Ian On The Red Dot

Firstly, congrats to Nadnut and Geekonomics for winning the blogathon.

Now…what was its point?

Some time mid-way through the competition, a troll appeared on Twitter.

John Kerr, head of Edelman Digital Asia, mentioned the event rather unflattering in his blog post ‘No money, no social media honey?‘.

There are also grumbles against events like a Blogathon in Singapore, where high-value prizes are being given out to selected participating bloggers and the creeping realization that the event is about hardcore brand promotion, rather than promoting blogging or raising money for charity, which is the well-known focus for a ‘Blogathon.’ I don’t know many journalists who would get involved under a structure like this – celebrities yes, media no.

Firstly – bloggers can be journalists, celebrities, or maybe, horror of horrors, even both. So yeah, maybe journalists won’t take part in a blogathon, but hey, if they wanted journalists, they might have called it a journathon. Blogging is a medium. Bloggers are people who write and distribute their content using a certain medium.

Secondly, for a post lamenting the state of disclosure and transparency with regards to the relationship between bloggers and companies, I find it funny that John Kerr would actually take issue with an event that is being so clear and upfront that it is being sponsored by certain brands and that there is going to be some (hardcore) brand promotion. Although, frankly, I was at the event, and I didn’t really see how it was more ‘hardcore’ than any other sort of event promoting any other brands. Maybe John Kerr prefers his movies stamped with meaningless ratings, with cutaways, lots of allusion to sex scenes, maybe a few silhouette shots thrown in, which does nothing for the movie plot instead of just maybe 1 good scene which while uncensored, exposes the dynamics of the relationship between the characters clearly (and yes, sex scenes don’t always need to be for gratuitous titillation).

The question that should be asked is, “What’s the point of sponsoring any sort of competition ?”

Like, what’s the point of the Subaru Challenge, which if you ask me, and even if you didn’t, I think is way more of an abuse on the contestants’ bodies than what the bloggers were put through.

Borrowed an image from Keropok because he had the nicest shot of the challenge. He also covered the blogathon here.

People who think the blogathon violates the spirit of blogging, whatever this spirit might be and the only kind of spirit I really think anyone should NEVER violate is the kind that come in bottles and taste a little smoky ( i.e. drinking whiskey with coke as a mixer – now, that’s a violation of spirit that should never happen), should just take their head out of their ass and realize that the blogathon is just a format.

Just like a marathon can be run as a competition or just as a way to spend time with friends (yes, I have some wickedly ’sick’ friends who run marathons as a way to hangout) or a way to raise funds for charity or just a way to exercise, a blogation as a format can be used for many purposes.

This time it was used as a competition where the contestants happened to be bloggers. Simple enough? Let’s break it down some more. Contestants (who happened to be bloggers) do some sort of activity (blog) to win prizes. This blogathon is really just beginning to look like any other sort of competition. How boring.

Now to the existential question – is it only bloggers who can take part in a blogathon? But if you never blogged before, and you take part in a blogathon as a contestant, have you now become a blogger?

But I’m really digressing.

So, the question that should be answered is “What’s the point of organizing or sponsoring any sort of competition?”

I can’t speak for the team from Ogilvy, and I would never have the audacity to, but I shall share 7 (because 7 is the number of completeness) points on how this blogathon might have, well, just achieved some sort of ROI at least with a supporter of the competition like me.

1. People learned about the Tangs website. Did you know there was a Tangs website? Well, now you and I do. And it isn’t some ugly looking corporate website from last century like the one for Ngee Ann City.

2. I was unconsciously introduced to the ‘Fashion Spy’ feature section of Tangs’ website. When I first visited the site, I zeroed in on that section. Why? Because the bloggers had earlier been blogging using a similar format.

Now, if you are wondering how blogging can help brand awareness, imagine if you request bloggers to blog in a certain way. That certain format could become easily identifiable on your own site or easily identified as related to your site. SCORE! 1 point to social media.

3. This isn’t exactly a product of the blogathon but more of Lenovo’s continued involvement in Singapore’s social media scene. When someone asked me what sort of Vista-based laptop he should get, my immediate answer was a Lenovo ThinkPad. Which is surprising considering that I use a DELL at work (then again, maybe not).

