The color was chosen as a counterweight to a time of turmoil, a warm and welcoming color that “conveys a message of compassion and empathy”.

So if you want to adjust your content according to the proposed color trend, here’s an easy way to get started.

Finding templates in Canva by color

If you are using the content creation tool Canva, it is very easy to create content with that fuzzy peach feel. By dragging the image above into an empty image in Canva, the color picker tells us that Peach Fuzz has the hex code #FEBE98. Now you can start adding elements to your images with the same color.

There are of course already a number of templates in Canva that you can use and you can search for templates by color. Just add the code #FEBE98 into the color picker and you will get several suggestions for templates with the same mood.

Color Palettes

Next step may be to create a palette based on the Color of the Year 2024. Go to Canva’s Color Palette Generator. Upload the image from Pantone and Canva suggests a number of palettes based upon the peachy original. If you find the one below a bit dull, there are others to choose from.

Another tool for creating palettes is Adobe Color Wheel. Here’s an example of a palette that was generated with Peach Fuzz as a reference.

Now you can start to incorporate (if your brand guidelines allow) these colors into your content production for 2024.

Oh, and there’s even a $30 color of the year coffee mug for the real enthusiasts…

“Sara Johansson” only responded to media requests by email and has been quoted in several Swedish media in recent months. But she does not exist. Her profile picture on LinkedIn is most certainly created by an AI software like the one behind the site www.thispersondoesnotexist.com which creates realistic photos that look like a real person, but is not.

In an interview with SVT Skåne, Eliot Higgins, CEO at Bellingcat, a site for investigative journalism says that the image is most probably computer generated. The white background, the hair cut and the fact that she only has one earring are signs that the image is fake. A reverse Google image search produces no results. In a preliminary police investigation, Vårdinnovation’s CEO Damon Tojjar confirms that Sara Johansson “is a joint communication account that Vårdinnovation has so that they do not have to be exposed in the media themselves”.

Synthetic media and deep fakes

Synthetic media, or artificially produced media, will become more and more common, but this is the first instance we know of in Sweden where a spokesperson for a company simply was completely fake.

If you are interested in deep fakes and synthetic media, I strongly recommend these two podcasts:

Making Sense – The information apocalypse. Sam Harris meets author and journalist Nina Schick who writes a lot about AI.

Brave New Planet – Deep fakes and the future of truth. Podcast with Dr. Eric Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

This was back in 2010, and although Facebook’s algorithm has changed and it might be a little harder to get that kind of virality today, we as users probably haven’t become much smarter.

As hurricane Dorian approached the coast of Florida, a Twitter account tweeted a video that appeard to show an enormous hurricane about to hit Miami Beach.

The tweet has gotten more than 1.7 million views, 35,000 retweets and 76,000 likes in one day, despite the fact that it is obviously fake. It looks fake and it is very easy to fact check, especially if you know that hurricanes originating in the northern hemisphere rotate counterclockwise. In the fake video, the hurricane spins clockwise.

Also, many of the replies to the tweet point out that it is not true and even link to sources that debunk the claim of the tweet.

The same video has also been shared several times on Instagram, but has since been taken down.

The computer animated video was first posted to Instagram in May 2019, several months before hurricane Dorian started to emerge. You can see the video here:

 

Visa det här inlägget på Instagram

 

Ett inlägg delat av TheGlitch (@theglitch.og) 18 Maj 2019 kl. 8:24 PDT

Why do we share fake news on social media?

So why do we keep sharing stories that are so blatantly false? There are probably many reasons why this happens. Research into why people share fake news show that “Individuals tend not to question the credibility of information unless it violates their preconceptions or they are incentivized to do so”.  There is also a tendency to view unique content as “too good not to share”.

In other words, there is no incentive to fact check something that looks so cool. Some may not even care.

There are many ways you can fact check social media posts, by googling and checking hashtags. You can take a screen shot and do a reverse image search on Google, that often reveals that the footage is older than what it appears to be. And as always, if it looks too good too be true, it probably is fake.

What you can learn from Google Search Console

This tool can help you improve your SEO through for example what keywords your site ranks for, what position you have in search results for those keywords, how much traffic your site gets from specific queries, and what other sites have linked to your content.

