A shining (and hilarious) example of why authenticity matters in blogging
Anna sent me a link to this new blog on the Guardian website. It’s the diary of a 19-year-old about to embark on his GAP-year travels in India and Thailand, hoping for ’swimming, sunbathing and partying’.
After the first post, the comments start flooding in, and the readers are aren’t unimpressed: “posh 19 year old goes to Thailand to find himself amongst all the other ‘gappers’, and we can follow his every move? wow.”
By the 4th comment, suspicions of nepotism start to appear: “who’s son is Max then? terrible terrible terrible, shame on you guardian”
By comment No. 20, he’s been rumbled: “Well, given that Paul Gogarty is a travel writer for the Guardian, I guess that answers the question about who he’s related to”
Ouch!
The final nail in the coffin is an astute reader who finds an article written by the lad’s father in 2002, about a holiday in Thailand, no less, mentioning his 13-year-old son, who would now be 19.
Game, set, and match.
This is very poor stuff from the normally very social-media-savvy Guardian. And the lesson to be learnt (putting aside the uninspiring subject matter of the blog)?
You can’t out-smart your readers. If you aren’t being authentic, you will be found out by the crowd.
Tom wrote this on 14.02.08 –
It's filed in the Blogging, Mistakes box
On February 14th, 2008 at 8:45 pm, Paul Fabretti responded:
Not at all dissimilar to what happened to The Times recently:
http://www.waxy.org/archive/2008/01/30/the_time.shtml
On February 15th, 2008 at 8:31 am, Phil Herborn responded:
Personally the final nail in the coffin was when he slagged off Australian travelers, WTF! Now that totally Freeeeeaakkkks me out.
Doesn’t he know that it’s going to be an equally as drunk Aussie who is going to teach him how to deal with the “The heat, the roads, the snakes” while he is on tour.
Ahh well, good luck to him :)
On February 17th, 2008 at 8:56 pm, Will McInnes responded:
Two theories circulate in this particular stormy teacup: 1) it is a nepotistic stitch-up 2) it was some kind of strange promotional hoax for E4s ‘Skins’.
I personally am erring towards the third theory, which is to believe (I know, I must be barmy) what the Travel Editor wrote here in his response to the hullabaloo:
http://icanhaz.com/travelguardiantruth
Given this response, do we still feel as strongly as we did?
On February 18th, 2008 at 11:42 pm, Phil Herborn responded:
The reality is probably some kind of combination of all three theories and a missing 4th perhaps.
On February 19th, 2008 at 11:19 am, links for 2008-02-19 « Brendan Cooper - Your friendly PR social media planner responded:
[…] A shining (and hilarious) example of why authenticity matters in blogging @ Nixon McInnes: Social me… This story has spread very quickly. I think it’s the ‘killer meme’ - exposing untruth. It will be interesting to see how the Guardian’s travel writer reputation is affected by this. (tags: guardian blogging nixonmcinnes pneo001) Posted in del.icio.us daily. […]
On February 19th, 2008 at 1:29 pm, I attended the Chinwag Measuring Social Media event last night « Brendan Cooper - Your friendly PR social media planner responded:
[…] while, and when you’re found out you will be in deep doo-doo. You only have to look at the very recent Guardian blog situation to see that the truth will out, sometimes astonishingly […]
On February 20th, 2008 at 11:42 pm, Tom responded:
I read a piece in the Observer last Sunday about this. It did make me feel sorry for the poor lad, but I do think that The Guardian brought this on themselves in the first place.
On February 21st, 2008 at 11:47 am, Ruth responded:
Further developments today: David Cox’s piece on today’s CiF tackles the issue head-on, and talks about - among other things - the democratisation of the media.
The commenters seem to like it…
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_cox/2008/02/media_and_the_mob.html
On February 21st, 2008 at 6:06 pm, Alex Hammond responded:
You have to feel a bit sorry for the kid, but this is hilarious. The internet is a cruel, cruel place…
On May 24th, 2008 at 6:58 pm, TheWayoftheWeb » Can large companies do Web 2.0? responded:
[…] And yet, within the space of a few days, they’ve gone and made a has of something as simple as publishing a blog about a 19-year-old going travelling. You can see the offending blog and uproar, here. (I picked up on it thanks to the nice people at NixonMcInnes) […]