Gary Andrews

I now own the latest Cornershop album, Cornershop and the Double O Groove Of. I wasn’t necessarily planning on buying it until an unexpected intervention.

I’d listened to the album a couple of times on Spotify and thought it really rather lovely. I Tweeted my thoughts on the album and made a mental note to possibly purchase a copy if I saw it for a decent price.

A few hours later, I had a retweet from Tjinder Singh from Cornershop, along with a quick thank you.

We don’t follow each other, so he must have been keeping an eye out for mentions of the band. I’ve never been personally thanked by a relatively well-known musician for complementing their music before, and that kind of tipped me towards buying the album.

As with most things Internet-related, it got me thinking about social media and communities.

One assumption I often come across with managing your online social media areas is that you have to use it to fight PR battles and crises, or to use them to launch whizz-bang promotions that entice new followers.

This isn’t to say this is a wrong attitude – these are both very valid and necessary uses for a brand’s social media.

But a good community manager also knows the value in the little things that show the large swathes of often silent fans they’re appreciated.

All community managers will have a set of vocal fans they’ll often interact with. These are often the brand cheerleaders and can be nurtured.

But it never hurts to say thanks to those who’ll pop onto Facebook and Twitter once to politely say how much they liked something. These are also relationships worth nurturing.

After all, the person who you say thank you to a couple of times or answer a reasonably easy query could be tomorrow’s brand evangelist.

And, yes, the new Cornershop album really is rather good.

written by Gary \\ tags: community management, Cornershop, Tjinder Singh

Social media’s pretty well established now but the question of who should take ownership for activity is no closer to being answered. PR Week have recently been attempting to answer this, making an argument for a host of different disciplines, while Econsultancy have argued that social media shouldn’t be owned by a PR or ad agency. I tend to agree with them.

Social media is a multi-faceted beast. It can be used to break stories, promote campaigns and brands, deal with reputation management, drive sales, and nurture and develop an enthusiastic community of fans and followers.

Just looking at this list it’s clear that there’s a whole host of potential stakeholders all of whom could legitimately lay claim to be the right people to drive this strategy forward.

Marketing will certainly be happy to push the message or the brand but may not be the right people to respond to a crisis or issues that might arrive.

PR, meanwhile, will be perfect for this and would seem to be the most natural fit but, although you have some excellent social PRs, may not be the most naturally inclined to nurture or build a community, while the community person may not necessarily be the right person to completely get across the message on the occasions that are required, or deal with social issues out of the community.

Then there’s the analytics, something that those on the media side of things are generally less inclined towards. Then there’s always the temptation for some companies to give it to “the web guy” or the most enthusiastic member of the team. But if they’re doing this on top of their normal work and don’t get the support from the rest of the organisation then this negates any savyness they bring to the table.

I realise this is a somewhat simplistic overview of the whole area – some companies have very evolved social practices and are happy to work in the grey areas – but it still shows the dilemmas and issues ownership of social projects.

It’s why, increasingly, I strongly believe that any company, organisation or group that has genuine aspirations of working successfully in a social space should be employing somebody whose brief is solely social media and is comfortable with all these disciplines (and, in fairness, a lot of companies are moving in this direction).

Ideally this person will have some form of media background or knowledge – they’d need to be able to communicate with the PR and marketing sides, and also comfortable writing and commissioning blog posts. They’d also have the time to integrate with a community, appreciate the sensitivities and, if they’re really good, use this to feed back and potentially help their employers produce something cool and well-received.

The other aspect of this is the social person being happy to delegate social responsibility elsewhere in the organisation. One of the temptations for social media is to give it all to one person.

But if you’re going to have one person overseeing social media then they will need to facilitate and delegate. There will inevitably be co-workers who are better placed to run Twitter feeds or answer questions on this topic, and, most importantly provide guidance.

I’ve worked in plenty of places and heard tales from elsewhere where social strategy and cool ideas were held up because several different departments wanted to make a land-grab for the social media rights and this internal jostling often ended up slowing the whole process down.

And, as we all know, social media isn’t exactly an area that’s inclined to hang around.

It’s all to easy to have assorted departments squabbling over who should take charge of social media. Instead, treat is as a separate discipline and hopefully you’ll see the benefits.

written by Gary \\ tags: advertising agencies, PR, PR agencies, PR Week, social media, Twitter

A new year, a new shiny toy to play with in the shape of Quora, the social question and answer service.

