Today, through their official account @axisgsm, Axis announced that robinmalau.com won the Axis Blog Awards in the “Internet and Technology” category by a vote of 75.68%. The other nominees were Padmanegara and my friend Bangwin.
Background
I’ve been blogging since 2005, and this blog specifically since 2006. The reason was simple: I wanted somewhere to write. At the time I’d just moved to Bali for the second time and lost touch with most of my friends in Bandung. My days were just work. After a while I got bored, and I discovered RSS — the ability to subscribe to blogs and get a constant feed of stuff you actually wanted to read. Suddenly I had information coming in every day on tech, skateboarding, business, art, all of it. Nobody at work cared about any of it, and my Bandung friends had gone quiet. So I started posting here instead. That was the beginning. By today’s count, 771 posts and over 200,000 unique visitors since I started tracking with Google Analytics in 2007.
I still remember checking Feedburner early on and seeing the number tick from zero to one. I talked to myself about it for several minutes. “One person subscribed!” Then ten daily visitors became twenty, then fifty, then a hundred, then a steady 250–300. Whether that’s a lot or not doesn’t really matter to me. If one person showed up every day — even the same person — that’s enough reason to keep going.
Point being: I started this blog to share things, regardless of audience. So when I got nominated for this award, I didn’t immediately understand what was happening. “What even is a Blog Awards,” I thought.
My first impression was that the organizers were using popular bloggers to promote the event. But after thinking it through, I registered because I had nothing to lose.
Voting and the Fun Part
When the voting window opened on October 17th, I was planted in front of my computer with Tweetbot open, hitting up everyone who scrolled through my timeline to go vote and share the link. After about ninety minutes the blog was dominating at 84%. That’s when it got interesting, because I’d run out of people to ask, and with eight days left to vote, I needed a strategy.
Here it was: first, deploy friends with large Twitter followings as buzzers. Second, use my Google+ account, which had 200,000 followers. Third, go personal — Path and Facebook, more targeted, run it aggressively over several days.
Scratching Your Own Itch
A lot of people I recruited to vote asked: “What’s the prize if you win?”
Fair question. I didn’t know. Somewhere in the first email from the organizers it said “prize details will follow in a subsequent email.” That email never came. Even the final email I received today didn’t mention a prize. I’d tried asking Axis directly on Twitter once. No reply.
So why was I going all-in on a contest I had no prize information for?
Anyone who knows me knows I’m competitive. I don’t like losing. But this time it wasn’t just about winning.
My company runs a digital agency in Jakarta, and we’ve organized contests exactly like this one — the standard play for getting a client’s brand talked about on social media. I’ve always needed participants, and the kind of participant who genuinely goes for it is rare. Without someone like me, these contests are hollow. So this felt like scratching my own itch: becoming exactly the kind of participant I’d always hoped would show up at the competitions I ran.
Results
Winners in the other categories: Blog Music: Widiasmoro. Blog Fashion & Beauty: Stellalee. Blog Film: Amir Syarif. Blog Food: Anak Jajan. Blog Lifestyle & Miscellaneous: Benakribo. Blog Travel: Ransel Kecil.
All in all, fun. Prize ceremony is November 9th, 2012. Thanks to everyone who voted, got pestered on Twitter, held out hope for an iPhone 5 on Path, talked about other people in my Facebook comments, and to the Google+ crowd. And thanks to Axis for putting this together.
Update: I showed up late to the awards night at the Axis Community Lounge in Mega Kuningan, but I still got the prize. Mystery solved: a trophy, a 1TB hard drive, a 15″ laptop sleeve, free Axis internet, and a t-shirt. Not bad — worse than what SEO geek Aulia predicted (an iMac) and travel boy Daniel’s guess (iPhone 5), but significantly better than Nadia’s: a mouse. A mouse, Nad?