It’s Christmas. It’s so important to make someone happy and I’m a generous fellow. So, following the comment made on my previous post I decided to proudly display my new award. You can find it over on the right of the blog as well.
Not being a chap to do things by half measures, I have allowed myself the luxury of a certificate as well. Thank you, Anonymous. You’ve made me so happy.
For music lovers, here’s Schnozzle’s take on it.
It appears blog awards are like buses; None for ages and then they all come along at once. Yes, after the TGO Awards debacle had finally died down, up pops another “Blogger Award.” This time it’s from an outdoor chain call “Trespass.” No, I hadn’t heard of them either, and I don’t feel great about giving them all this free advertising on my blog.
I found out on Monday afternoon that my blog had been included in their list of Hiking/Walking blogs, along with about twenty others. As I wrote in another post, these days I am not keen to be part of this “how big is your willy” contest, as generally the winners are not those who write the best blog, but those who can drum up the largest number of supporters to vote for them. You need only to look at the winner of the TGO Outdoor Blogger of the Year award to see how that works. However, even though TGO had not asked me if I wanted my blog to be considered for the award I let it go, as I have a soft spot for the magazine.
So what is it that makes me feel like I have been used by this current award scam?
Put simply this retailer is using all the bloggers and the good will of the blogs’ readers to promote their business. They have selected (it was the company’s marketing department that made the selection) NINETY blogs – twenty in each of Running and Hiking/Walking, and ten in each of Climbing, Camping, Cycling, Snowsports and Travel. Those ninety blogs will have a colossal readership ~ probably far more than, say, the readership of TGO. Let’s say that each blog has 300 loyal readers (these are popular blogs, remember) and 10% of these are persuaded to vote. That’s 2,700 voters. Okay, there will be some overlap, but these are illustrative figures, so bear with me. I don’t believe the overlap will be that large, as the company has gone out to find a diverse as possible range of blogs
Most of the bloggers will use social media to spread the word. However, if you try and vote, you find that you need to authorise your selection using your Facebook account, explicitly giving permission for Trespass to have access to all your FB friends as well. Let’s suppose that most FBers have a hundred and fifty FB friends. (That seems to be about average). This means that Trespass now has the contact list for 2,700 x 150 people. That’s 405,000 people added to their mailing lists.
Whatever the overlap, you can see that this is one hell of an easy way to increase your mailing list for very little cost at all. Just the price of a bright young marketing chap, William Wallace. (Yes, honestly.) Apparently all the blog writers were contacted for permission to be included in this marketing exercise, and not contacting me was an oversight.
After a bit of chat with other bloggers on twitter, I decided on the Monday evening that I didn’t want to be part of this. I used the company’s web site contact form to try and talk to their marketing department to have my blog removed from the list. I did not hear anything for two days, so this afternoon I contacted them by twitter and before too long William & I had a discussion and he agreed to remove my blog from their scheme.
In his last email to me he included the following paragraph:
“I understand your train of thought, but I'd like to assure you that our main intention was to highlight outdoor blogs and give a little back to the community. This is a strategy that we hope to follow going forward with more community based activities which hopefully highlight the benefits of getting outdoors and leading a more active life.”
Well. I’ll let you be the judge of that.
I have since discovered that David Williams, writer of the excellent Fellbound blog has also had his blog removed.
[IMAGE NICKED FROM HERE]
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
Quoting Wikipedia: The duck test is a humorous term for a form of inductive reasoning. The test implies that a person can identify an unknown subject by observing that subject's habitual characteristics. It is sometimes used to counter abstruse, or even valid, arguments that something is not what it appears to be.
In the previous two posts about this year’s TGO Outdoor Blogger of the Year award there is general consensus amongst those who have posted comments that the average reader of TGO would not see the winning blog as representative of outdoor blogging. Social media – twitter and Facebook – was buzzing. Most were astonished that this blog, so different in style and content to all the other blogs that were nominated for the award, had won. Something wasn’t right.
The following (seemingly valid arguments) are all true:
We’re all agreed then that The Girl Outdoors is an outdoor blog. And yes; The Great Outdoors magazine is an outdoor magazine.
So why all the fuss?
Let’s go back to the duck:
So I’m totally satisfied that this is not actually an outdoor blog at all, and nor would any loyal reader of The Great Outdoors magazine either. It is a duck. Hence the plethora of comments on my two preceding posts. It must be particularly galling for the other nominees in the ‘outdoor blog of the year’ category to have lost out to a duck.