Since Tuesday, Twitter – and Quora – has exploded with hype, counter-hype, naysayers and people somewhere in-between trying to work out if this is the next big thing in social media.

There’s a few interesting points to be made around the bubbles around these services, which I’ll come to in a bit, but to answer the Quora question, my initial thoughts are probably not, but it’s an interesting and potentially very useful site that could gain a reasonable amount of traction.

Taking out the obvious self-publicising answers that appear on the site, the quality of the answers is very high and in-depth and there’s a very knowledgeable crowd on there.

There’s also potential for mainstream media and other companies to use it. For journalism, it seems like an excellent place to gauge opinion and reaction that’s likely to be more considered than, say, Twitter, as well as cultivating potential contacts.

You can also see how this could be useful for specific radio or even TV shows, while it offers good opportunities for brands to enhance their profile if they’re willing to engage with this community.

But – and I could be very wrong here – the strengths of Quora is also probably the reason why it probably won’t go mainstream in the way that Twitter did (and Gigacom also has a few potential pitfalls as well).

Firstly, the more users Quora gets, the greater the potential for the quality of the questions and answers to go down. The voting element adds a safeguard of kind, but if, say, you see the sort of mass adoption in the style of Twitter, then the user base changes.

Secondly, would a mainstream audience necessarily want to become regular Quora users? If there’s a lot of specialist knowledge there, will it discourage the average Twitter user from regular usage, if they just want to socialise?

Unsurprisingly, Quora is also very to-heavy with marketing, technology, PR, media and social media queries, which may put others off. The quality of answers is usually strong, and fascinating, for these topics, but stray away and the level of answers is somewhat hit and miss. Will this put off people who don’t specialise in these areas?

I’ve asked two questions – and followed several others. One was on SEO, which had short, sharp, snappy, useful replies. The other was a question on managerial sackings in football, which I’d hoped would attract a couple of thoughtful responses.

So far, I’ve had no responses and a quick look through the other questions asked around football aren’t exactly on a par with those in the social media section. That said, the growing food community on Quora is quite useful and interesting.

Perhaps the area, or social media site, that Quora could impact on the most is LinkedIn. The type of discussions are very similar to a lot of the groups I’m a member of and opening it up to a wider audience taps into even more expertise than individual LinkedIn groups can offer.

As with anything social media related, if the site, app or whatever is to break through into the mainstream it needs to reach out beyond the early adopters and those who rush to praise it off the back of this – normally the social media and tech community – without alienating those who have vocally supported it.

It’s why I’m not rushing to hail it as the future of social media or the next big thing from this area, although the amount of use and the ease with which the new users are embracing the service suggests this isn’t a flash in the pan. How far it can go is another question.

And this leads neatly onto a finishing tangent, which Quora neatly highlights. The big mainstream social media sites that are breaking through are few and far between now, despite everybody looking for them. But those, llike Qoura, that appeal to an informed niche will pick up a lot of traction.

Several years ago, I remember musing to colleagues that niche would be the next big thing. In hindsight, I was probably a bit too early but there’s no reason to reverse that prediction. The problem with networks or sites that appeal to a nice audience are they will never become as big or as sexy as Facebook or Twitter, but they have the potential for decent growth and even a business model.

Other than niche, the other obvious areas for exploding in 2011 are mobile apps and social TV. In the former, smartphone usage is becoming more ubiquitous (about half the people on my bus today had an iPhone). All it needs now is a social mobile app that changes the game completely. Foursquare isn’t quite it, though.

With the latter, you only have to tune into Twitter and Facebook during any TV show with a decent amount of viewers to see how important social media is as a backchannel. With Google and Apple moving into the TV market and a generation comfortable with social media as part of their everyday life coming into more disposable income, the potential for growth in this area is huge. When somebody makes the right product, that is.

Now, having said that, expect me to be shown up as the ignoramus I am as all these predictions turn out to be gubbins by December.

Additional: Vicky Chowney mirrors my thoughts on Quora in a much quicker, cleaner and more intelligent way.

written by Gary \\ tags: 2011 predictions, LinkedIn, Quora, social answers, social media

Who would have thought bath screens could start a good discussion on social media? On a National Union of Journalists mailing list, of the reasonably high-up members shared with us an email he’d rather mischievously sent to a DIY store asking for their review rates after they invited him to write a customer review of his purchases.

Although done in semi-seriousness, I don’t necessarily agree that it’s an area where the NUJ should be getting involved in. For me, although the quality of reviews can be variable to say the least, they are still a useful service and the company should be congratulated for trying to engage in a form of a two way conversation and even create a community, of sorts.

