We are pleased to announce that yesterday we officially launched our Handpicked Community.

There are so many great blogs that we want to include in our Handpicked family but some are just not quite ready to join our Collective. By building our Handpicked Community we can stay in touch with you and hope that the community will become a useful stepping stone to help bloggers grow and expand their blogs further, with a view to eventually joining Handpicked Media Collective. The HPC is a collection of fledgling  and established blogs which although are not part of our collective have still been handpicked by us to join.

Members of the community will receive press releases about brands,  invitations, samples and exclusives but only from us here at Handpicked Media, we will not be passing your details on to third parties.

We are excited about this new venture and from last night’s Twitter activity we can see you are too! Click the image below to see what our new community members have been saying about it all!

If you are a blogger and wish to apply to join the Handpicked Community please email debbie@handpickedmedia.co.uk

If you are an agency and would like to enquire about our Handpicked Community outreach service please do email Debbie at the above too.

OFT

An announcement was made on Monday that we were under investigation by the OFT, we want to just to clarify the outcome with you all, to clear up any misleading reports that have since been posted. We were involved in a campaign earlier in the year that involved twitter promotion that resulted in consumers complaining about a fashion sale. No rules were in place at that time about promotion on twitter, which then led to a thorough investigation.

We are the most popular blogging network in the UK, and were very happy to be dealing with the Office of Fair Trading to shed some clarity on how blogs deal with sponsored posts and twitter. Over the last six months we have been working closely with them to set the standard in terms of sponsored posts and the use of social media to promote them. Any sponsored blog post organised through Handpicked Media carries a clear ‘Sponsored Post’  flag so there is total transparency that it has been paid-for. We are happy to lead the way  in terms of professional behaviour online and hope that others will follow our example.

The OFT has said, “Handpicked Media cooperated with the OFT throughout the investigation.” The case has been closed and the OFT were satisfied that we have been complying with their standards since the one campaign that they felt was not clearly marked.

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Borkowski will be looking in depth at the past, present and future of PR and pricking at the too-often cosy world it inhabits, a world lined with endless parades of headcount-fodder celebrities and fuelled by the erroneous idea that talking a good game is all that’s necessary.

Borkowski offers a different perspective; one where wit, hard work, a little risk taking, some seriously long-term thinking and a conscience replace the catty, dayglo cliché of the Ab Fab set. On Borkowski, you’ll find In Search of the Sons of Barnum, an ongoing series of salutary studies of the buccaneering publicists, (Harry Reichenbach, Jim Moran and others) who created the grand images, ideas and stunts that built the movie industry and gave form to the modern media, as well as Mark My Words and Stuntwatch, which comment on the latest news and celebrate and anatomize the sometimes delicate, sometimes macabre machinations of celebrities, food giants, sports stars and the people who manage them.

twitter: @MarkBorkowski