It must also be worrying for the winners of the other categories as they are seeing their highly prized awards – for indeed they are – tarnished a little by an unseemly spat in the newest category – a category, as TGO said themselves, that had been brought in by popular demand this year.
So what went wrong?
I’m writing this next section as if walking over eggshells.
After the nominations had closed it was pointed out to TGO on twitter that there was not a single woman on the ‘Personality of the Year’ category shortlist: see Mirella’s comment 2nd up from the bottom.
[CLICK TO ENLARGE]
‘Women Climb’ then stepped in asking for the gender balance of the nominations for the awards: (2nd comment from the top in the next screenshot)
[CLICK TO ENLARGE]
There was obviously genuine concern amongst the largely female contributors to this thread that women were not represented in anything approaching a realistic proportion of the gender balance in the outdoor world. This is patently true. A good example of this is the fact that there were just two blogs out of the ten nominated in the outdoor blogger category that were written by women. But what could TGO have done about this? Nothing, of course, as they were the blogs nominated by the public.
The odd thing is that after this conversation took place on twitter (there were other conversations dealing with this topic as well) one of these blogs (the duck) came top in the voting and the other, ‘Two Blondes Walking’, apparently came second. And, the duck won by a considerable margin.
Now we have already seen that hardly any TGO readers (apart it seems from Martin Banfield – read his comment here) were aware of Sian’s blog. So they didn’t vote for it. Yet the two blogs written by women came top of the poll. What are the odds of that happening? Any statisticians out there?
Explain. Draw graphs. Give reasons. Show your ‘workings out’ in the margin.
TGO Towers
When this year’s awards scheme was started, the magazine had its Editor slaving away over a hot keyboard. Sometime later Emily went off on maternity leave, which is a joyous thing. But it did leave Daniel, the Digital Editor, with quite a bit more work to do. Of course he has help but TGO is a small ship and there is still a magazine deadline every month and an increasing digital presence to manage on top of this.
It’s been said elsewhere on the last two blog-posts that it was possible to vote and vote often on this particular poll. Apparently this has been the case for the last three years, and in the past there have been numerous cases of multiple voting, but nothing that materially affected the result of each category.
I’ve been told that this year it was unlikely that voters’ IP Addresses were checked. So: Given all that you have seen here, what do you think has happened?
What next?
This is really up to The Great Outdoors magazine. Already we have seen TGO readers cancel their subscriptions. We have seen a great deal of anger and disbelief at the outcome of this particular poll.
I think it’s right that it should be up to the great unwashed to nominate their choice for the public to vote on. It makes sense to keep the numbers to a manageable size so that people are wiling to trawl through the choices available before picking their own winner. However, I do believe that TGO should have the final say on those going forward to the voting stages. Who knows what might be the outcome if a well organised, ambitious blogger (say) manages to garner a fair few folk to get their blog nominated into the top ten? Perhaps that same blogger could go on and muster an active set of the community to support their effort, in order to balance out some perceived imbalance?
Using this system, TGO might be able to avoid the ducks in future.
What do you think? Have your say below. I know you’ll be civil. This place isn’t like twitter.
Thank you.
EDITED TO ADD: if you want a wise and wonderful take on blog awards, take a peek HERE
There’s been a lively debate on social media over the last three days about the winner of The Great Outdoors ‘Outdoor Blogger of the Year’ Award. You can read some of the debate in the comments section of my last post HERE.
I wrote in that post “Imagine my surprise when I learned last night that The Girl Outdoors had won this category.” Well, a lot of people were surprised by this result. The blogger, Sian Anna Lewis, wasted no time at all in getting the award onto her blog and her LinkedIn profile. Scroll through her profile; She has a short but impressive work history. Her current occupation is Online Editor for BBC Countryfile Magazine, working for Immediate Media.
Awards are important to young journalists; it helps them stand apart from the rest of the new journalists. Winning awards suggests achievement and promise. They look great on a CV.
Perhaps it was that urge to to have an award that drove this ambitious young lady to go for it. But how do we think that she did it? She’s not on any blogroll that I have seen. So, who nominated her blog and, who voted for her?
I’ll now show some screen grabs taken in the last couple of days.
The first is from twitter and shows that Daniel, of TGO, followed Sian (and her friend Lucy) between 15th and 18th June of this year.
The next screen grab takes in the period 3rd –8th October:
It appears that TGO knew full well who Sian was and so presumably the content of her blog, well before nominations were due to close, which was 25th September. Voting for the award closed on 10th November.
