Fake Player Real Issues

The Fake IPL Player’s blog is great fun. Each post gets tonnes of (deserving) comments. Whoever is behind this blog has hit upon a brilliant idea
Take this .. About John Buchanan, he writes: "I think he wants to send his laptop in to bat the next time, given the amount of time he spends with it. Maybe if he spent half that time with us players, we may win a match or two"
He reserves the most acerbic comments for Appam Sreesanth: "Appam has this uncanny ability to piss off anyone who’s unfortunate enough to come within 2 kms of him."
How popular is the FIP ?
So far, 41,502 people have voted on the fake IPL player blog(Fakeiplplayer.blogspot.com), to determine whether the anonymous blogger, purportedly a member of Shah Rukh Khan’s Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) team, should disclose his identity. Needless to say, 64% of the voters feel he should stand by his word and disclose his identity at the end of the popular Twenty20 cricket tournament.
The blog, which has been offering visitors dressing room gossip, occasionally peppered with interesting accounts of life in the KKR team, has taken the online world by storm since it was launched on 18 April. The blogger’s inclusiveness and pointed irreverence certainly are selling points among cricket buffs who rarely have the insider’s view on what is considered a gentleman’s game.Firms are now paying attention to blogs, using them as an informal network to get the opinion of customers

Why is he a runaway sellout ?
Let’s face it, we as a society love our reality shows and love gossip…we’ve never had access to gossip on cricket and the blog is catering to that need. While much of the content on the blog could be classified as fiction, it was something that readers could relate to, much like the book The Zoya Factor by Anuja Chauhan, which tells the story of an advertising executive who is regarded as a good luck charm by the Indian cricket team. Even Times of India tried to encash teh popularity by runnng a column saying “Here you get to hear from the ‘Real IPL players’,” it read.

The Fake IPL player blog had at its peak, on 26 April, 150,000 visitors, who each spent 15 minutes on the site—which adds up to about 37,000 hours spent on the blog in one day. Putting it up there with popular individual led blogs such as Aamir Khan’s blog at its peak with about 170,000 visitors. Much of the interest in the fake IPL blog has stemmed from cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore, even though the blogger apparently belongs to the Kolkata team.

Why is he spitting venom ?
Well the whole idea of a negative blog is to say: you have a right to your own opinion. The last time it happened in India involved Barkha Dutt of NDTV . The media company took a blogger to court for criticizing Barkha Dutt on her coverage of the terror attacks in Mumbai, and won. Internationally, Domino’s Pizza Inc. faced a lot of flak after a video on YouTube showed an employee preparing a food order with cheese he had put up his nose. The company failed to act in time, losing a crucial opportunity to contain the crisis.

While both the management of IPL as well as KKR have tried to maintain a silence on the fake IPL player blog, its growing popularity is likely to a definite impact on the brand KKR and their sponsors. In this tough competetive times all publicity is good publicity; specially these economically challenging days, when notoriety is also aspired for however, at times, when negative publicity is relentlessly targeted at a certain individual or a brand; that too by a nameless, faceless Internet entity, then it can have very serious implications. In this case, it generates mistrust among teammates thereby causing a rift in the team and to continue to be happy with the association despite the fact that the team hasn’t fared too well would definitely be tough .

My two cents...
My bet is on this concept being the brain child of some media manager or PR expert from the team. Good to see non-traditional media being used to create excitement around the event. What say friends ?