Photo courtesy of ANDY KHO
THE
trip started with a bang. With two bloggers pulling out, another
diagnosed with dengue the night before and one more unable to locate
her passport two hours before departure, we were two bloggers short
(despite replacements having been found for two) when we boarded the
plane on July 6 on Malaysia’s first blogger media trip.
Halfway
to the airport, I was half expecting the worst – to arrive at LCCT with
no one except my photographer, leaving me to fly to Thailand alone to
face the sponsors. What could be worse?
Garden dinner in Krabi: (From left) Tan, Goh Kel Li, Nigel Sia, See Tho (sponsor), Kimberly Low, Teoh Kar Yeong and Andy Kho. Organising
a blogger’s media trip is no easy task. Beyond being a new media and
receiving much cynicism from sponsors, advertisers, press media and
hoteliers, the assignment of handling the bloggers itself is already a
mission almost impossible.
Mood swings, work commitments, blog
traffic limitations, sudden illness, accidents, blog politics and
conflicts ... it's insane. Or, it could just have been my luck that
everything seemed to fall apart as easily as it had formed. “Wow, it’s
a free trip! I want to go!” can switch to “Well, it’s free after all;
it doesn’t matter if I don't go,” faster than you can say “Huh?”
“It’s
about choosing someone you trust, making the right choice, taking the
right precautions and expecting the worse,” said Kimberly, one of the
bloggers on the media trip.
Indeed, it was my first time
organising a sponsored overseas tour and I was already experiencing
heaps of problems before departure.
Managing and entertaining a
group of bloggers is like pleasing your parents; the only difference is
that you cannot retaliate – and there are definitely more than two to
handle.
However, bloggers, in a way, are truly kings and queens
of their own empires. Unlike traditional media, we do not seek contents
from a third party to build our “empires”.
Versatile contents can easily be created at the flick of a finger – or a few flicks on the keyboard in this case.
Our
opinions are honest, brutal and straight to the point; the piece can be
detailed or brief, written in an uncensored or family-friendly
approach; information is updated in real time and feedback is
immediate. Readers take our words straight to their hearts. After all,
we are not paid to blog.
It is this strong feature of New Media
that many advertisers nowadays overlook, hence the scepticism. We were
taught in school and by society to understand and apply the science of
marketing and advertising in the real world, where methods and formulas
like ROI (return on investment) are employed to calculate the
effectiveness and revenues of a promotional scheme. But, we were never
taught about the power of blog.
Blog is revolutionary. Neither
covered in the books nor seen as a marketing tool before, it has bared
its influence on the public many times over.
News spread faster
than live broadcast, power to alter human perception, voicing out
political views or complaints of bad service in restaurants.
To
grab hold of this new media is to grab hold of the targeted audience’s
hearts, seize their attention and feed them word after word any
information we might deign to type on the keyboard. No matter how
incredulous or irrelevant the information is, it's our opinion. It’s
sensational.
And, even though it was really a pain, I’m proud to
be working in this niche market, proud to be a blogger, and proud to be
organising a fully sponsored trip to southern Thailand for this group
of wonderful hard-to-please bloggers.
We went to a hot spring
waterfall to experience the wonder of nature that was Krabi, Well,
actually, they went; I slept in the car due to exhaustion. But the look
on their faces when they returned, the tales they told of their silly
attempts to leap between the freezing river and hot spring, cracked a
smile across my face.
After all the hassle, the disappointments
and my missing out on all the fun, their laughter, their anticipation
of the rest of the trip – even the sight of them snuggled comfortably
in their five-star beds in Sheraton Krabi at night – have made it all
worthwhile. I knew this would be a great story to share.
**~
Nicole,
Remember the times when I said, "No pineapples!"
*Smacks hand*
