Thank you Vuelio for nurturing the UK’s growing digital influencer community

You’re reading the blog of the top Comms and PR Online Influencer of the Year.

Vuelio named me the UK’s top Comms and PR Online Influencer of the Year at its annual online influencer awards.

I joined some of the biggest names in online influencer to collect the award alongside Adobe, Brexitcast, Car Throttle and the Ministry of Justice.

Blogging has become an important part of my life in the past decade. It’s a means of thinking out loud, sharing ideas, and building a community.

Along the way I’ve landed jobs, projects, book deals, led crowdsourced projects, and met some amazing people including Sarah Waddington.

Blogging has changed a lot during this time. It has fragmented to different forms of content, and new platforms. Bloggers have given way to Instagrammers, podcasters and vloggers.

Vuelio has followed the market and broadened its tracking from bloggers to influencers across all platforms.

It has done a fantastic job over the past five year celebrating and nurturing influencers in the UK. It’s recognition of the growing role of the 11,000 influencers in the UK that it monitors.

But the business of digital influence remains a nascent market. There’s also a lot of fakery, fraud and plain nonsense. We’ve all got a story about dodgy data or influencers over stretching and making daft demands of brands.

Vuelio contributes to professional practice through work with organisations such as the ASA, CMA and #FuturePRoof. It contributed to this recent #FuturePRoof guide to influencer marketing governance by Scott Guthrie and I.

Finally, alongside the annual awards it funds research into the market.

The headline from the UK Bloggers Survey 2019 by Christ Church University highlighted the growing professionalism of the influencer sector. A new survey is in the works for 2020.