In 2011, we became the first country in the world to let go of an official communication channel and hand it over to our citizens.The Task: Position Sweden as a progressive country. And put the core values (openness, authenticity, caring, innovation) into action.The Solution:Remove nation-branding conventions by letting ordinary Swedes control the official @sweden account 1 week at a time. Let them represent Sweden through personal reflections: thoughtful, provocative and fun tweets. Then repeat the procedure week after week putting new persons in charge of the account. Tweet by tweet, the image of Sweden is built: dynamic, personal, innovative and deeply human. Then add: No censorship. No limits. Just like Sweden.

Curators of Sweden is not a campaign, but an ongoing initiative that lives in real-time on the Twitter platform. The initiative started on Nobel Day, December 10th, 2011. Each week sees a new spokesperson for the country, which is revealed on Sunday night, before starting his/her honorable task on Monday morning.An archive function of the curators’ tweets and a short description of the project are available in parallel on the curatorsofsweden.com website.

ResultsWithin 6 weeks, we attracted over 26,000 followers from 120 countries and started thousands of conversations, sparking discussions on transparency in social media and how technology can be used for democracy as well as inspiring others to start similar accounts like @WeAreAustralia, @PeopleOfTheUK, @TweetweekUSA and @CuratorsMexico.We’ve been featured in all major media such as The Times, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News; blogs such as boingboing, thenextweb, readwriteweb and mashable; as well as on sites such as Huffington, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Vogue, Washington Post, Globe and Mail, La Stampa; and was broadcast on Swedish, Italian and US radio for an equivalent PR value in excess of US$19,800,000.Some media have been contacting our curators directly for interviews after their week was up. We think this is great!