From a customer point of view, these visible levels of feedback are useful. Pre-web, any feedback would go deep into the company’s filing system. Even the small step of allowing reviews and comments opens this up to a new level of conversation (although the really good ones don’t just leave it at comments, they host and curate and foster a community as well).

I’m probably doing my manly image little good here by confessing DIY is something I know precious little about. To me, customer reviews from the similarly uninitiated are highly useful. A while ago a friend purchased a cabinet of sorts – several of the reviews on the site said it was a nice item but very fiddly to put together. She ignored the reviews and several hours after the delivery was cursing ignoring the reviews, and talking about adding a review herself.

This is, in my mind, hugely different from a journalistic review. I’d probably look at customer reviews first and, if still unsure, then search out a more professional view. Although whether there’s a publication that has a specific section on bath screens, I have no idea. Does that level of depth exist? I suspect the SEO for the professional publication would be much worse, and harder to find than on-site reviews.

To go further, there’s a strong argument for saying if there are paid reviews, they should be kept very separate from customer reviews on the site. At the very least they should be flagged as such. An unflagged paid review nestling among a group of unpaid customer reviews raises all sorts of questions, none of them good.

This isn’t to say companies shouldn’t include paid reviews on the site. It’s quite useful to have a neutral assessment of the product, especially for more subjective things, such as music. Whether the company wants a neutral, even critical, review of a product is another matter.

User-generated content hasn’t killed journalism, and neither will customer reviews either (you might as well argue that the BBC’s Have Your Say boards constitute opinion columns and should be paid as such). And if a company takes it on itself to create and curate a community of, say, DIY lovers that’s well-taken for the initiative (providing there is a genuine commitment to curating and keeping the community well-managed).

There’s undoubtedly an issue with profitable websites that will happily commission reviews for free when the cash is there to pay the journalist. And you can argue where the line should be drawn. I also appreciate the NUJ needs to protect the interests of its members, but I’m not convinced replacing customer reviews with professional paid-for reviews on every subject would be a particularly good way to go about it.

Others may argue this is just another way of letting amateurs into do reviews for free. I disagree. Although this skirts on area that touches on journalism, communities and the general sociability features of Web 2.0, there feels a world of difference – for the reason outlined above – between getting amateurs to fill in for journalists and getting customers to give feedback and nurture a community that can contribute positively.

The one area I’d definitely agree with the NUJ member on is the original email should have a proper contact (his reply just bounced back). I’d also be curious to see what the response would be, although I suspect we’d differ on agreement of the any reply. There are plenty of good battles for the NUJ to pick to protect the future of journalism. I don’t think this should be one of them, even if was done in semi-seriousness.

UPDATE: Comment from Sian below. I showed her the email, just to get things straight in my own head. I think she makes a reasonable point.

“The thing that bugs me about this, is that it doesn’t appear to be an NUJ stance, yet the guy who sent the email (the NUJ vice president no less) has decided that he’s going to use the weighting of his position to make trouble. “

written by Gary \\ tags: communities, feedback, journalism, NUJ, reviews

Like an ageing celebrity, some web companies, startup or otherwise, feel like they’ve been around forever and you assume they’re in rude health until you see a news story flash up that they’ve died.

And then you remember they exist, feel a bit sad, relive the happy memories and move on.

12seconds.tv, sadly, is that aging celebrity.

At that start of the week, the video microblogging (or microvlogging, I suppose) site announced it was to close later this month. It It was lacking: Lack of a revenue model, lack of time, lack of interest all seemed to conspire to kill it off.

Which is a shame in many ways, as every now and then you’d see a nicely worked PR campaign, or piece of community growth around the site, usually from people who knew what they were doing when it came to social media. It mark spark a bit of extra interest or a mental note to re-explore the possibilities, but then it’d usually get put to one side.

And that was probably the biggest problem – lots of people who liked the site, could see what it was for, and liked what 12seconds was doing, but never actually used the thing.

Jemima Kiss wrote a very good analysis of why video chat communities suffer – they’re high cost, the communities are often small and video chat or video microblogging still feels a bit weird. I agree – it’s one thing to type a 140 witty retort on Twitter. It’s much harder to do that well with a camera pointing at your face.

