Posts from the ‘Social media’ Category

Apr 8

India Untravelled.

If you’ve ever fantasized about living in a remote village in the high Himalayas, experiencing the colonial charm of a hill station minus the tourists, savoring the country hospitality of India’s most hospitable culture, waking up to birds chirping on a farm, or finding the beauty of Europe’s alpine countryside in India, this post is for you. Read more

Aug 31

8 Comments

The coolest social media campaign in travel.

Ever since travel destinations have started flocking to social media, my travel wish list has been growing. It’s hard not to ogle at Visit Norway‘s eye-candy on Facebook and hatch secret plans of hanging out amid the Norwegian fjords. It’s easy to get distracted by Visit Jordan‘s teasers on Twitter, and be constantly tempted by the need for Spain. Read more

Jan 8

12 Comments

Are we losing our identity to social media?

Some of you may be familiar with the story of how I was threatened to be sued by a restaurant for a negative review. I refrained from telling my parents to keep them from getting worked up, until they stumbled upon my blog. Fail.

Many of us are tending toward a high external locus of control, which is to say that we change ourselves, our behavior, our thinking, our attitude, as many times in a day as our environment changes. This is becoming increasingly true, and challenging, with our addiction to social media platforms that allow us to assume pretentious personas not meant for everyone.

Professional identity

We all pay close attention to maintaining our reputation as subject matter experts in the workplace; a necessity for people to take us and what we do seriously. However, our publicly open social media presence is diluting that identity. Would you use Twitter / Facebook the same way if you knew your boss or co-workers were scrutinizing your every tweet / update?

Family identity

Whether it’s your family or kids, this is a tricky one. There is a line in our social life beyond which everything is out-of-bound to anyone whose related by blood. If your mom is on Facebook, you know what I’m talking about. Someday, when our kids read our tweets, we’ll want to hide our heads under the bed and wish we had been addicted to alcohol, or something else that’s offline instead.

Personal identity

This one is the most boggling of all. Juggling who we are in the workplace, with that at home, with that online, can be quite a handful in itself. Add to that all the alternative online presences we juggle – from being socially acceptable on Facebook, to finding a geeky niche on Twitter, to getting headhunted on Linkedin, to gaining credibility as genre experts in the blogosphere, the list goes on.

Among all these avatars we can so magically transform ourselves into, can we even remember who we really are? Who are we, really?

Oct 27

31 Comments

On Social Media & free speech

I am a little flustered right now. My head is flowing with many thoughts, but I must start at the start.

A month and a half ago (mid Sept), I had an unfortunate lunch-time experience at a restaurant I frequented. In a nutshell, a server spilled all kinds of food all over me and my clothes while I was eating, seated along the corridor, and the “service recovery” after that was excruciatingly bad; all in the middle of a work day! Expectedly, I was appalled by the experience, and also exhausted by the conversation I had with the restaurant manager. I resorted to HungryGoWhere, a popular Singapore-based site where I often review food joints. Here is my entire review on Zaffran, the restaurant in question.

With little else to pacify myself, I moved on and went about my life as usual. Until a few days back, when HungryGoWhere’s moderator wrote to me the following message:

To this, I immediately replied with my contact details, standing by the integrity of my review. Following 4 days of silence, I received an email from Zaffran this afternoon, and you have to see it to believe it:

I guess you’ll understand now why I’m flustered. (And a little angry and a little amused)

Rule #1 of Social Media – I’m an online citizen and I have the right to share my experiences with my fellow citizens.

Over to you – Any thoughts, insights, suggestions, comments? Any lawyers?!

UPDATE: Calvin Timo, a Twitter friend, wrote a post about the incident on his blog and received an email from Zaffran claiming that they are “friendly and reasonable” people. Well, actions speak louder than words.

Disclaimer: This is a personal blog and all thoughts expressed here are my own, not intended to harm anyone. Via this post, I only seek support from the online community and share my experience of the situation I’ve found myself in.