4. I haven’t been using facial wash (because the tube is empty) for a couple of weeks now, and coupled with the stress at work, my face is really showing the effects which Nadnut so honestly pointed out. Why no facial wash? I haven’t been buying my own facial wash for some time. I usually use whatever is found lying around in the toilet or whatever the gf buys for me because, well, guys aren’t supposed to bother about such frivolous stuff like toiletries. Anyway, now the brand Kiehl is stuck in my head, and the next time I get dragged along for shopping, I’ll probably only check that brand out cos seriously I know shit about such stuff and spending a couple of hours being exposed to good looking guys touting that brand, well, it must work for me too…right…right? Weak-minded I am.

5. Mainstream buzz.

6. Why are there activities held at that big empty space outside Ngee Ann City? Well, to make the shopping center a hub of activities. Why have road-shows? Why have give-away contests? Why have mini concerts? One doesn’t need much imagination to see how the blogathon as an event temporarily turned that little corner of Orchard Road into the hub of activities for that day. Get people near the store, they might just enter the store. Pure Genius. Almost diabolical.

7. Lastly, and I think this is the killer way the blogathon might have succeeded. The bloggers were placed in a display window. What’s the point of a display window. Err..duh, to display things. But short of putting naked women in a display window, how do you get people to actually look at what’s in it. Putting the bloggers there got people to look into the display windows. And if Tangs have merchandizing, marketing and window-dressing people worth their salt, 3 months down the road, when I’m shopping for something, somewhere in my unconscious brain, things are going to start kicking in and I’ll be drawn to some shiny object whispering seductively ‘buy me, buy me’ and I wouldn’t even know why. Although I’ll guess and say I might have seen in displayed somewhere, somewhere close to friends.

Anyway, recap.

1. Competitions – Not new.
2. Awarding sponsored prizes for competitions – Not new.
3. Getting contestants to do things to win prizes – Not new.

Lastly, the blogathon was a little like a reality TV show. One of the main reasons for the success of any reality TV show is the casting of the contestants. If you want drama, you got to cast properly – place the pretentious vicious school belle in the same room as the nerdy, kind, never-been-kissed social outcast.

In the case of the blogathon, I think the team scored with casting or at least with the bloggers nadnut, dk, claudia and aaron. I follow these 4 bloggers rather regularly and from what they usually write about products on their blogs, I know that they do not embellish. They will try to find something good to say, and usually they can, because good, can always be found (not all products are made evil) but they won’t say more than what they can.

For a blogathon, if you want trust, if you want promotion with any shred of credibility (and in this case, I think the bloggers had pages load of that), then casting is important.

You can write the script. Allow improvisation. Build the stage. Get great lighting. Find excellent props. In the end, it is the actors who deliver the lines that really matter. This time, I think they deserve a standing ovation. It was an honest performance.

Yesterday night, at turn:styles, a titanic battle between bloggers and journalists, billed as ‘Journalism’s from Mars, Social Media’s from Venus‘, was staged by the wonderful people from Ogilvy.

Before beginning to discuss any questions concerning bloggers and journalists, it is necessary to state my intuitive understanding of certain terms, which will shed some light on the terms’, albeit not definitive, meanings.

Bloggers are writers who produce content that exist primarily online in the form of published blog posts. As writers, they are not defined by their methodology and ethics in crafting their post. However there is a perception that a blogger’s ethics and skills as a craftsman of words is lacking the professionalism that is attributed to journalists.

Journalists are writers who currently produce content that exist primarily offline which is available on print, radio and tv. As writers, they are held to a higher standard of ethics by the public (a standard which they supposedly uphold) and there is an assumption they have a professional skillset that distinguishes their writing from bloggers.

Social media is content that is produced by individuals who engage in conversation and exchange content online. Social media is a subset of digital media.

Traditional media is whatever we grew up with before the advent of the internet.

Someone ( I apologise that I have forgotten his name ) said that bloggers and journalists are of the same breed. He is insulting someone there but I’m not really sure who. In any case, his point was valid. The time really has come to start distinguishing between the medium and craftsman. Journalists have been taking their craft online and unfortunately some bloggers have been taking their inanity off.

Traditional media, digital media and social media aren’t monolithic systems that play a singular role.

