Tagged: blog

No One Must Know This Is A Sponsored Post

Media Discovery (New Web Ltd) is encouraging blogs to run paid for advertorials, without disclosing to their readership that the content is an advert. This appears to be in breach of the advertising industry's code of practice.

Anyone who has ever run a blog is probably familiar with these sorts of email - I get one or two a week.

Hi Terence,

I recently sent you an email about hosting an advertisement on your site. I hope you received it, if not it may have ended up in your junk folder.

I believe we offer a very attractive system of advertising. You would be paid a yearly-renewable fee for placing a text-based advertisement that is appropriate to the topic of your site.

Please get back to me if you are interested in placing an advertisement on Shkspr.mobi?

Kind Regards,

Jesse Morgan
[email protected]

I rarely reply to such spam, however, having heard of Media Discovery's shady practices in the past, I thought I'd respond and find out more.

This is what I got back:

After reviewing your website, we think that a new blog post would be the best and least intrusive option for you. We have two ways of doing this:

A) You are free to come up with the content of the article or blog post, but we do ask that it is in some way relevant to our client and is composed of roughly 300 words.

B) I can ask our copywriters to craft an article to fit your site.

To see an example, kindly visit: http://www.mycarreviews.co.uk/citroen-c4-review/. The advert can be found within the third paragraph - 'J.D. Power'.

We’ll pay you an annual upfront payment and we will endeavour to make sure that you are paid within two working days, using PayPal or Moneybookers. Working with a telecommunications, beauty, health, tourism or finance client would ensure you would get 130 EUR per year, while working with an online gaming client (poker, casino, bingo etc) would ensure you would get 140 EUR per year.

Please let me know if you're interested, so I can have your site assessed by our Technical Team. I can then send the advert details and client information.

Alternatively, if you have any more questions about this advert type, then please do let me know.

Thanks,
Jesse

This is what the "advert" looks like:
JD Power Advert-fs8
The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this doesn't look like an advert. The site carries no mention of the fact this is a sponsored article.
(I've no way of verifying whether JD Power paid for this advert, or even if the blog's author is working with Media Discovery.)

I queried this - surely it's not right that advertising should be displayed in such a manner. Their response?

Thank you for your message.

We prefer it if our adverts are not marked out as such. They tend to be more successful when they look as natural as possible.

Many thanks.

This is, as far as I can tell, an illegal practice.

There are various laws and regulations governing advertising in the UK. The Office of Fair Trading specifically calls out the following practice as illegal under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations, the following is an offence:

Being honest about advertorials

Using editorial content in the media to promote a product where a trader has paid for the promotion (advertorial) without making that clear in the content or by images or sounds clearly identifiable by the consumer.

Can A Blog Get In Trouble For This?

There are two potential risks for bloggers who don't acknowledge the providence of their sponsored content.
Firstly is the issue of legal liability. I am not a lawyer - but I would be very wary of publishing content like this. Regulation 18 states:

Innocent publication of advertisement defence

18.—(1) In any proceedings against a person for an offence under regulation 9, 10, 11 or 12 committed by the publication of an advertisement it shall be a defence for a person to prove that—
he is a person whose business it is to publish or to arrange for the publication of advertisements;
he received the advertisement for publication in the ordinary course of business; and
he did not know and had no reason to suspect that its publication would amount to an offence under the regulation to which the proceedings relate.

I spoke to the ASA who confirmed that it was unlikely an individual publication would get in to trouble - they'd much rather go after the advertiser.

Secondly, major search engines - Google in particular - can completely remove you from their results if it suspects you have been spamming.

In the above JD Power example, the link doesn't use the nofollow attribute which further contributes to its spammy nature.
JD Power Link

What Can Be Done

In the UK, the regulator is the Advertising Standards Authority. Unsurprisingly, they take a keen interest in the online space. After having a chat with their advisers, I have lodged a complaint with the ASA using their online form.

I don't fundamentally disagree with the notion of advertising on blogs - I use Amazon's affiliate scheme to earn a few coins, and I have occasionally run campaigns from ebuzzing. Crucially, I always explicitly say if a post is sponsored and who the sponsor is.

