Today was the first weekday of the trip and we had a company visit with Skapa. We jumped out of bed at 8:15 and went to breakfast. Jumped into our Business Professional wear and headed off to the tram station. When we arrived to the Skapa office we were welcomed with Swedish Cinnamon Buns, Hot Tea, Coffee, Sparkling water, and our wonderful host Erik Ekholm, the CEO. The main objective of the presentation that Erik gave to us was surrounding what value Skapa brings to its clients. The two main elements of their business is Communication and Marketing along side Web, Technology, and Development. Caterpillar, Volvo Penta, Skanska, and HemoCue are just a few customers that Skapa works with to produce websites and blogs to give further insight into the benefits of products produced by the company.

Skapa’s philosophy is to “Attract new business and develop loyalty by delivering relevant and updated content that meets the customers wants, needs and challenges”. By doing this, Skapa strives to create the most relatable and engaging content to put out to possible consumers. Erik also gave us a piece of advice if we ever post anything on the web for content marketing, “When making content for the web, make sure not to be specific on time” If the content is relevant at any given time “It can feed multiple channels, such as Blogs, Press, Social Media, Sales Material, Email Marketing, and Websites”. We had a bit of time after Erik’s presentation to interact with the team that works in the Sweden office. I was able to strike up a conversation with Magnus Askling who is a Content Marketing Specialist. He manages and creates blog content for six different clients. Through the conversation with him I was able to get some insight into what his process looks like. First off he told me he needs to be very organized because he is working on multiple blog posts at one time. To execute his duties, he creates a schedule of content posts to ensure there is a constant stream of posting. Then he moves into interviews folks at the company over the phone, Skype, and in person to gather information to produce a blog post on the project.

From Skapa we headed up to University of Gothenburg to grab lunch at the cafeteria (It was pork chili with a white rice bedding, bread, salad, and cinnamon apples). It was exceptional compared to food at Carthage.

After lunch we moved to a classroom to have two business school professors give us a lecture on the history and economics of Sweden. Some highlights form the lecture:

• Sweden has 10.3 million people
  • 9 Million of which live south of 60 Degrees North
• The Country GDP is 538 Billion USD
• Sweden has been part of the EU since 1995, but still uses the Swedish Krona
• Tuition at Gothenburg University for individuals who are not EU citizens is about 20,000 Euros per year. Which is $22,191.50 USD.

After the lecture, it then moved into Fika and a Sweden trip tradition called “Ask a Swede” which is an event where 3-6 Swedish students come in and spend an hour or two with us just having conversations about anything under the sun. It was really insightful to see the parallels and differences in our daily lives from country to country.

For dinner a small group of us returned to John Scott’s (Different Location) I got the Scott’s Burger, which has the most fixings on it! For drink selection, I went with John Scott’s Beerlieve in Lager which is another beer that is brewed in Gothenburg by John Scott’s Brewery. It was a wonderful meal and for a very reasonable cost. Coincidentally, it was 168 SEK which is the same price I paid on Saturday night!

Takeaways

• Content Marketing is the less known marketing but has so much value to both the business and customer
• Food at the Gothenburg University is really good, unfortunately this is not the case at Carthage
• College students are not so different from country to country, we all have the same problems and successes