Traditional media, and more specifically, newspapers have played a myriad of roles:
1. A platform for brand marketing.
2. A platform for classified ads.
3. A source of breaking news.
4. A source of entertainment.
5. A source of investigative journalism.
6. A source of analysis.
7. A source of good and great writing.

When we say traditional media is dying, what we are in fact are saying is that traditional media have lost their monopoly on some roles and have been supplanted by other systems like Craigslist, Twitter and Facebook for others.

The roles that can be played, and the effectiveness of the players are, sadly or maybe realistically, tied to how the players can monetize what they do and as long as the general consumers of online content refuse to pay for content, the ‘Sword of Damocles’ hangs over anyone who tries to fulfill the roles 5, 6 and 7 above.

A big portion of money spent by brands is not online. This is the pot of gold that Facebook have been pursuing as Facebook tries to get brands to spend more money online. The onus at this point, at least in respect to the role traditional media plays as a platform for branding marketing, is on social media to justify themselves for the proclamations that the new way is the best way. Saying this is the new tidal way of change and everyone should just go with the flow is selling snake oil.

And while it might be true that the measurements used in traditional media is also another pile of horse-shit, the ‘you-do-it-too-why-i-cant-do-it-too’ is hardly an intelligent argument to make against the people who are used to an entrenched system. You don’t win a girl over by being the same as the current boyfriend. You win the girl over by being better and proving you are better than the current boyfriend.

Or you could just keep telling the girl the boyfriend has cheated or might have died. Oh wait….

UniqueFrequency kept hammering the point that he got information from his friends (or rather members of his network) though online channels. The truth of the matter is that the last leg of the chain in which information travels to reach UniqueFrequency doesn’t matter shit if traditional media exists as a link somewhere along that chain.

We who like to blow the trumpet of the new crown prince of media need to ask what happens when the old king is finally dethroned? What happens when we realized then that the old and seemingly debilitated king was really the glue holding the realm together.

What happens when traditional media indeed dies as we have so gleefully prophesied?

Update:

UniqueFrequency takes offense at the representation of his points. Screenshot of his tweets below.
I apologize for failing to mention, and I concede I missed the part where UniqueFrequency acknowledged traditional media as the source. However, as clarified by the tweets, his example was given to downplay the importance of traditional media at least as perceived by other members of Gen Y, a perspective he states that he obviously does not share.
It is that perception and its pitfalls that I’m addressing above. It is still my opinion that most advocates of Social Media themselves have that perception and while it was not apparent to me last night that UniqueFrequency was above all that, it is obviously clear to all of us now that he is. My sincere apologies in representing otherwise.

In the ideal case, there is an inverse relationship between speed and the reliability of news. Gosh, even GOD had to take 6 days to create the universe. I think it would be safe to cut traditional news outlets some slack in reporting news that has just happened, news that we might have already heard over Twitter.

The question is what other details are appended to the ‘breaking’ news coverage. Is there analysis. Are things aggregated better in a way that provides more informative context?

More data isn’t more information. The Twitter apps being created to help filter the noise out from the signals is a reflection and recognition of the problem. Journalists and traditional media play the role of filters and curators, a role which admittedly they should try to do better online.

Is there a place for citizen journalism to kick in and break news while the meatier stuff is prepared the old school way? While I despise how STOMP has devolved, it began with a rather noble premise and was a good start by traditional media to lead in the experimentation of new ways to deal with the evolving behavior of consumers and producers of news.

There were some comments made last night about the wisdom of the crowd. People who brandish that term around without at least acknowledging that there are certain preconditions that need to exist in a system before the said wisdom can be realized deserves to be shot.

I might even have the temerity to add that a lot of the systems we claim that enable wisdom to be extracted from the crowd to not have all the 4 basic elements required.

The 4 elements are:

Diversity of opinion
Each person should have private information even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
Independence
People’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them.
Decentralization
People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
Aggregation
Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

I can’t remember who said it, or where I read it from, but this quote got stuck in my head when DK and UniqueFrequency were arguing for the self-correcting mechanism of information propagated online.

A careless whisper can lead to death.

Just something to think about when we tuck ourselves safely into bed at night, assured that all is right in a world where increasingly disinformation is so easily spread. And while, disinformation can also be easily debunked, sometimes it may be too late, seeds of doubt may have already been sowed or the new information does not reach those who were exposed to disinformation..

