MANILA - Two Filipinos are set to join world leaders at a landmark climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark this month after topping the "Raise Your Voice" video campaign sponsored by CNN, YouTube.com and the Danish government.

The six-minute video created by Paul Darwynn Garilao and Alfonso Orioste, Jr. bested 600 other entries in the online competition. The campaign encouraged individuals to submit user-generated videos about the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference and the winners were chosen via online voting from November 6 to 30.

Aside from the Filipino duo's entry, another entry "Global Warming Project" from Brazil also made the cut.

In an interview, Orioste said he and Garilao will be leaving for Copenhagen on December 13 to attend the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15). He said they will also attend a live debate sponsored by CNN and YouTube, which will be hosted by CNN news anchor Becky Anderson. Their video will also be shown on CNN International News.

Orioste said the victory allowed him and Garilao to voice their concerns about the effect of climate change in the Philippines. He urged government leaders to take a stakeholder approach in disaster preparedness through "close and efficient coordination with both the public and private sectors."

Similarly, Garilao said he hopes to bring back their learnings from the Copenhagen event to teach all stakeholders in the Philippines about the need for disaster preparedness and reduction of carbon emissions to combat climate change.

"We hope to share our learing experience to private sector, government officials and everyone who is interested to learn. We will maximize social media to report everything that happened there," he said.

The effectiveness of online relationships

Garilao said their victory in the "Raise Your Voice" campaign also showed the effectiveness of tapping the Philippine online community. He cited a 2008 Universal McCann study that showed that 83 percent of Filipino Internet users (3 million users) are members of a social network.

"We are the social networking capital of the world. Other countries may be more developed but I think that Filipinos are more active, more participative when using the Internet," he said.

Garilao said their campaign video first appeared in the blogosphere via the Awesome Planet blog of Anton Diaz and the enviromental blog Pinoy Green Academy. "Diaz [alone] has 5,624 subscribers in his Typepad blog, 3,024 Facebook friends and 1,559 Twitter followers - in which a significant portion participated in online voting," he said.

He said a total of 14 bloggers campaigned for their video for the "Raise Your Voice" campaign.

Garilao also tapped social networking site Facebook to spread the word. He said Definitely Filipino, a Facebook group with close to 400,000 members, campaigned for them while more than 600 Facebook users linked to their video and shared steps on how to vote.

He said they also created a Facebook page on the last day of voting and invited users to vote for them.

For microblogging site Twitter, Garilao said he and Orioste got help from columnist Manolo Quezon III who tweeted about the campaign to his 4,548 followers.

He said they also tapped online and offline news media including the Philippine Star, Good News Pilipinas, The Philippine Daily Inquirer, ABS-CBN Balitang America and abs-cbnNews.com. He said their embedded video on abs-cbnNews.com was watched at least 151 times during the campaign period.

For their offline campaign, he said researcher and community advocate Maria Embry from California helped them by tapping her contacts in the Filipino American community for the campaign. 

Their alma mater De La Salle University-Manila also supported the campaign through the endorsement of DLSU President Br. Armin Luistro FSC. The video was also shown in an environmental seminar in University of Sto. Thomas attended by hundreds of students.   

Offline pull to online push

Garilao said their campaign sought to convert "offline pull" to "online push" by informing the audience how to vote at every instance.

"For example, after ABS-CBN's Balitang America featured us on November 12, we immediately recorded it and uploaded the video on YouTube. Somehow, the video served as campaign material as it highlights the process of voting," he said.

He said their experience also made them realize that tapping social media was not enough to win the campaign.

"We realize that it's not just the social media platforms but the number of relationships in those platforms that spell the difference. We spent zero on this campaign in terms of advertisement. We used a laptop and our own time to mount the campaign and we created a dialogue with the online community," he said.