How can you trust a publication if they refuse to tell you where their interests lie?

If you're a blogger and have been approached by company trying to engage in deceptive practices, I strongly suggest you file a formal complaint against them with your local regulator.

Should you edit old blog posts?

The fifth anniversary of my blog went by without me noticing. I don't know if I'm a narcissist, but I quite often find myself re-reading old entries. Sometimes it's because I've Googled for the solution to a problem, only to find I helpfully blogged about it yonks ago - other times I'll read an article and think "Hmmm, I wrote on that subject a while ago," and go off to find what I used to think.

With over 560 entries - ranging from single images to thousand word screeds - it's tempting to leave everything which I've written preserved in aspic. But I can't do that. I'm an inveterate tinkerer.

One of the big challenges of any webmaster is preventing "link rot". Old sites die, change their structure, or edit their content - which means links from this blog get broken or point to things which they shouldn't. To help counter this, I use the WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugin. Every so often it emails me to say a link is down. I'm then faced with the decision of whether to leave it pointing where it was, redirecting it to a cache, or finding a new source of information.

I have to admit, most of the time I just leave the link marked as broken. This isn't just laziness - some sites (especially personal ones) have no duplicate.

As I fiddle with old posts, I notice other things wrong with them. I fix spelling errors or grammer what is clumsy. I fix issues caused with blogging plugins which I've long since deleted.

But I never change my opinion. I already feel that I'm playing too close to the memory hole. Although WordPress tracks the changes I make, the post doesn't reflect past versions unless I explicitly call attention to a change.

Is this odd? Film-makers go back to re-edit their works, musicians remix their tracks, books are reprinted free of errata, newspapers publish corrections, and software writers publish updates.

But in all those instances, the original remains. You can listen to your mono-mix of The Beatles without ever having to even know about the surround-sound remix. But with this blog only exists here on this server, and it is only read when you dial up a specific page, and then - if I have willed it - it may all be Newspeak.

NaBloPoMo - Stats

As we enter another NaBloPoMo - where I try to write a blog post each day in Novemeber - I thought I'd take a look back at how this blog has developed.

On Friday, October 30, 2009, I switched on WordPress statistics so I could get a better idea of what was popular on my site. My average traffic back then was 80 visits per day. Not bad for a backwater blog.

Since then, my writing has been getting better (I hope), my content has become more interesting, and I've had several stories which have spread far and wide.

The blog now gets ~600 visits per day.

monthly blog stats

What I find interesting is that it's some of the older posts which get the most regular traffic. This post about getting Android to run on Nokia phones is often in my "top ten" list - despite being published over three years ago.

May 12, 2012 was the busiest day with 17,186 views thanks to this article about the SIM-less Phone.

Arbitrary Milestones

I'm not sure how accurate the stats are, but since they were set up (two years after this blog started) I've had 470,034 views in total.

So, my goal is to get to the half million mark. Hopefully by the end of NaBloPoMo or, more realistically, by the end of 2012.

Here we go!

ebuzzing - formalising the PR relationship with Bloggers?


This is a sponsored post from ebuzzing

Find out more on ebuzzing.co.uk
I've been pleasantly surprised by ebuzzing. They're part of the Wikio Group, who are focussed on getting bloggers to post about about brands that they like - and get paid for it.

Despite running a backwater blog on obscure mobile phone related nonsense, I often get emailed by companies wanting to promote themselves here. Sometimes they offer review goods to keep, sometimes cash, sometime they don't want anyone to know they're paying for the post.

As a blogger, I've no real way of assessing my market worth - nor how to deal with the tax implications of being sent free "stuff". I've got a pretty clear idea of the ethics - always reveal if you've been paid to blog - but I'm slightly unsure of the legals.

That's why I think ebuzzing is a great idea. A fixed payment for blog posts and a clear set of ethical guidelines.

Payments are either per post - this one is netting me £30 - or pay per view - usually around 2p-5p.