The next consideration is the filtering of the nominations prior to publish the list to vote for. You’ll have noticed there was a choice of ten in each category in the awards. This means that some filtering must have been made; It is not credible that just ten candidates came forward in each category. TGO knew exactly who and what the Girl Outdoors blog was all about and all about the writer (she calls herself “editor of the blog, but let’s not quibble) as it looks as if she (and others) were being offered space for an article in TGO magazine itself.
I doubt very much if readers of TGO voted for her, as their profile is going to be totally dissimilar to her blog’s readership profile. This means that others must have voted for her. But how did they find out about the awards?
There is nothing on the Girl Outdoors blog about the awards leading up to, or during the voting period.
It has also been pointed out to me that there was no limit to the times you could vote. There was no IP Address block that you would normally find with online votes that prevents multiple voting.
It’s all mystery, isn’t it?
Perhaps Sian or Daniel can help us here?
In March of last year I wrote a piece on the circulation pressures on outdoor magazines. I illustrated the piece with a chart showing the relative decline of the three most popular UK outdoor titles: Country Walking, Trail and TGO. TGO has subsequently reverted back to its original title of The Great Outdoors.
Since I wrote that last piece TGO has revamped its online presence The Great Outdoors and I like it. It’s a much more readable online site these days. I often find myself reading and commenting on some fine articles. Recently they have had pieces on fracking and wind farms – subjects I’ve not seen covered in any other outdoor media. Daniel Nielson seems to have grabbed this by the scruff of its neck and is doing a fine job.
I’ve taken a look at the combined site for Country Walking and Trail – Live for the Outdoors – and I have to say that it’s unimpressive. See what you think yourself for both sites.
Here’s an updated circulation chart; it shows a further decline in print sales for all three magazines. The figures are for second half 2013. (New figures will be out in a couple of months) I don't know how to find out the popularity of the magazines’ online sites, but from the content and reader interaction I would imagine that TGO is doing better then LFTO.
You’ll see that Trail and TGO have both lost about 10% of their magazine readers in the last year and Country Walking about 12%
***
Over the last three years TGO has been very busy with a clever marketing ruse; the TGO Awards. I was nominated for an award in each of the years. I wrote about this HERE and again HERE. In the second of those pieces I was mildly critical of the emphasis put upon product. I wrote
This year there was a new category: Outdoor Blogger, and I was included in that category but wasn’t asked or told that my name had gone forward for voting. If I had been asked I would have politely refused, as I found the voting in the previous two years to be totally bizarre. I didn’t mention it this year on the blog, instead favouring to support a blogger that I felt was a far worthier recipient – James Boulter of Backpackingbongos. I took to twitter and Facebook to support him there, hoping that he would break through the previous years’ bizarre choices. James has written and illustrated his blog wonderfully this year. He made a fabulous trip to Sweden’s Sarek National Park and countless adventures in the UK, in the wild places of England Wales and Scotland. Click on his name to have a look at his fabulous blog.
Here was the list of Outdoor Bloggers to choose from:
I would have been more than happy to see any of seven of those bloggers (the first seven) win this award. Some are friends of mine, but of the seven James has been head and shoulders the best this year. Tony Hobbs isn’t really an outdoor blogger, He’s more an outdoor film-maker. Two Blondes Walking are based in Dartmoor and are entertaining. I had never come across “The Girl Outdoors,” and I read a lot of outdoor blogs, as you will have noticed from my “blogroll” over on the right.
So Imagine my surprise when I learned last night that The Girl Outdoors had won this category.
Click on the link and take a look. I am absolutely stunned by this result. I have no idea how TGO could possibly think that this blog fits with the profile of their readership. The lady who writes the blog (which is really an advertorial business) is a professional journalist - the online editor of BBC Countryfile.
Another highly respected outdoor blogger put it far better than I ever could in his summing up of her blog: Here are two of his tweets on twitter:
‘I've only just looked at it - beyond belief! Trite and superficial rubbish.’ This was closely followed by:
‘@TGOMagazine: Have been increasingly unhappy about weak content and this outdoor blog nonsense is the last straw. Subscription cancelled.’
In these days of dwindling magazine readership, is it really sensible for a magazine to shoot itself in the foot like this? This result has a nasty knock on effect. It demeans all the other worthy winners of the awards. You can find out who won each category by clicking HERE. My congratulations go to all the other winners and TGO for hosting the event. But there needs to be a serious re-think on who goes forward to be nominated for voting next year.