If there was ever an alien invasion, I would propose that DK and Euniqueflair be our ambassadors for peace. The tone they struck last night from the blogging camp was sugarine concilliatory and stark contrast to the belligerent stance of UniqueFrequency. euniqueflair would bequile our alien overlords with her charm and dk would seal the deal with an impassioned impression of Jack Nicholson’s Mars Attack ‘Little people, why can’t we all just get along? ‘ speech.

The question is not whether digital media and traditional media ( by extension, whether unpaid bloggers, citizen journalists and journalists ) will coexist. The question isn’t even whether coexistence will be adversarial or symbiotic.

The real question is how we will coexists? Which of the different roles will either Social Media or Traditional Media take up. Which new systems will be in place to allow, if not, improve the way existing roles are played out.

Will roles be lost or mutated to a point that society as a whole suffer?

Who will mourn the loss of the 4th Estate?

For example, will we lose the kind of intrepid journalism that brings CNN reporters to war fronts?
Will citizen journalism by participants on the ground of war fronts bring us the same, if not better, coverage and analysis that mitigates such a potential loss?
What systems are we will building in place to deal with such a potential loss?
How can we continue to fund investigative and intrepid journalism?

Such questions are of the kind we need to ask going forward with further open room sessions. If not, all we will be doing is enjoying the company of great friends, good bear and navel gazing. Which we will of course share will the rest of the word on Twitter.

Update:
Rereading some of the tweets from last night between DK and me. I have a feeling he interpreted the question in this tweet ‘@dk the question is not whether we will coexist.. The question is how.’ as me questioning the possibility/probability of such a coexistence.

In fact, the ‘how’ was more of a reference to the mundane details of such a relationship. Who takes out the trash? Who brings home the bacon? Who will cook the food?

“Can a relationship exist?” and “How a relationship exists?” are two different questions.

Reg Braithwaite is using GitHub as a blogging platform. It’s an interesting idea in a non-gimmicky way.

This post was written in response to Patlaw’s post which was a response to Cowboy Caleb’s post.

It needs a better ad network for the blogs.

The strategy of the current ad networks, while it may make the companies a ton of money and allow the representatives of the companies and the affiliated bloggers live (or seem to live) the good life with parties, product launches and other camwhoring opportunities, that strategy is like a gatling gun spraying bullets hoping something hits – while taking little relative effort, it is still a waste of bullets.

That strategy entails we elevate the mediocre or worse give the mediocre an inappropriate sense of entitlement which makes them self-obsessed demanding pricks.

Back to the beginning – what we need is a better ad network for blogs.

What would a better network for Singapore’s blogs look like? It will look like The DECK where membership into the network is by invitation only.

We need an ad network where the good blogs aren’t guilty by association like how they would be if they joined *ahem* certain networks which are littered with camwhoring idiots (note: not all camwhores are idiots but enough for me to think that camwhoring affects the brain or only those with little brain matter camwhore).

Here is why we need a better ad network. We need an incentive for the good writers to continue writing as well as attract more good writers to post their thoughts and ideas online. Money as the only reason to do anything is crass, but it shouldn’t be ignored.

An ad network of the better blogs would give them more bargaining power with potential advertisers.

Because this isn’t a network for everyone and not everyone can just fill up a form to join, if this ad network is the one making the most money for blogs in Singapore, more bloggers would be inspired to write better in the hope they can join this lucrative network.

Money is sadly a necessary incentive to bring about the kind of blogosphere Patlaw and Cowboy Caleb envisions.

And that’s why we need a better ad network modeled after The DECK.

I can think of some blogs that should be the founding members.

1. Blankanvas by Patlaw
2. Cowboy Caleb
3. Culturepush
4. Startdrawing.org
5. Mr Brown
6. Design Sojourn

There are a few more I can think of, but why don’t you guys (and gals) contribute possible blogs.

I read this post by ShadowFox. I totally enjoyed it. Like my sis would say – guilty indulgence. Like Yoda might say:

“Pain, suffering, death I feel. Something terrible has happened. Young ‘ShadowFox’ is in pain. Terrible pain”

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

His blog posts, comments and links led me down a rabbit hole which makes me feel that the Malaysian blogging Scene is 100times more happening than the Singapore blogging scene.

Nice.

Damn. I’m feeding the trashy self. Must resist. Must resist.

Resistance is futile….