Posts have to be approved by moderators. This could be a bit tricky - do you want someone telling you what you can and can't write on your blog? I've found them to be very fair. Despite my less than fulsome praise for the Dell Duo the only changes ebuzzing wanted were to ensure that I'd correctly included the links to the client's content and that I'd spelt their name correctly. No heavy-handedness at all.

Posts have a minimum word-count and have to feature links to the client and any marketing collateral they want. Usually an embedded image or video.

I must confess that I've found some of the campaigns a little lacklustre. Sometimes they're little more than "embed this video and ask your readers to discuss why they like cheese." To me, that's an advertorial rather than a genuine discussion. Of course, if you don't run the cheese campaign, you don't have to.

My Perfect ebuzzing Campaign

This campaign is also an opportunity to imagine your perfect campaign: who are the brands you’d love to work with? What would be the best way, in your opinion, to create an original experience between your community and those brands? We’d love to hear your ideas!

I think any successful campaign has to focus on two things.

  1. What the blogger can - or would - do with the product.
  2. What the reader can get out of the promotion.

I'd love to see more exclusive content, more competitions, and more blog-focused promotions. Sending people off to join a Facebook group feels a little 2009 to me. Pick winners from the best blog comments - similar to the Ping Pong competition on Vikki Chowney's blog.

I could also imagine a phone manufacturer posting photos of landmarks taken with their hot new phone. Then get bloggers and their commenters to post photos of the same landmarks taken with their crappy old camera-phone.

Sign Up

If you're interested in signing your blog up, you can find out more on ebuzzing.co.uk. There are no joining fees and you're free to pick and choose what you'd like to blog about.

Sharing propelled by ebuzzing

The Best Phone for Blogging?

NaBloPoMo Logo

This has been a really tough NaBloPoMo for me. Work has been frantic - meaning that my lunchtime blogging has been restricted to a quick bit of copy editing. I've also had some wonderful new toys to play with - which has distracted my attention.

But the biggest problem? My Android phone. Don't get me wrong, I love Android - but for typing, it's nowhere nearly as good as my BlackBerry was. I spend a lot of my time on trains, so I'm used to being able to bash out a fairly lengthy post or email. That's just not possible on my Nexus One.

Android Onscreen Keyboard
There are three major problems with the Android's onscreen keyboard.

  • It takes up so much room, you can only see two lines of text. Annoying if you're writing a long document.
  • The accuracy is very hit and miss. It's no worse than other onscreen keyboards - but it's just not as good as a physical keyboard.
  • The auto-correct feature is pretty good - but I miss the BlackBerry's integrated spell cheque.

The general consensus on Twitter seems to be that the HTC Desire Z is the best Android phone touting a real keyboard.
HTC Desire Z
I've yet to try it - but the keys look similar to the awful N97 "dead flesh" keyboard.

The Motorola Milestone has a better looking keyboard and is a similar price.

I could type around 60WPM on a BlackBerry keyboard - so whichever phone I get needs to be at least as good as RIM's offering.

With that in mind, I'm also considering going back to BlackBerry - the new Torch 9800 looks incredible.

BlackBerry Torch

I've been playing on the most recent BlackBerry emulator (something more companies should provide) and it really could be the phone for me. Touchscreen for quick use, keyboard for long messages, I know the email and calendaring options are better than Android. But will I find OS6 too restrictive after the freedom of Android?

There's also Windows Phone 7 to consider. I really like what I've seen of WP7 - but there aren't any phone with keyboards available in the UK. Both the Dell Venue Pro and the LG Optimus 7Q may make it over here - but there are no timelines.

Finally, there's the BlueTooth keyboard accessory. Amazon have Mini Bluetooth Keyboards from £15 - although some of the high end ones go for ten times that.

It would mean carrying yet another gadget - to go with the phone, solar charger, video glasses, Kindle and whatever else I have on my person - but could it bridge the gap? I find that I can't type for very long on a laptop keyboard. The only device I'm comfortable typing on with all 10 fingers is a Microsoft 4000 Ergonomic (although I'd love to give a Maltron a try even if they are a bit pricey though). Would a BlueTooth keyboard be as easy to type on?

So, which phone would you go for if you needed to do extended bouts of typing or blogging?