Improved results

In November 2018 my travel blog did not get much traffic from Google so I have been tracking its performance in Google Search Console ever since. By submitting a sitemap to the tool, I have helped Google crawl and index my site in a more effective way. Then I have been studying what search queries I rank for and some that I could rank better at. I have also started to try to get more external links to my site, through different activities.

Other steps I have taken is to add more content and links in order to improve the over all performance of the site.

The results:
Increased traffic: web search clicks (last 3 months) is up by 3000%, ok it is from a very low level but I am happy that it is going quickly in the right direction.

Increased total impressions: up by 3000%, also from a low level.

Increased average CTR: up from 2.7% t0 3,1% which means that when my blog shows up in search results, users click more often on my links.

Increased average position: up from 40.3 to 29.5 which means that on all the words and phrases that my blog ranks in Google, it has climbed an average of more than 10 spots.

Increased number of internal links: up from 26,000 to almost 54,000.

Decrease in number of external links: down from 2580 to 2360. Interestingly, the drop is mainly due to a huge drop in links from one of my other blogs, possibly due to a drop in the number of ranked pages on that blog. I must investigate.

All in all, by studying the results of my travel blog in Google Search Console, I have been encouraged to make ongoing changes and to add more quality content. This has helped improve the performance of my site just as I had hoped for.

You can have a look at my travel blog here and read tips from my trips to different destinations such as San Francisco, Singapore and Milan.

During last night’s Champions League final in Madrid between Liverpool and Tottenham, model Kinsey Sue Wolanski ran onto the pitch in a tiny swim suite. Wolanski is the girfriend of Russian born Youtuber and prankster Vitaly Zdorovetskiy, who has a history of streaking as well.

Gained more than 2 million followers

Right before she ran onto the pitch in Madrid, Wolanski had 316,000 followers on Instagram. That has skyrocketed to about 2.5 million followers earlier today.

Instagram is also full of copy cats who try to look like her account in order to gain followers. One of the fake accounts has grown from 73,000 to 114,000 followers in less than a day, so it pays off apparently.

Instagram has supspended Kinsey’s account

However, Kinsey Wolanski’s real Instagram account @kinsey_sue is nowhere to be found right now. A few hours ago, Vitaly posted a photo on his Instagram story where Kinsey says her account has been hacked.  More likely though is that her account has been suspended by Instagram, due to her sudden fame being a result of a criminal act.

Footnote: I’m @kullin on Instagram.

 

Visa det här inlägget på Instagram

 

Ett inlägg delat av Hans Kullin ︎ (@kullin) 21 Apr 2019 kl. 3:17 PDT

With this new feature there are toggle switches for each Instagram account that you are logged into. By turning the switch on or off, you can decide which accounts the image or video will be posted to.

I tried to post to two of my accounts and it worked like a charm.

Here is the image posted to @kullin 

And here it is on my @sthlmer account:

This can be an advantage for users who run multiple accounts in the same niche, or for brands that may want to publish identical posts to different brand accounts.

I would still use it with caution, especially if a lot of your views comes froms hastags. Since both images are publishes simoultaneously, they will appear next to each other in the hashtag feed, which may lower your reach and cause confusion.

Anyway, it’s an interesting new feature and we will see if this is a limited test or if the feature is permanent.

Follow me on Instagram at @kullin or @sthlmer for travel photography. Also see my travel blog “The World is Kullin”.

The fight for the spot as the world’s most subscribed Youtube channel has been going on for about one month now. Swedish Youtuber PewDiePie has had the largest channel in terms of subscribers for quite some time, but he is challenged by the Indian music channel T-Series.

I wrote about a year ago that T-Series already was the largest channel on Youtube in terms of number of views. T-Series overtook the Swede already back in February 2017 and now has 53.5 billion views, compared to 19.2 billion for the Swedish gamer.

According to the trend in October this year, T-Series should have passed PewDiePie already a month ago, but since this became a “thing”, PewDiePie’s numbers have improved significantly and his channel is now adding more new subscribers per day than he has done at any point during the last two years. So he has benefited a lot from the competition from T-Series.

Data from Socialblade:

T-Series will be number one this weekend

T-Series is still growing slightly faster (about 35k more per day) and at the current speed, T-Series will overtake PewDiePie as the world’s most subscribed Youtube channel on Saturday, Nov 24.

