k r i s a n d r o

First of all, no worries that I will spoil anything about the movie in this post because I hate movie reviews that give away too much about the plot and make me feel like printing the blog post down and marching down to the blogger and shoving the paper down his/her throat.

I got to thank my iPhone and my data plan on instances like this when I was travelling underground in the MRT and received the invitation from Alvin of Omy.sg, telling me that United International Pictures (UIP) are giving away 10 pairs of tickets to the SG Blog Awards finalists watch the VIP Gala Premiere of Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen.

KuKuNehNeh (KKNN) was extremely excited when I got news that I was one of the lucky 10 bloggers who got the tickets as she was a big fan of the first installment of the movie even though she can hardly tell an Autobot from a Decepticon much less recognizing who Optimus Prime was when a group of mascots appeared at the Cathay were the premiere was held.

A retro and movie version of Optimus Prime were there amongst the insanely popular Bumble Bee and one Decepticon in the form of Starscream or Megatron. I couldn’t really tell as it looked as though they carefully crafted all the nice Autobot costumes and didn’t know what to do with the remaining material and thus decided to put them together and paint it all grey to make it look like one of the bad guys. I don’t have a picture of that poor dude in that Starscream/Megatron costume but trust me, it was baaaaaad.

KKNN was even more excited after spotting quite a few bloggers from the SG Blog Awards and especially at the local celebrities and came in dribs and drabs like Elvin Ng from Mediacorp.

The picture above summarizes very well what happened: Me before spotting Elvin Ng, KKNN after seeing Elvin, Me after seeing KKNN see Elvin.

So I mopped the remains of the starstruck KKNN from the floor and went up to the cinema theatre where she hoped for Elvin to sit in our theatre while I hoped for Megan Fox to do the same.

The movie was AWESOME! There were more robots and favorities from the original cartoon, longer and cooler fight sequences and the animation was top notch. It was a little draggy in parts because of the over dramatization of certain scences which sometimes involves Megan Fox running in slow motion in a top that left little to the imagination but that didn’t stop us from enjoying the movie thoroughly. I am definitely going to watch it a 2nd time just to check out all the action again.

I do realize that even if I say the movie sucked, people are still going to watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen just because of the love for action, the Transformers & Megan Fox.

Thanks to Omy.sg and UIP for the tickets and all the sponsors for the goodie bag!

It was a blast at the “Your Blog” event yesterday at the Open Room. The event is organized by the good folks at Ogilvy and the topic was on “How to market your blog Like a brand”.

Yongfook

 

The speakers came from very different backgrounds; we have Yongfook, the handsome-enough-to-make-me-question-my-sexuality CEO of Egg Co., who produced cult favorite projects like Open Source Food (now known as Nibbledish) & Sweetcron;  Arti Mulchand, who has spent much of her career life in SPH and probably regards words as any guy would regard porn; Design Sojourn,  a serious award winning industrial design leader who still has enough humor to ; and not forgetting Andy from ToysREvil who made me laugh so hard from his Singlish and subtle hand-wanking gestures that I teared up.

All of the speakers (apart from Arti who owns a small personal blog) have very successful blogs in their own right and the amazing thing is that none of them made money directly from blogging. The success I am referring to is of course the niche traffic that they have built up over the years and it was the personal branding in their blogs that led them to other opportunities. All these happened because of their blogs; Yongfook dated a hot girl (he also got a job in a big media company in Japan but I like to emphasize the ‘hot girl’ part), Design Sojourn is working for a huge electronics giant; and Andy has… toys. (You guys will never understand how important that is to him)

The great thing about the speakers is that they shared their own experiences on how they evolved as a blogger through the years and it’s exactly what I am or what most of you bloggers are going through. I started off writing in 2004, just wanting to have a voice and not caring about what I say because who is to judge me on my own space? Soon the readers rose from one (myself) to a couple (colleagues, friends) and I found blogging tools like wordpress that relieves me of my lousy html skills. Soon, strangers started popping out of nowhere because of search engines and referrals and I found my voice becoming restricted. I could actually hurt somebody and thus hurt myself from the things I say! I came soon to accept that true opinions (the ones with FUCK YOU! ALL YOU FUCKING BASTARDS!!!) are not meant to be on the web especially when I am not very anonymous.

I soon turned to the ‘dark side’ and got into the hype of putting ads on my blog so that I can eventually strut around in my berms in Orchard during daytime, scoffing at all the stressed out peeps in suits and ties while checking out my adsense account.

