With an unprecedented step, Swedish citizens have taken over the nations official twitter handle. Curators of Sweden is the buzz word now in Sweden, and is a project that grants a Swedish citizen full access to @Sweden for a full 7 days before it is transferred to a new citizen. During the 7 days, the Twitter handle profile picture is replaced with an avatar of the current author who is asked to promote Sweden, life in Sweden or any other irrelevant material (acting as a personal account) for the handle’s 16,000+ followers.
It started with Jack Wermer, a writer and marketer, who started tweeting on December 10th, 2011; followed by the writer Hasan Ramic, a Bosnian immigrant and currently the handle is in the hands of Adam Arnesson, who is what appears to be a social-media-savvy sheep farmer born in the 90’s! (According to the handle’s current official website). Following authors will be a priest and female truck driver.
The obvious objective behind this project is marketing the nation to attract tourists. I personally admire this courageous step which I believe will be very effective specifically in the subtle and creative manner it was implemented. Nonetheless, having your typical everyday Swedish citizen be granted this opportunity to express his affinity and promote his nation through Social Media, particularly Twitter, has to be interesting especially after the success Social Media had in provoking the Arab Spring last year.
The campaign was developed by the Stockholm agency, Volontaire for the tourism group Visit Sweden and definitely approved & supported by the government.
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