T-Series predicted to overtake #PewDiePie as the world’s most subscribed Youtube channel on Nov 24
Click To Tweet

You can check the live feed from Socialblade here:

IKEA today opens up its first India store in Hyderabad City. The Swedish furniture retail giant continues to be ranked the most valuable Swedish brand according to an annual survey by the brand valuation and strategy consultancy Brand Finance. In a new report listing the top 50 brands in Sweden, IKEA holds the number 1 position in terms of brand value, followed by H&M and Nordea.

“IKEA’s brand value dropped 5% over the last year to SEK197.1 billion, as the brand faces many of the same issues as other conventional retailers, especially increasing global competition from online-only sellers and digital home-improvement offerings.”

The top 10 list remains intact from 2017 but there are significant changes in value among the leading brands. For example, Nordea is the only brand among the top 6 that actually sees an increase in value, up 7% according to the metrics used in the report.

Top 10 most valuable Swedish brands:

1. IKEA (-5%)
2. H&M (-7%)
3. Nordea (+7%)
4. Ericsson (-15%)
5. Telia Company (-12%)
6. Volvo (-7%)
7. Swedbank (+7%)
8. Handelsbanken (+3%)
9. SEB (+6%)
10. Skanska (+7%)

Among the losers on the list is for example forestry and paper giant SCA which drops from number 18 to 38, with an estimated drop in brand value of 86%. The highest new entry on top 50 is hygiene and health company Essity which enters the list at number 20. The explanation for this dramatic shift (which the report fails to mention) is of course that SCA in 2017 split its business into two different brands: SCA and Essity.

The fastest growing brand is the e-casino B2B provider Evolution Gaming which increased its value by 82%.

See the entire list here.

Press photo: IKEA.

For travel tips about Sweden, check out my travel blog.

On one side you have four of the five highest ranked football teams: Brazil (2), Belgium (3), Portugal (4), Argentina (5) and France (7). Also on this half are Uruguay (14), Mexico (15) and outsider Japan (61).

The somewhat “easier” half of the knock out stage includes Switzerland as the highest ranked nation (6), along with Spain (10), Denmark (12), England (also 12), Colombia (16), Croatia (20), Sweden (24) and host nation Russia (70).

Fortunately, lower ranked teams of course can beat higher ranked teams, like Mexico’s surprise win over first ranked Germany. But as a fun exercise, here are the predictions for the Round of 16 based on current FIFA ranking. World Champions will be Brazil as they beat Switzerland in the final. Bronze goes to Portugal as they beat Spain.

Starting tomorrow, we will know which teams will advance and possibly make it all the way to the World Cup Final.

Digital influencers have become a major force in online marketing in recent years. Brands turn to celebrities and other influencers to engage audiences and sway purchase decisions in influencer marketing campaigns. A new study by Fullscreen and Shareablee shows that these social media influencers have a strong impact on their followers’ behaviour.

The study looks at four levels of digital stars:

• Celebrities – 20 million followers or more
• Trailblazers – online stars with 1 million or more followers
• Emerging voices and rising stars – digital creators with 250k – 999k followers
• Micro influencers – social media stars with less than 250k followers

Young people are influenced by social media stars

In the study, consumers aged 18-34 were asked whether they had taken any action as a result of seeing social media posts from digital influencers. Not surprising, many of them had and it turned out that celebrities were least effective in swaying consumer behaviour.

Micro influencers and “rising stars” are most effective in getting consumers to try one of their recommendations. As many as 45% of consumers report that they had done that.

“Digital trailblazers” are very effective at getting followers to purchase an item that they talked about in social media. Influencers with less than a million followers are almost as effective, while one in five consumers report that they had made a purchase as a result of a celebrity post.

Instagram creates most engagement for influencers

Among the social platforms that digital influencers use (Snapchat not included), Instagram creates the most engagement. This is especially true for micro influencers who see 86% of total engagement take place on Instagram.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that for example Youtube is not important. For many influencers, Youtube generates millions of views, so it all depends on how you define engagement. Also, I would have liked to see how much blogs affect consumer behaviour. At least in Sweden, many high profile bloggers generate massive sales for brands in campaigns that include a combination of blogs, Instagram and Youtube.

To read the entire report, please click here.