Hello Sven, here are the keys to the bus. Now remember, you’ve got nine million people to drive around and we’d really, really appreciate it if you didn’t crash into anything.
Flag courtesy of goscandinavia.about.com
Earlier this year, Sweden (yes, the country) turned over their official Twitter account to ordinary citizens. The program, which is officially known as Curators of Sweden was the brainchild of the government’s Swedish Institute, the official tourism entity, VisitSweden and a Swedish communications firm, Volontaire. To qualify as a curator, Swedes have to be nominated by someone other than themselves, they must know what Twitter is and how to Tweet, and they have to Tweet in English (hmmm, target audience anyone?).
Their goal is to promote the diversity and unique characteristics of their country through the eyes and the mobile devices of its citizens. In a true democratic fashion, each week, a different Swede is selected to represent the country in the Twittersphere with no limits or rules. The only words of warning come from Tommy Sollén, VisitSweden’s social media manager, who imparts these words of wisdom when handing over the keys:
“Please, do this with some dignity — remember that this is an official channel and there are a lot of people reading this, so don’t make a fool of yourself.”
It is a pretty bold move for a country to trust its citizens with unrestrained 140 character stream-of-consciousness Tweets. It must have gone pretty smoothly because it wasn’t until June that the world took notice. One of the Curators Tweeted a few, not exactly offensive, but basically quizzically ignorant comments about Jews (IMHO as a member of the Judean tribe). Her comments weren’t so much anti-Semitic, as from someone who has lived in isolation her entire life. The 27-year-old curator, Sonja Abrahamsson, is from a tiny town in northern Sweden where as she puts it “Where I come from there is (sic) no Jews, everyone is related and owns a tractor.” OK, moving on…
Erik Iseberg, 18, was one of the first curators. Casper Hedberg for The New York Times
But it was this and a few other curator missteps (or mistweets) that caught the media’s attention and one fake pundit in particular, Stephen Colbert.
When the story of Sonja Abrahamsson broke in the middle of June, Stephen Colbert was quick to swoop in. It wasn’t so much what she tweeted, but that, in his characteristically bombastic way, he wanted a turn at the Sweden Twitter account. Since then Colbert has launched a Twitter campaign to become a Swedish curator with the hash tag #artificialswedener and with all the publicity that’s been sparked @Sweden’s followers have grown from 28,000 to nearly 70,000 as of this writing. As is the nature of Twitter, ideas spread fast. The Netherlands, the City of Leeds (UK) and a host of other whereabouts have established their own rotating curating projects.
So is Twitter the future marketing tool for travel and foreign diplomacy? Or will that bus likely be driven off a cliff? I supposed that depends on the attention span of @Sweden’s followers.
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