I’ll confess, I don’t think I’d even considered using one of the several vlogging sites in any kind of professional capacity or brief for about nine months now, if not longer. I don’t think I’ve heard too many people in my field mention 12seconds or Seesmic for a good while either. And I played with it a bit a few years ago but never really used any of the communities much on a personal basis.

About two or three years ago, video microblogging or live streaming felt genuinely exciting. Certainly, there was a fair bit of buzz, even from the technophobes in my then office, when the people promoting the fourth Indiana Jones film got Steven Spielberg and the stars to do a Q&A via Seesmic.

I remember looking into the possibilities of Qik, Seesmic and 12seconds, and others, for work purposes (chiefly PR at that point in time), but gradually it seemed to become less relevant to the brief. There were people using these sites but it seemed to make more sense to focus activities elsewhere.

Journalism-wise, as well, 12seconds was an interesting tool. But then, although there wasn’t the immediacy, YouTube was still the daddy (with Vimeo clinging onto the coat tails) and, for a variety of reasons, it made more sense to post elsewhere, especially if you wanted something longer than 12 seconds.

And then Audioboo was doing a nice job for the audio side of things – and you felt a lot less self conscious using this. Plus, the quality on Audioboo is generally good no matter where or what you’re using. Making good video is a lot more time consuming.

But I genuinely don’t think video blogging sites like 12seconds are completely on the way out. The innovative campaigns that were run using 12seconds and the felt the technology is getting a lot more mobile and easier to use, while increasing in quality, means you’ll always get a steady number of people working in the area.

There’s definitely a niche for a more intimate, immediate, community vlogging site that isn’t directly competing with YouTube or Twitter, although if I knew what that was, I wouldn’t be writing that now.

Certainly from both a PR and journalism perspective, there are wonderful chances to get very creative with video and some portable tools. It might even be good for the health of this particular area if it was written off – it would give those who are genuinely passionate about it the chance to build something away from the limelight a little.

Video’s such a ubiquitous medium that I’ve no doubt someone, somewhere will come up with a great idea. In the meantime, there’ll be one less place to experiment with. 12seconds.tv will be missed, but probably not for much longer than that length of time.

written by Gary

Ding! Another day, another poorly worded and conceived pitch arrives in my personal inbox, and my heart sinks a little further towards despair. If it weren’t for the Germans, and Portugal’s goal fest against the North Koreans, I’d have received more useless pitches than goals this World Cup.

Quite simply, judging by the majority of pitches than have landed in my inbox, general PR from companies looking to take advantage of the World Cup has ranged from poor to truly shocking. Most have made no attempt to remotely engage.

At least one email has been so laughably bad, I’ve sent it on to friends and colleagues so they can marvel that, yes, some agencies are still much worse than had previously been imagined.

I’m not in the habit of naming and shaming, but at least one agency has come close to me breaking this general self-imposed rule. Not that they’d know – judging from their emails I’d be shocked if they’ve even ever bothered to read anything I write.

Here’s a few selected highlights:

• An email starting with the words: “Hi, we’ve created some virals for your blog.” No, no you haven’t.
• An fairly obvious copy and paste email email urging me to cheer on England three days after they were knocked out.
• A general assumption that I was a fanatical England fan. I support Wales. This is fairly obvious.
• An email asking me to send a copy of my publication to agency x if I ran a piece on the product they were hawking.
• The PR who sent a pitch during the opening game. We had better things to do at that stage.
• Several emails that had nothing to do with the World Cup, other than a hastily added sentence to include a reference. You’re fooling no-one here.
• All bar two emails started with ‘Hi’. Not ‘Hi Gary,’ or any attempt to make it personal. Just ‘Hi’.
• One insinuating I would be so desperate for content during a two day break of football that their pitch was the only way I could keep my readers hooked.
• Hardly any emails made any reference to the fact I write for half a dozen places at the best of times. It was always ‘for your blog’. Do they mean this place and its five readers?

There have been two exceptions to this general trend – two well-crafted, engaging pitches where the PR had clearly read the type of things I write about, read my profile and made a general effort.

They were the only two I replied to – and if they’re reading, you know who you are, and I’m sorry I’ve not been able to write about the information in your pitch. It was simply a case of lack of time. But I really did appreciate your emails and the personal touches. If I was using good examples of how to pitch to bloggers, these would be among them.

Speaking to other bloggers, the trend seemed to be depressingly similar. They too had received endless pitches from PRs labouring under the illusion that we were so excited about the World Cup, we’d write about any old tat that mentioned it.

They were half right. We’ve all been very excited about the World Cup.

