New contest! - Royale Atmos

Even if this is going nowhere, just an update will help. 

Any update??

I am feeling conflicted about this guys.

If a sponsor is not being professional about the contest, should we continue to be professional and abide by the rules of the contest? (and sadly the indiblogger team is not making much headway)

I mean clealy this was a business transaction (even if for most bloggers this was a product of their passion - which is not only NOT being appreciated, but being abused).  But the sponsor got their end of the bargain - with so many bloggers contributing and giving the sponsor free brand mentions with a lot of positive linkages.

And right now it certainly looks like they over-achieved this and did this absolutely FREE.  If they had gone to a social media PR agency chances are that not only would this cost them much MUCH MUCH more (yes, a lot more than all the prize money put together) - but they wouldnt have achieved even a small minor fraction of the kind of social media mentions that was achieved thanks to the bloggers participating in this contest.

There's professionalism, fairness and justice.   I dont think the sponsor appreciates any of this 

The question is - do we - and should we help this sponsor appreciate these concepts?

Hey IB team, this has now gone way beyond anyone's understanding. We understand it's the sponsor's fault but you guys are being too unrealistic and unprofessional. This was least expected from atleast you guys. The last response from anyone on the IndiTeam was more than a month ago, and this was going to get resolved "anytime soon". Since then, people have been asking and the IB team has been a mute spectator. It somehow seems to me like you guys have lost interest in IndiBlogger as your  passion, your bread and butter, and are exploring new possibilities, and that is the reason bloggers are suffering.

Hey CyberKid, I understand where you're coming from, and we have been unprofessional with regards to this contest, there's no doubt on that front. Losing interest however, is the opposite of what's happening! We've had quite a bit going on these last few months which took up a significant amount of our team's bandwidth. That is no excuse - we know we could have done a lot better, and we're sorry we've caused so much frustration and dissapointment.

Hi everybody, we're very sorry about the long dormancy on this front, it certainly isn't fair to any of you who participated. We are looking at this as two separate issues, one being this contest, and the other being all future contests and how they will be executed. With regards to this contest, we made a significant breakthrough today, so things should get back on track soon. We'll be in a position to give you an ETA by Monday, if not sooner. With regards to future contests, every single bit of feedback you all have taken the time to give us via various forum threads and support tickets is being taken into account, and our team is giving this top priority and it is being discussed at length. We will post an update on a separate thread before the next contest is launched.

Hey Renie, thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule and responding to the queries, here.

As you've mentioned, we'll be expecting something on Monday, if nothing, atleast an acknowledgement from you guys that you're working to get this resolved ASAP.

The Indiblogger team deserves a round of applause for this (and much much better sponsors too)

All I can say is that if the Indiblogger team decides to go hard on sponsors and demand a lot more professionalism from their sponsors, they have my support and surely most bloggers.  They should stand up and be bold to fight for fairness.

I do hope this has been an exercise of learning and no other sponsor tries to take advantage of the innate goodness of the blogging community in future.

Monday's passed by and its Thursday already (ok, almost)

It does look like this sponsor is not being honest, not being professinal, also not being considerate to the Indiblogger team which made an announcement based on what the sponsor committed to, but backed out (for the nth time)

I do feel bad for the indiblogger team that they're being treated this way, but I definitely feel the sponsos needs to be treated very very sternly and put in their place.  I think if there's no announcement by End of this week, we can be sure the sponsor will easily drag this to next diwali and make another announcement for a contest just before diwali, again.

The question is if we should continue to treat them nicely or expose their unprofessionalism - and how do we do this?

any thoughts?

Look forward to the outcome of this hopefully soon (if it doesnt come in next week, well....)

And on a different note, the judging process is something that needs quite a bit of work. But thats something there will always be differences of opinion on.  In the last few contests I have always seen better entries of posts/ blogs than the winner decided by the sponsor/ judge/ indiblogger team.  I am not sure if the Indirank/ stats give an undue advantage or higher weightage despite the best re-assurances of the Indib team.  For e.g. I know a lot of bloggers who (or whose main friends/ readers) are not on FB for whatever reasons. They get penalised).

But even beyond that. The sheer content produced by the winner casts a doubt as to what the judges were really evaluating or if they evaluated the content at all (and saw something else/ or decided randomly). I can understand the pressures of time, but finally this is about blogging and creating content, if the judging is not reflective of a serious evaluation then contests cannot be taken seriously and some bloggers might start using spurious means too.

Perhaps I am the only one who thinks this way.  But my recommendation is that for future contests (and IBA awards) this should also be worth pondering over.  Also consider if some of your rules / evaluation design might be unduly influencing or being unfair to some contestants.

Good luck to the Indiblogger team & our community of bloggers

I hope that judges do take into the consideration that how hard we have worked on the vlog on content, creativity, relevance and information purpose rather than just judging it for "vlog" category. A video takes longer time than a post, and unlike the post, you cannot edit video after submission. 

I hope the judges do not give this entry as stepchild treatment that I feel, as was given to the one in Cashify contest. cause that just curbs us to go out of our comfort zone and invest time/money/energy to create different content. 

Quick update - the judging is almost complete, and we're hoping that the results will reach us tomorrow. Once that happens, I can post a definite timeline!

Okay

Great, thanks for the heads up. Eagerly waiting now for the much anticipated vouchers.

Great . Fingers crossed. If I get selected in any category this would be my first award on Indiblogger. Looking forward for it :)

The whole day passed by. And the sponsors are still judging I guess :D

Any updates after all? :(

When will be the result announced??

Its clear that the client is only stringing along the Indiblogger team and has no intention whatsoever of coming out with the prize at all

I hope the Indiblogger team can be transparent and advice us what the issue is. We'd support them and understand if you want to call this off.

This sponsor has been unprofessional, unethical and downright slimy and deserves to be pulled up for that. But at the very least, In this case you really cant expect to enforce rules like 'keep the blogpost for a year' right?  

Did you participate in any of these contests?

ROYAL Atmos is taking a royally long time to decide... but then, I guess, the aristocracy is invariably entitled to delays and cannot be questioned. :)

@Renie, whatever happened to the tomorrow?

We finally have a definitive ETA we can share - it is going to take a few more days unfortunately but we at least know for sure that we can announce the results on Monday!

Hi Renie - can we still expect the results today or has this got delayed again?

Hey Indi guys, when can we expect winners announcement? 

Any update???