Gary Writes A Blog

Been thinking a bit about the CIS cup final on Sunday.

It could be said that Dundee United were the quintessential Scottish team i.e they bravely stood up to a much bigger enemy and gave their all, just to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Their opponents however were quintessentially something quite different…

While the eyes of the world were firmly fixed on Hampden this weekend for Dundee Utd’s participation in the CIS cup final, the attention in Sweden was on another event.

Saturday saw the climax of this years Melodifestivalen which is more or less Sweden’s biggest sporting event. Unfortunately, the whole event is designed to pick Sweden’s entrant to the Eurovision Song Contest. Over the last few weeks 3500 entrants were whittled down to 10 that performed in front of 13000 people at Globen last night and 3million TV viewers (a third of the country). At the end, the winner was Charlotte Perrelli…

Obviously the fact that she looks like a fox/weasel/foxy-weasel didn’t hold Charlotte back and she will be carrying the hopes of a nation into the semi-finals in Belgrade. Here’s the song…

Just watched United lose the CIS cup final to Rangers. Absolutely gutted.

I was watching it on a really bad connection that was probably being broad-casted from the dark side of the moon. Unfortunately it was the dark side that won the game.

United done well and lost the game on penalties after being in the lead twice. A real shame, but they certainly didn’t let anyone down.  We still haven’t won anything since 1994, but at least we have a half decent team now and maybe there will be a few finals to come!

Today is international Pi day (3/14 in the American way of writing dates).

I’ve always been fascinated with Pi. It’s not only the tastiest sounding mathematical constant, it also always pops up when you least expect it.

Everyone learns in school that the circumference of a circle is pi*d but it springs up in many other places aswell. When I was studying electronics I learned that the reactance of a capacitor was 1/(2*pi*f*C) and of course who could forget that simply multipling a frequency in Hertz by 2*pi gives the dimensionless measure of angular displacement, the radian.

I also found out that if you measure the diameter of an elephants foot and multiply it by 2*pi, you get the elephants height, but this was not in electronics class…

Anyone got a good pi equation?

Saturday was super-duper weather so we took the chance to get out of the house and take a long walk from the city and through the national park Djurgården.

It’s unbelievable weather for Stockholm in March and the crocuses were out in the gardens of the embassies that are south-facing.

We walked down to the canal where there is a herony (where herons live) and there was already a few there sitting on their nests and shouting at each other.

By the time we got back towards the city, the clouds were starting to come over and it was getting cooler, so we headed home.

Hahahahahahaha….

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7287984.stm

Hahahahahaha… (cough) hahahaha…

On the 1st of March, Maria’s mum sent over two martenitsa for us to wear…

Martenitsa are red and white threads that you wear around your wrist throughout March or until you see the first blossoming tree, you then break off the martenitsa and tie it around the tree. There is also some rule about seeing a stork and putting it under a stone, but there aren’t very many storks in Sweden, so I’ll go for the tree.

I think that this is a really cool Bulgarian tradition and unique to that region. It’s meant to celebrate the spring, but I’ve also heard stories of how the red and white symbolises the blood of soldiers who fought in the past and of a story about three brothers.

If you ever meet a Bulgarian on the 1st of March you can say “Chestita Baba Marta” and it’s basically wishing them a happy spring.

After a superb, “real man’s food” dinner of a big steak me and the lads (Henrik and Jan) headed out to 5emtio-4yra in Medborgasplatsen last night.

Was a great laugh, especially on the dance floor where the three of us boogied on down like three unused extras from the “Thriller” video…

It’s tradition in Scotland that on February 29th every leap year, a girl can ask her boyfriend (or perhaps just a stranger) to marry her.

I’ve managed to survive to lunch time so far…

The rise of the new media (blogs, social networks etc.), has led to a new line of work for the PR departments of most big brands. The question is how do you defend your brand against people crtiscising it online where it can be read by anyone? Worse still is when the bad PR goes viral and within days hundreds of thousands of people are talking about it (as happened with Kryptonite locks).

The first step in defending your brand online is to find out quickly what people are saying. Time is of the essence and a weekly Google search for your brand name just won’t cut the mustard. Use a company like Agent 25 that trawls the internet and notifies you whenever your brand is mentioned in relation to a particular topic you are sensitive about.

The next step is to act immediately!

If what the person is saying is an untrue claim, then try to send them evidence that it is untrue and ask them to remove it from the Internet before it does any damage.

If what they are saying is true, then it is best to try and be civil, send the author an email outlining your side of the story, tell them you are working on solving the problem and ask them to remove the article while you get things sorted out.

If it is an opinion which is different from yours and could damage the brand, the best thing to do is to get involved in the conversation as soon as possible. For example, if you own ShineyShampoo Ltd and somebody wrote that using ShineyShampoo made them feel greasy, get on their blog and leave a comment saying “I think that ShineyShampoo is not greasy and always smells of roses”. Remember to make it look as if you don’t work for the PR of the brand though.

Using this technique PR agencies can monitor what people are saying about your brand online and start to put your side of the story online within an hour or two of publication.