I’d even go as far as to say that once the World Cup kicked off, unless the pitch was something very pertinent to the general narrative of the tournament, then football bloggers should have been the last people to pitch to.

The reason: we’ve all got more than enough to write about. With three games a day for the first two weeks, and then a couple more a day for a week after that, it’s really not as if any football blog is struggling for content during the World Cup. And as most bloggers generally have day jobs, unless it’s a pretty spectacular, the pitch is likely to be deleted, assuming it even gets read.

The really smart PRs – and there have been a few – would have got their campaigns and pitches in at least a couple of weeks in advance of the tournament. That stage is a bit of a deadzone, with a lack of any content or decent talking points.

And – on a small tangent – twofootedtackle’s Chris expressed amazement that I’d received so many general PR pitches. I’m such an infrequent writer, and aren’t fixed to any specific publication that I’m not an overly easy writer to target. Quite often the editors of the places I write for receive the same release, which is a bit of a waste of an email. There’s really not a great deal of point sending me a general release at the moment.

I’d like to stress that I’m definitely not PR-unfriendly – quite the contrary, if it’s a well-written, personalised and targeted pitch then I’ll make an effort to write about it, although this isn’t always possible. I’ve written some very interesting and enjoyable pieces off the back of good pitches.

But as somebody who has done plenty of blogger outreach, and still does the occasional bit in this area, I’m far less tolerant of badly done pitches, especially because I know that this stuff really isn’t rocket science and really isn’t hard to do well.

And at the end of the day, I can just hit the delete button. The guys at the brand who’ve paid for blogger outreach – and have no doubt been told that x number of blogs have been hit – are throwing thousands of pounds down the drain for incredibly bad PR and probably don’t even realise it.

UPDATE:

And the day this is published, the PR company I’ve already requested remove me from their mailing list, sends me another email inviting me to something I don’t want to go to. In Manchester. Next weekend. It’s fairly obvious, that I don’t live in Manchester. Or Birmingham, where the same thing I don’t want to go to is happening, but the weekend later. I have plans both those weekends. Exactly how many bloggers do they expect to get to this event? Or are they just box ticking?

My bad. I misread the email. They’re not inviting me to go to the events. Just write an enthusiastic blog post about them. Which is even less appealing.

Also, Chris O, as a final post on the excellent – and soon to be departed – Some People Are On The Pitch blog has done a list of every company that’s pitched them to write about brands that, if you ever read SPAOTP, you’d know they’d have little or no interest in writing about.

written by Gary \\ tags: football bloggers, pitching football bloggers, pitching to bloggers, PR, PR and bloggers, World Cup, World Cup PR

EDIT: Since posting this last night, The Sun have since dropped the World Cup blogger sweepstake after Who Ate All The Pies and other blogs complained.

Look at the screenshot of The Sun’s World Cup Blogger Sweepstake above. If you were a PR who’s been pitching football bloggers recently you might skim the blogs and think “Wow, that is a pretty impressive line up of bloggers. They’ve even managed to get some notoriously hard-to-reach, popular and high-class well respected blogs on board. I wonder how they managed that?”

Short answer: They didn’t.

Sure, they spoke to some bloggers. And some bloggers said no, and left it at that. And then saw their blog in the pages and on the website of The Sun.

Chris Taylor from It’ll Be Off was one of those bloggers. He’s not best pleased:

“I ignored this email, hoping that if I didn’t respond, I wouldn’t be involved in all this savage wankery. But sadly I am. My blog is now apparently Chile, and The Sun have publicised this site in a YouTube clip and on their website. I received another email from them yesterday asking for a little coverage of all this on my blog. So here you go:

I want to make it abundantly clear to everyone: I have nothing to do with this. I want nothing to do with this. And I am furious that the good(ish) name of my little blog, that ceased to be a concern some six months ago, is being used by the worst of all tabloids as some fucking publicity machine for their horrendous sweepstake generating iPhone app, and their even more horrendous newspaper.”

Tom Dunmore at Pitch Invasion picked up on Chris’ post and it quickly became apparent in the comments that several other blogs, namely Unprofessional Foul, Run Of Play, Sport Is A TV Show, The Onion Bag, and Two Hundred Per Cent were all included without permission as well. And none of them are particularly happy about it.

The Ball Is Round and twofootedtackle (the latter of whom I write and podcast for) agreed to enter into a prediction league but not the sweepstake and didn’t give their permission to be included or to use their logos.

There may well be more.

