Hanoi Grapevine at ASEAN Blogger Festival 2013

We are very proud to announce that the Grapevine, represented by one of our team members – Pham Hoang Mien – is attending the ASEAN Blogger Festival 2013 in Surakarta, Central Java, Indonesia on 10 – 12 May 2013.

ASEAN Blogger Festival 2013 is a conference for bloggers & social media enthusiasts from the ASEAN countries to meet and discuss together. This year’s theme is “Reinventing the Spirit of Cultural Heritage in Southeast Asia”.

The program includes seminars and workshops on ASEAN cultural heritage, ASEAN tourism as well as social media development and its role in ASEAN countries. There will also be a discussion to agree on ASEAN Blogger Community’s Action Plan.

Pham Hoang Mien, Grapevine’s representative to this conference, is responsible for our social media and has been with the Grapevine since early 2009. She has also contributed a few valuable opinion pieces for the music column, one of the most popular of which is The Live Music Scene in Hanoi and HCMC: a Comparison.

Mien is also an independent blogger in her own right with very strong insights. Recently she took part in an International Tourism Bloggers Conference in Kuala Lumpur where she became aware of the fact that other ASEAN countries (such as Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia) have an extremely good base of travel bloggers promoting their country’s tourism in English. According to Mien, tourism blogging is currently very weak in Vietnam and she highly recommends more Vietnamese bloggers start writing about Vietnam tourism in English. Read her full blog about the conference in Malaysia here. Also follow her on twitter for more updates about the upcoming conference.

Photo courtesy of The 2nd Malaysia International Tourism Bloggers Conference and Awards (MITBCA).