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Working with brands is a hot button topic at the moment. In this golden era of Australian Mummyblogging, everyone is being pitched by brands, asked to attend brand events and promote stuff to their followers.

I was lucky enough to be invited to Sydney this week to attend a brand event hosted by Colgate. You probably saw my guilty tweets yesterday about how I need to brush my teeth more often and my frustration that despite Amy being obsessive about toothbrushing, her teeth continue to fall apart thanks to Ehlers Danlos. Yay us.

The event wasn’t all about teeth however, the main message was about trust. With Colgate being named Australia’s Most Trusted Brand, they wanted to discuss trust with bloggers and how to increase our trust, by working with trusted brands. Which is an interesting concept, if you think about it. Previously working with brands was thought to decrease trust, but now I’m not so certain.

As bloggers, our reputation is the most important thing we have. Our blogs live and die by our reputation and someone whose audience loses trust in them is not going to have an audience for very much longer.

Brand events are all the rage and this is fantastic, for bloggers and for brands. But are we really thinking about which brands we align our names and reputations alongside?

This is important to think about. If a brand reaches out to bloggers and works with 10 bloggers and then ends up in the media for bad practise, then this reflects on the blogger. We might not like this fact, especially if we didn’t know that the brand was about to land in hot water (think BP oil spill, Nestle third world practise).

Whether we like it or not, brands that we work with DO reflect on our reputation.

To be fair, brands that we review for reflect less on our reputations – especially if the review given was balanced and honest – than brands that we work with. Working with means writing about, promoting to our followers as a good brand to be part of and accepting sponsorship.

Working with brands, while only one small part of blogging, continues to be something that many of us want to do. I think I have a responsibility to think about the reputation of a brand before working with them, in order to not harm my own reputation.

We ended our event yesterday with a round table discussion on trust, relationships with brands, Klout, PR and how to grow traffic. It was honestly a fantastic session, and I am pleased to have been able to be involved.

So now my question is: How do you feel about blogger trust and reputation? Does someone promoting a crappy brand to their followers automatically make you think less of them?

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And no, it’s not that kind of toy.

Last time I travelled interstate, I did so without an iPhone and without anything to keep me connected to the Internet. I pinched Mum’s iPhone for the occasional tweet, but really I was completely unplugged. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t actually good for me.

The time before that, it was the Aus Blog Con and while I had a working iPhone, I got rather twitchy that I couldn’t check emails while I was gone and I did miss meeting some people because I didn’t get their emails until 48 hours after the event.

If we add a few interstate trips coming up, plus my utter addiction to all things technology, you can probably see that I was angling for a new portable computer thingy.

Being tax time, which is the only time Nathan and I have any money, I ran the finances through my incredibly complicated budget system (pen and paper) and decided that if we were careful, I could afford to buy myself some sort of tablet device thing, to use for emails/twitter/writing when I’m not at home.

So yesterday, I bought myself an Acer Iconia android tablet and I am in love. Unfortunately so are my children and so I’m spending today twitching every so slightly while I wait for them to get distracted so that I can stroke it.

We also spent some money on the house, buying plaster gap filler and yellow paint for Amy’s bedroom and our budget has money set aside for more paint, lining for my kitchen, fruit trees (care of a Christmas gift voucher), new mattresses for the bunk beds that my children are moving into and new clothes for the kids. Once that is done, everything is back to normal until next tax time.

On the upside, I do have a lot of beans and rice. That’s always a bonus when you don’t have to budget buying poverty food into the mix.

It feels good to buy something solely for myself.

Now I just need to find money in the budget to replace my falling apart shoes and we’ll all be good.

I was going to write about blogopolis and then just link you to the post that I wrote before Aus Blog Con, wherein I described all my issues with social situations and then let you read it. And then I thought, HEY! You guys are special, you probably deserve a whole new post of me talking about issues.

So. Blogopolis.

It’s in a fortnight now and while I am very excited, I am also refusing to think about it too hard, in case I freak out and have to hide under my bed covers for a little while.

I have social anxiety. I never know what to say to people. I freak out and panic before walking into a room filled with people and I either end up talking too much, or not enough. That’s the short version.

Because of this and because I have had the pleasure of meeting a bunch of my blogging friends at previous events, I have to consciously remind myself to talk to new people and to seek out people I want to meet, rather than just hiding in the corner with the women I am comfortable with.

Being pushed out of my comfort zone can only be a good thing and I am working on attending as many things as I possibly can. If nothing else, I am getting fantastic at hiding a panic attack under a frozen smile.

Blogopolis is freaking me out in a number of ways:

1) I am worried I won’t get to meet the people I am desperate to meet.

2) I am freaking out that people won’t like me because

a) I seem standoffish (no, I’m just trying not to lose my shit) or

b) I am hiding in the corner, with my nose in my phone, freaking out on twitter.

3) I have nothing to wear because my jeans don’t fit me anymore and

4) I am going to get lost. This is the least likely thing to happen, but I’ll panic about it anyway, because that’s what I do.

Logically, I know that most of these things won’t come to pass. I’m sure I’ll be fine and if I’m not fine, I am going to pretend like hell I am.

So please, if you see me in a corner freaking out, come and rescue me. I would love to talk to you.

And in the event that I’m not freaking out and you want to talk to me, then come say hi. I am not scary and I really want to meet you too.

The strangest thing about my social anxiety is that despite it, I quite like people.

Also, as an ending to this rambling, quite crappy post – I collect business cards, so if you’ve got a blogging business card, I WANT it. I’m planning on slowly pinning them all to a wall near my desk, and I need more in order to start. So if you can help with that, I want your card.