Monday, January 20, 2014

Day 4 Lets Get To Business

I woke up to a loud knock on our door this morning. My two roommates and I all looked at each other and did a quick rock paper scissors to see who would answer the door. My roommate joe lost so he got up to answer the door. Our female neighbors kindly came over to wake us up for our first trip to a business today. Although they came quite a bit earlier than we were planning to get up... It was definitely a good thing though we had plenty of time to get ready and prepare for the day.

Our first visit today was to Skapa. My other roommate Tyler was in charge of getting directions to get us to Skapa on time today. Last night we figured out a short route on the train to get there. Skapa had a beautiful office. It was so clean and very welcoming. They are a marketing company who is concentrated on social media. The CEO Erik Ekholm greeted us and led us to our conference room where he would give his presentation.

Erik started this company from the ground with his wife. Although his wife was a marketing major and he was an engineering major they created this wonderful business who does a really great job of helping a lot of big named companies with their social media websites. I really learned a lot from Erik's presentation on marketing in social media. Erik also had some very interesting statistics on where social media is used around the word. Of all twitter users 95% are from the United States. He also had a few slides that showed the various search engine results for some of his clients and how their webpages were activated. We watched some fantastic marketing videos during the presentation. These were some really popular videos on YouTube. Companies posted these videos on YouTube as a way to get the consumers attention. It is very interesting how many different ways companies can grab the consumers attention.

Our next stop on our trip today was to Gothenburg University. We sat down and had lunch in the cafeteria first. Let me tell you the food they served there was fantastic! I am quite jealous our cafeteria isn't pumping out food like this. After lunch we entered one of the lecture halls and professor Claes gave us a brief powerpoint on Swedish business. Professor Claes gave a very informative speech on the history of Sweden as well as the economics of Sweden. He spoke briefly on the housing bubble in 2007. Sweden was actually one of the first to recover from the crisis and it resulted in very little debt. Many other countries struggling with getting out of the recession took some of Sweden's ideas to help get themselves out of it.

There were two other speakers who spoke who both had gone to school at the university as well as somewhere outside of Sweden. My favorite was the male speaker who had visited the U.S. for graduate school. He spoke to us about his opinion of Americans as well as some of the activities he did while being overseas. I found his stances on some of the political parties to be very interesting as well as some of his positive thoughts on Americans.

After our final meeting at the university a few of us walked over to Haga to shop for a bit. Unfortunately we couldn't find anything to purchase but towards the end we decided to stop in this nice sports bar for dinner. They made some very good food, I got a wonderful cheese burger and fries! Yes I know very American. We listened to one of the bands playing there and had a few of the beers on tap. I really love trying all these different beers here in Europe. I am making it a new goal of mine to try a new beer if I decide to have one every night.

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