Jun
02
South African Junket
A month ago I was one of the few approached by a group called the International Marketing Council of South Africa offering a trip to South Africa to cover the US national team in the 2009 Confederations Cup. The trip was totally free including flight to and from, as well as travel costs and hotel in South Africa. In other words it was a tough deal to pass up.
I, like a couple other bloggers declined the trip. My reasoning for the decline was personal but honestly it would have been a very cool trip. It was a very big honor to me personally to even be considered for the trip.
Thing is that trip is has been canceled.
I guess since my decline of the offer I pretty much put the thing to rest and ignored anything that came from it since then. Shortly after I said I wasn’t going the whole thing got canceled and some comments came out from a few bloggers over the ethics of the whole thing. A conflict of interest come up and from there things got a bit out of hand.
I won’t point fingers like some out there but by now you all know who and what was said about the trip. One writer/blogger came out and said some things that got some folks upset. The best summary I found was over at Pitch Invasion about the whole ordeal. You can form your own opinion about the subject there.
Was the comments tossed out there blown out of proportion? I know I am a bit late on the discussion about this trip but since I had a little bit of a stake in it at one point I feel I can still bring it up to those who didn’t know about it.
In my mind the comments weren’t all that crazy. Some took them a little more to heart than others since it was directed at certain bloggers/writers that those people may enjoy more than others. Every blogger on the web has a certain following and some are bigger than others which is why some may have taken the snarky comments to heart a little more than others.
In a perfect world where I am not bound by a couple weeks of paid vacation time by my normal day job and other facts of life were more sorted (getting married in three months and currently buying a house takes a lot of time away from things) out I would have accepted this trip.
So in all maybe this trip was just too good to be true after all.