So what, you may say. Surely the bloggers should be happy that The Sun’s giving them free publicity. Surely they’ll gain readers and make more money and the like from this?

Possibly in same cases, but that isn’t really the point.

I’ve got no problem with the blogs that were happy to take part and are publicising it on their blogs. It’s their choice and they’re happy to take part. That’s fine.

But for those who declined or didn’t respond there’s several reasons why they’re well within their rights to be unhappy.

First off, The Sun has used their logo and blogs without permission. There’s a huge irony here given their owner, Rupert Murdoch’s, criticism of Google for stealing content on their news aggregation pages. So it’s not ok for Google but it’s fine for News International.

[EDIT: Sian asks in the comments what the legality of this is. I'm not entirely sure. It may be that The Sun haven't done anything wrong, legally, in using the names of logos. I'd be fascinated to hear from anybody who is a little more clued in than me on this]

Also, it’s then incredibly cheeky to use these logos when permission hasn’t been given and then email said blogger and mind if they’ll give it a bit of publicity on their blogs.

Secondly, the sweepstake isn’t just a bit of fun. It’s being used to promote an iPhone app. The implication here is that these bloggers, by taking part in the feature, endorse the application.

This leads to the third point. Several of the blogs The Sun’s included have built their reputation on independent, thoughtful analysis and have positioned themselves very much as an alternative viewpoint to the tabloid football frenzy, often criticising these writers. They are a world away from The Sun and often don’t take advertising and will very rarely, if ever, accept PR pitches, especially for something like an iPhone application.

In short, it affects their reputation. Especially if, in Chris Taylor’s case, they have serious ideological differences with The Sun and are critical of their coverage.

Finally, aside from the above, the whole thing is massively patronising to the blogs involved, especially those whose analysis and writing regularly outdoes the national press.

The “aren’t you lucky to be taking part” attitude sticks in the craw, the taking logos without permission then expecting an uncritical link back is sheer chutzpah and the prize for winning this sweepstake – an interview with The Sun’s chief sports writer – is a piece of condescending bone-tossing from old media to new media, to remind bloggers of their place in the hierarchy.

It does a disservice: to the bloggers involved who said no to the original request, to the readers who will assume that these blogs endorse The Sun, and to any hardworking PR who has spent ages building relations with these blogs for a very tiny mention, especially PRs from other papers.

(Disclosure: I have, in the past, been one of those PRs. And I worked hard to ensure any pitches were respectful and non-condescending and were more than just “we’re a big company, write nice things about us”. And I know several PRs from other papers and similar companies and they also adhere to the above.)

The sad thing is, there are so many football blogs that with a bit of time and research they could have probably found 32 bloggers willing to take part AND promote it on their sites. And if their initial blogger outreach was better and there was a better incentive at the end of it, they may have even got more bloggers onside.

Hell, it could have actually been fun, if you were one of those who wanted to get involved. (I wouldn’t have been but it’s not my place to tell other bloggers who they can and can’t endorse).

Instead, we’ve got some very unhappy bloggers.

Not, you suspect, that The Sun care much. After all, they’ve got a World Cup Sweepstake app to promote.

UPDATE: Arseblog makes a pretty decent point in the comments of Tom’s post:

“I’m no huge fan of The Sun but it’s not like we’re being hugely exploited here. To be honest, I don’t think anyone who reads the paper gives the slightest shit about any of the blogs and they’re hardly using our logos to make money.”

Which is a fair point and it’s worth putting perspective on this. It isn’t the end of the world. But it’s also very bad practice, not to mention manners and it’s only by pointing this sort of thing out that you might (ha!) get a change of tune. It’s the principal of it all, innit.

He’s probably right that the majority of Sun readers probably don’t really care or read the blogs involved. I’d love to see them tackle one of Brian Phillips’ wonderfully cerebral pieces at The Run Of Play though.

UD 2: Brian’s pointed out that The Sun don’t even do them the courtesy of linking, so none of them have seen ay surge in traffic. It now appears that they do, through clickable images. Although I can’t find this, but I’ll take Brian’s word for it.

And, as Fredorraci points out in the comments below, despite this being billed as the UK’s top 32 blogs, several aren’t based in the UK. Brian’s site, for a start, is an American site.

It also seems that the total amount of traffic blogs have received through this has varied between nothing and not very much at all.

written by Gary \\ tags: blogger outreach, blogs and newspapers, copyright, ripping off bloggers, the sun, The SUn World Cup Blogger Sweepstake