”

The press’s bias shouldn’t make marketers gun shy, though. In VisitSweden’s case, humanizing the “brand” of Sweden by offering up its actual citizens is a logical and appropriate move. The fact is — are you sitting down? — Swedish people appear to have a different sensibility than Americans.

For example, they don’t appear to share our knee-jerk political correctness and queasiness over discussion about sex. Though Abrahamsson appears to be an extreme case, her predecessors in the @sweden role have also shown their quirky sides.

For instance, there was the woman who stated that she’d like to have intercourse that very minute, while Jack Werner, the first citizen to man @sweden, who went by the nickname “the masturbating Swede.”

Perhaps Americans who are contemplating a trip to Sweden should know beforehand that the place they’re intending to visit is more The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo than Pippi Longstocking. Maybe some Americans would even find a different sensibility refreshing. After all, isn’t exposure to different ways of thinking part of what travel is supposed to be about?

Seeing the clash of sensibilities on Twitter may not be pretty, but it is transparent and bold. At the very least, you can’t deny that it has raised awareness via its cringe factor. “It’s so amazing to watch,” says David Berkowitz, vice president of emerging media at digital agency 360i. “I’m so happy it’s not my country.”

Yet we’re talking about it, right? And what’s the downside? Does anyone believe that there are people who were considering visiting Sweden, but got turned off by this social media campaign?

Maybe so, but they probably wouldn’t have liked Sweden much anyway. Better to rent Pippi Longstocking again and call it a day.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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