Wazzup Pilipinas!
A By-Invitation only Professional Blogging Summit will be held on October 18, 2014 and your friendly neighborhood pambansang blogger was invited as one of the panelist/speakers. To guide me on what to say, I decided to write about it here as reference to my discussion later during the event.
This will surely be an interesting event as we are tasked to talk about how our blog started and other topics namely how to maintain a professional bloggers and social media specialists network. We will be sharing insights on how we started our blog and social media network, recruitment, and relationship management.
I am grateful that it was Miss Janette Toral of Digital Filipino herself who invited me to the event. It is an honor to be lined up with respectable bloggers who already made a name for themselves and consider their blog as highly active, influential and wide-reaching.
I've been telling everyone that it was her who was my biggest influence on why I decided to pursue a blogging effort. Not that I wanted to make it as a source of income, but as a way to be informed of what's happening around me, get the opportunity to learn about new things and be able to express myself effectively by sharing what I have learned by blogging about my experiences.
I was originally so active in Facebook, and even more active than today. I often comment a long statement in every thread and would be very active sharing my insights. Thus, a friend suggested I start a blog. But I didn't start out with Wazzup Pilipinas. I setup a different blog. Well, actually, I setup so many trial blogs tinkering and experimenting on which one would best be appropriate for me.
I started with a personal blog entitled as Be Kind To us Trolls which talks more about my personal insights and opinions about current events, politics and showbizness. I was also socially active and used Facebook and other social media to expose erring government officials. I once was able to initiate the closure of an illegally-established office in the Local Government Unit (LGU) of my hometown....and was so brave in criticizing faulty personalities mostly discovered in Facebook and Twitter
Yes! I was proud to be called troll around social media networks including forums and other sites of which I am a member. I nwasn't sincere with it though. It was just an idea I thought that would attract attention, and later I found out it did when I started to learn how to measure its reach and interpret statistics.
However, it was Miss Janette who worries about the blog being perceived as negative that people might be afraid to read it in the first place. I actually joined it in her Top Emerging Influential Blog Site Writing Project and voted for my top ten choice of blog sites. I never knew that it would be the following year that I will become a part of the winning blog sites among the top ten with a new blog I created when I left another community blog of which I was a Senior Writer..
I was a contributing writer at another blogging community where I learned a lot and gained connections but not all good things remain the same when I was looked upon as over-dominating when I started organizing my own events and recruiting bloggers to write about them for the community blog. I eventually left this community when politics was all over the place antagonizing and suffocating the other members. They even let go of other writers who were sympathetic to my cause.
Basically the some of the senior members of the community blog confused my aggressiveness as a threat to their administration. They made people to believe I was unethical and egoistical. Later I got reports that they are doing the same thing with other writers who eventually left them for good too.
This led me to improve Wazzup Pilipinas which I originally created as a spill-over site to further promote my article at the community blog site. I bought my domain name to make it more professional. I also got the idea of creating my own version of a community blog site which we called Jeepney Manila, however it was not successful in recruiting members since my focus was divided among three blogs of which the third was my tech blog called Pinoy Tekkie.
Eventually, I converted my Wazzup Pilipinas blog into a community blog site and partnered up with government agencies like the Department of Tourism (DOT Fun Ambassadors), and the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTComs), and a lot more partnerships. It soon turned into a promotional tool to help in capitalizing interests towards the different happenings in the Philippines. Many companies, and event organizers including colleges and universities, started coming in requesting for online media partnership to promote their organization's events. Request for partnerships came in like a tidal wave which requested us to promote new products, services, establishments, organizations and other events organized by government, private and educational institutions and even advocacy initiated by NGOs and special groups.
Did I mention awards? They also came in like I was literally buying the as rumored by other bloggers since they could not believe I was that influential. A lot of intrigues and controversies came my way like they were designed to break me, but little did I know I would be reaping more rewards soon.
The Professional Blogging Summit also includes how to handle blogger politics and intrigues of which I am in that particular predicament right now where I am directly in the middle of a recent issue involving a unscrupulous PR agency which I probably rubbed the wrong way because of my aggressiveness.
This PR agency released damaging information to some bloggers who also spread the issue among their peers, including other bloggers and PRs by posting the issue in their respective Facebook pages. Below is a post by one of them submitted to me by a concerned FB friend who was able to penetrate their group whom he or she says do not entirely support the ill doings of the few. many of them were just there to have a laugh of the ruckus but are mostly not agreeable to what was being posted by these misguided souls.
But that's a different story all together of which I may not be able to tell since it only gives bad vibes to the community and myself as a whole. Let us focus on amplifying positive energy so that we would become more appreciative of what we have accomplished and what we would soon conquer in the blogging industry.
Honestly, I am not good in handling these conflicts since I am too sensitive. I would often see myself trying to answer every accusation but I fear I am just wasting my time because it seems the other party do not listen and already shut themselves down to believe only in what they want to believe.
Well, I guess that's about it. I may or may not be able to use the information here due to a limited time of 40 minutes shared with two other bloggers in discussing the topic. But what is definite is the summit's benefit for all the other bloggers who were invited to join the event. So if you were one of those who got invited, see you there and maybe we would learn from each other.
Long live blogging!
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