k r i s a n d r o

Thanks to Ahjay of Porter Novelli for the pic above!

 

KuKuNehNeh (KKNN) and myself were invited by Estee Teo for a Bloggers Event by Gillette. First up was a nice brunch spread from Serenity and were given a goodie bag each that consisted of a Gillette Power Fusion Atom, Gillette Fusion Hydra Gel and a media kit. To top it all off, we were given a pair of tickets to watch the latest James Bond flick with Gold Class tickets from Golden Village @ Vivocity.

KKNN and I are not fans of Bond but who would pass up on tickets to watch a blockbuster in $30 seats?

Many bloggers have already covered their experience on the event of the brunch and the movie but I will like to touch on something else. After attending quite a bit of blogger events so far, I am most impressed and most intrigued by this particular one. Not because Xiaxue was there, not because of the good food and not because of the freebies. Er… okay. I do admit that I love the Gillette Power Fusion Phantom to death and it is THAT GOOD even though I cannot grow any form of respectable facial hair.

I remember reading about Uniquefrequency’s post titled “Don’t Be The Insurance Salesman At The Party – Doing It Right“, which was on a Samsung event in which I had the privilege to attend. The article that Uniquefrequency wrote is about Daniel Goh who ‘did it right’ by working on relations with the bloggers for some time before organizing an event which in itself, was very nicely organized with no ‘in-your-face’ branding that one might expect.

Now, if the Samsung event was being mild on the branding, the Gillette event’s branding was almost non-existant!

There was no presentation. No contest and nothing to be won. Besides the media kit that is sitting in the goodie bag and the Gillette commercials that were running on TVs during the brunch, there was no mention of Gillette at all by the people from P&G and Porter Novelli! In fact, the ONLY time when Gillette was brought up during the event was when I was conversing with Edwin from P&G and it was me who brought up the topic of the differences between the battery powered Gillette Fusion and the non battery ones.

I really appreciate the team from P&G and Porter Novelli for organizing such a non-pushy event. If there are looking to work long term with the bloggers, this is definitely a great start to a good blogger-brand relationship.

Gillette is also holding an exciting contest! Details below!

 

Oh! As for the picture of me and Xiaxue..

Here it is….

Fidelis, Me & Xiaxue

 

=P

“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.

The very first popular blog that I came across was Xiaxue‘s back in the days when she was funnier and less commercialized(IMHO). Blogs at that time were a form of entertainment and a way to keep myself updated on my friends lives. Having a steady income back in 2005, I got a webhost and the URL ‘krisandro.com’ without going through what most bloggers go through; Having a free blogging platform like blogspot/wordpress/xanga and then realizing later that they want a self hosted blog.

It wasn’t my intentions to use it as a blog in the 1st place but I eventually hopped onto the bandwagon and started to write. I used dreamweaver/frontpage to design and code my blog and it wasn’t powered by any blogging platform. I don’t have any friends who had a self hosted blog during those times, and without the knowledge of blogging platforms for self-hosted blogs, you can imagine how stupid it was for the period between March 2005 to Feb 2008. I was basically coding everything manually like my archives.

LOL

My traffic back then was mostly made up of my ‘offline’ friends and colleagues and then I start to hear good comments that I was ‘funny’. I then started to write a little more frequently and got ‘tomorrow-ed’ a couple of times. Unfortunately, after migrating to wordpress, you guys won’t be able to see the old entries that I had before Feb 2008.

I had a very long blogging hiatus for a period of almost 6 months because of personal reasons and there are 3 reasons that made me come back to blogging in February this year.

#1 – Friends

KuKuNehNeh knew me better through my old blog archives and after we got together, she kept badgering me to revive my blog. Friends like DX, Ade and my WLNY pals also popped by every once in a while through my shoutbox and say things like…

“YOUR BLOG IS DEAD!!!”
*REMOVE COBWEBS*
“KRISANDO!!! COME BACK! I LOVEEEEEEEEE YOU!!!”

Okay, it’s obvious that I made the last one up but the point is, these people gave me the confidence that they would like me to write again.
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#2 – WordPress

Seriously. Without wordpress, there is no reason for me to update my blog as often as I can now. Everything is great about the platform to the point that I only need to concentrate mostly on content, content and content. Well, in krisandro’s blog, it’s actually rubbish, rubbish and rubbish. But I know you guys like rubbish and rubbish is gonna stay!
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#3 – Ping.sg

I don’t think the traffic for June can match the traffic of May though

Without Ping.sg, my blog’s growth would not have been what it is now. Nice folks do submit my works to tomorrow.sg every now and then but it is Ping.sg that gives me constant traffic. It’s also the folks at Ping who are very supportive of my blogging style and they make up a majority of the ones who leave comments whenever I post something up and it feels bloody nice to have people leave comments.
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This is my 100th wordpress post, and I’ll dedicate this to the 3 reasons I mentioned and all my supporters, including those who are SILENT READERS. You know who you are.. (Cuz nobody else knows who you are…)

[Image from Sistic]

I was pretty lucky to have been offered 2 tickets for free to Mayday’s (五月天） concert, held at the Singapore Indoor Stadium on the 26th April. It was a gift from my Uncle who is one of the senior directors at the Indoor Stadium. SHIOK RIGHT? JEALOUS ANOT???

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On an unrelated note…

I brought up to Ruifang on Saturday that almost all the bloggers call their other half or their close friends by nicknames.

Sheylara calls him The Goonfather.

Rinaz calls him CartCart.

Peggy Chang calls him MiuMiu

Xiaxue calls her mum MoMo

So, from now onwards, Ruifang is known as KuKuNehNeh. (Don’t flame me. Half of it was her idea)

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So, KuKuNehNeh and I were quite kiasu and we left Ang Mo Kio 2 hrs before the concert at 8pm. It was a wise choice in the end as the car park at the stadium was quickly filled up not long after we arrived at 6.30pm. Being the lazy asses that we are, we concluded that it was too far to join our friends for dinner at Leisure Park. What did we do to curb the hunger?

Eat BAO at 7-11 lor.

The both of us weren’t big time fans of Mayday and I only really listened to 2 old albums of theirs and KuKuNehNeh has only listened to ONE. Having such little love compared to the swarm of people flooding the stadium, we can’t help but snigger at the youngsters posing with their Mayday t-shirts and laugh at the crazy energy of the throngs of fans (*cough* Yiting *cough cough* Yanling *cough*) inside the stadium.

Panoramic shot from KuKuNehNeh’s LG Viewty. Cool eh?

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One such crazy fan was ‘sitting’ to the right of us. I wouldn’t say sitting actually, because she was standing up more than 3/4 of the time and blocking our view. She was shaking her booty, bouncing up and down, nodding her head with fury and playing with imaginary drums with her two blue light sticks.

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At certain points in time, she really look like she was having spasms. Nearing the end of the concert, one of her light sticks flew out of her hand and into the sky, and landed right in front of us. Without breaking the beat of her spasm-y dance, she turned her head and looked at the group of us sheepishly. Realizing that her blue lightstick is gone, she promptly takes out another stick. EVEN MORE POWER ONE!!!

Bigger and in rainbow color!

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The couple to my left laughed and said,

“Wah! Got spare!“

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WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

The band really had a lot of energy and knows how to keep the crowd going and I really love the tone of 阿信’s voice. It’s a pity that me and KuKuNehNeh enjoyed their old hits so much more. Many of their new hits don’t have that kind of impact and identity that the old ones have. All the above reduced our enjoyment of the show.

All the above…. and that spasm-y woman.

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