Public Affairs and Social Media in Vienna with Austrian Online Influencers

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Austrian bloggers Helge Fahrnberger, Michael Vaccaro, and Matthias Wurz discuss SEO and social media marketing in Europe, cultural differences between Europe and the US, and what Austrians think about Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Kerry, and Bruno. Schwartzman & Associates is a public affairs firm of record for the U.S. Dept. of State.

Social Media Marketing in Vienna Insights 

00:58 – Helge Farhnberger talks about his blogging experience in Austria, his blog, his work as a social media and software consultant, and a primary sociological condition for human cooperation.  

02:45 – Michael Vaccaro talks about his blog, a platform for building online visibility for indie recording artists – primarily in Austria and Germany –  to help them get record deals and talent representation.  

04:02 – Matthias Wurz talks about his experience blogging, his blog, and his objective of explaining Austrian culture to an international audience.  

05:19 – Austrian bloggers share their opinions on Arnold Schwarzenegger as an actor, a politician, and an Austrian and why Austrians call him the man without a mother tongue.  

06:43 – Why Austrians stripped Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name from a football stadium named after him in the city of Graz.  

08:27 – How Austria’s right-wing conservative voters felt about the US Supreme Court’s decision to recognize President George W. Bush over Senator John Kerry, who was of Austrian descent.  

08:58 – Austrian bloggers react to Sasha Baron Cohen’s portrayal of a fictional Austrian character in the motion picture Bruno.  

10:10 – Austrian bloggers discuss the motion picture The Sound of Music and how many Austrians have seen the film.  

11:23 – Austrian bloggers discuss Viennese coffee house culture versus American coffee house culture, Starbucks, and talking your coffee to go.  

16:45 – Working hard, hardly working, and living to work versus working to live.  

18:02 – Austrian bloggers discuss Austria’s ranking as the best place to live globally.  

21:34 – Austrian bloggers debate whether or not a more precise delineation between work and play is causing social media marketing to develop differently in Europe and Austria.  

22:17 – Helge Farhnberger on the social demographics of Austria, which has 8 million people. And he talks about why innovations are more likely to come out of the US than Europe.  

24:31 – Michael Vaccaro talks about mixing social life and work, social media usage among younger people in Europe, the role social media users play as cultural signposts, and how Austria’s listing as the best place to live reinforces that behavior.  

27:26 – Matthias Wurz offers a counter perspective to Michael Vaccaro’s assertion that laziness is at least partially to blame for social media apathy in Europe and how he uses Facebook professionally and personally.  

32:45 – The state of the newspaper business in Austria, whether or not Austrians are becoming less interested in newspapers, and the reach and impact of mainstream news media.  

34:43 – How Michael Vaccaro started securing MP3s from labels that he could make available.

35:48 – Matthias Wurz gives us the state of the news media business in Vienna from the perspective of an officially accredited Austrian journalist who has been writing for a magazine for many years.  

39:12 – Which mainstream media channels are most under pressure from advertiser defections in Austria, and how the advertising agency spend is changing in Austria.  

40:34 – German start-ups developing products that involve search engine optimization consulting.

46:23 – Matthias Wurz on whether Austrian journalists are SEOing their stories and Steve Lohr’s article “The Boring Headline Is Written for Google.”  

50:07 – Austrian bloggers discuss the recent student protest that completely clogged the streets in central Vienna, which was organized entirely through Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #unibrennt.  The demonstration was estimated to be 20 to 40 thousand students large.   

59:02 — End

Photo by Paavel Liik on Unsplash