It didn’t work. So now I am back to where I started, and realize that not everyone can make money through blogging directly (certainly not me).

Their blogs were a brand. People who knew of Yongfook, Design Sojourn & Andy knew what they were about and their success were built upon shaping their blogs to their strengths for a niche audience. Getting success in terms of traffic hits are not much of a secret these days considering how much information is out there. Barring bloggers who cannot write coherently or has no opinion whatsoever, we all can succeed in our own right.

So what’s my niche to work on. Humor methinks.

It’s a little on the ‘Lame’ side of humor but I’ll get whatever laughs I can get.

Don’t make me come over and tickle you.

(Check out the key take aways summarized by Brian Koh of Ogilvy)

(Oh and Arti, if you are reading this. You were shaking so bad throughout most of your speech but the points that you put across were definitely a lot of food for thought.)

“Social Media Breakfast (Singapore) co-founded by Derrick Kwa and Daryl Tay with the aim to build up the social media community in Singapore, regardless of individual usages, be it personal, work, school or play.”

 

This is the 4th time that Social Media Breakfast (SMB) has been held and my 2nd time attending after breaking my SMB cherry at SMB2. Truth to be told, I was quite confused on what SMB is all about during my 1st attendance but SMB4 has certainly shaped to be of a more structured event with the presence of topics and a panel to guide the discussions. Being the 1st time this has been done, there were definitely downsides to this structure as the audience had minimal participation in the discussions and despite it being very interesting with the witty and experienced panel, it felt a little one-sided.

One other point is that even though some of the panelists were bloggers themselves, they spoke more for the PR agencies and the corporate companies that are engaging in social media and I hope to see a blogger without such affiliation or experience in such companies to be a voice in the panel.

A point that is raised by the panellists briefly about engaging bloggers is ‘Credibility VS Popularity’ and the importance of not engaging in bloggers that are popular but not credible. Apart from morals, credible bloggers are deemed by most people as those who blog about niche stuffs. Bloggers who concentrate their blogs on certain topics such as technology, photography, food, social media and if you think about it, sex as well. Popular bloggers in the local scene are usually not the niche bloggers. Just look at the reigning blogging queen, Xiaxue and you will know what I mean. These bloggers treat their blogs as avenues to talk about anything that is in their lives. I am one such blogger and one of my posts can be about an amazing new website that gets you from point A to point B or about making fun of perverts on mIRC and the next can be about how much I love to fart in my hand and smell my fingers. I am not saying I really do but my point is that bloggers of my genre just blog about almost anything that happens in our lives.

We are Life Bloggers.

Many make fun and frown upon such bloggers such as myself but I like to see that we deserve recognition. Niche blogs may be relevant to companies and products but Life Bloggers are relevant as well! We may not all be able to tell a bit from a byte or may not be able to take a picture that will wow your panties off and won’t be able to tell you that the Char Kway Teow at KuKuBird Street is 0.26 marks better than the Char Kway Teow at Cheesepie Avenue. We may not have the grammar and finesse of a drunk Oxford English Professor but we still draw in readers that come back and read the content that we spew from our lives and perspective.

I know it’s hard to draw relevance to products and services for us Life Bloggers but if PR/Ad agencies do a little more homework and engage the right popular Life Bloggers that adore your products, I can ensure you that we do great jobs in convincing our readers that the KuKuBird Street’s Char Kway Teow is much nicer.

I have this blogging rule that I set upon myself a few months back. As much as possible, I will not write a short entry. I try hard to make every post a ‘worthy’ read so that one will remember some of the contents or be interested to come back for more.

For example.

“I looked around for any onlookers before proceeding with glee. I deftly inserted my index finger into my left nostril with a single combined motion of hooking the joint of my finger, twisting it and pulling it out, I extracted the pee-sai that was bugging me for the last half an hour. No surprise at the expertise that was put into this act as I have been digging my nose for the past 20 years and more. I calmly rolled the gooey substance to an optimum shape for flight and flicked the bugger out in the open but unfortunately, it landed on the shirt of a boy who cycled past me.”

.

See? I could have just said, “I dug my nose this morning.”

Anyway, my point is that I put a lot of thought into how I should craft a post to the best as I can and also try to make it long as possible without boring people to sleep and forgot that short posts can be as enjoyed as well.

So, I shall end this post now before my bad habit kicks in and hope to blog more regularly instead of stressing myself on both the quality & quantity of each post.

=D