A behind the scenes look at the Nuffnang Asia Pacific Blog Awards (Part 1)

As many of you probably know by now, the inaugural Nuffnang Asia Pacific Blog Awards 09, or NAPBAS in short was a major success.

My vision for the project encompassed the equivalent of an Oscars for Bloggers, and we set out trying to make it as grand an affair as possible.I cannot be happier with the results, and I have my team to thank for that.

The countless number of hours, blood, sweat and tears that went ino this project, is mind boggling, and it certainly forged strong bonds within the team.

Since there have been countless posts about the going ons of the evening itself, I thought it would be useful to write about the blog awards from where I was standing. As “minister mentor” of the event and project (Execution was headed by my able team).

So I’m going to start right at the beginning.

This project, started in earnest, about a year before the actual event. As the largest blog advertising community, we come across thousands of blogs on a daily basis, and were itching to do a blog awards. For 3 main reasons.

1) We wanted to honour the best, and in doing so, hopefully encourage the great bloggers to continue blogging and supplying great content to the open web.

2) To encourage other bloggers to emulate these great content producers.

3) We knew with our database and knowledge of the blogosphere, we had the ability to pull this bigger and better than any of its predecessors.

To be honest, the event was supposed to happen somewhere in March or April 2009, in conjunction with our 2nd annivesary, but circumstances kept pushing the date further forward. One thing we knew, is that regardless of how far the date was pushed, we would not compromise on the quality or vision of the awards. And so we waited.

Finally, after securing our wonderful sponsors, Pringles (who had been engaged with us from the start), our host destination, Uniquely Singapore, we were all systems go. I think this was somewhere in August, and once we set the event date at October 23rd, we found we had alot of ground to cover, and very little time to do it!

For the NAPBAS, we worked closely with our sister company Ripplewerkz Pte Ltd to develop all the interactive elements of the blog awards. This included as planned earlier, a website, the online home of the NAPBAS, which would cover three phases, (Nomination, Voting and Post event-not completed), nomination videos showcasing the various finalists, banner ads to publicize our event, the napbas booklet, the stage, and more.

The guys at Ripplewerkz are great when it comes to fulfilling their clients expectations, and I wanted a site that would portray the grandness of the event, but not be too cluttered and difficult to navigate around. Note that having sponsors also meant their brand assets needed to be protected, and so they were consulted on almost every aspect of the awards, down to the microsite. There was therefore a neccessary delay and buffer for every decision we needed to have made.

I really like the website, and the permanant home of the napbas, has been set at www.napbas.com, although the site has not been completed yet (Expect it 1st Q 10)

Once the site was up, it was a matter of waiting the three weeks, but also collating data and nominations to assess them. So whilst we were receiving the nominations at a breakneck pace, we had to assess them otherwise we’d be in for a rough time.

Over 10,000 nominations were received from all over Asia Pacific. The bias was definitely in countries where Nuffnang had a strong presence in, but we had nominations come in from Indonesia, Vietnam, China, India, amongst other places. Ultimately though, tough decisions had to be made, and I guess from the sheer numbers from Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Australia, the quality was too strong to deny.

Once nomination closed, we had a frantic time actually consolidating and finalizing selections for our panelists.

We had to narrow it down to 25 (Or thereabout depending on the nominations) for every category, as most of the panelists are busy people and, with 12 categories, you’re looking at 300 blogs in itself!

To help them, we came out with powerpoint slides that did several things.

Firstly to give them a broad definition of the category.

and secondly to highlight key reasons or elements we felt were interesting and relevant to the category.

Of course nothing replaces going to the blog itself, so after they are presented these elements, they go into the blog itself, and have a few quick minutes to browse through the site, and get a feel of it.

Finally we end the timing and let them score the blogs.

In dossiers that we prepared for each panelist.

For our foreign panelists, we got them to do it remotely.

To maintain fairness, judges with confilcts of interests with bloggers were excluded from judging ENTIRE categories. So Lionel from Ripplewerkz was excluded from judging for Best Original Blog Design, while Nuffnang panelists did not judge Best Fashion Blog as Candice was working with Nuffnang Australia as our community manager.

Each scoring sheet is easy to mark, simply with a tick or a circle, and there are generic judging points and judging points specific to the category.

With nominations closing on a Friday, and needing the panelists to get together over monday to wednesday in the next week, it was a mad dash getting hundreds of powerpoint slides, and individual scoring sheets ready. That was one of the first weekends that the nuffies would stay in. As in literally, get their jammies together (like so), and work overnight in the office.

1 person could sleep at the nuffie corner, and we got really thin mats for other people too. They were a temporary solution.

Until I got 2 tatami beds, which really are very comfortable, and supposed to be great for your back.

Alot of hard work was put in that first MAJOR weekend.

It paid off when at least 4 of the independent panelists commented that the judging process was world class and excellent in quality. Win no 1 for the organising team!

Part 2 coming up soon.