Shared by Andrea

In light of potential regulation by the FTC on bloggers, Total Beauty Media CEO Emrah Kovacoglu wrote an article that was distributed on their June newsletter called: “Beauty brands should not be working with bloggers…directly, anyway”.  The article created a massive reaction in the beauty blogging community as he made some strong statements about bloggers receiving incentives from companies, not following journalistic standards, and their fear of producing bad reviews. After carefully reading it twice my take was that he was mainly using the FTC news to make a case for the Total Beauty Sneak Peek program in which they act as a middle man playing a buffering role in the community. The beauty of the very dynamic blogging community is their freedom to pick and choose what they want to review and how they want to review it. Readers are savvy and the best blogs will be the most successful. It is not the role of Total Beauty Media to determine what standards they should follow and help enforce it. There is space for beauty blog directories and aggregation online, but not for creating a force that will help ‘control’ them…glossies operate in controlled environments, not blogs.

Reaction from Bloggers (First published on Bionic-Beauty.com):

• Bionic Beauty – Total Beauty’s Blog Blunder
• Robyn from Purely Cosmetics – Blogger Product Review Uproar
• Carleen from Beauty and Fashion Tech – Responding to Total Beauty’s Suggestion that PR Should Not Work Directly With Bloggers
• Beauty Junkie London – TB Gate: Beauty Blogging Uproar
• British Beauty Blogger – Say What, Mr. CEO?
• Gloss Menagerie – Total Beauty’s Drama Llama Extravaganza
• Casual Lavish – TotalBeauty.com CEO Knocks Down Bloggers
• The Nail Phile – Total Beauty Media’s CEO Turns On Us
• Beauty School – Brands Should Not Be Working with Bloggers
• Beauty in the Bag – Blogola Schmogola
• Advice Sisters – Bloggers Under Attack

Response from Total Beauty Media CEO: Emrah Kovacoglu – CEO Total Beauty Media posted a 8.27 minute video responding to what he called a: “dialog generated from the CEO’s Outlook in the June issue of Total Beauty Insider”. The video was seen 252 times and no comments were posted.