Aug 31
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
Apr 10
Update: Thanks everyone for getting in touch. Keep up the enthusiasm! I’m working with a small bunch of you to refine the idea. If you’ve indicated your interest, I’ll keep you in the loop of developments. If you’re interested to join the initiative, feel free to drop me an email or a comment 
India is a beautiful country. It’s richness of culture, natural wonders, people, traditions, festivals, landscapes, history, art, food, languages and wildlife, is as stunning as it is overwhelming. Even for an Indian, it’s impossible to explain in detail the diversity of India’s travel offerings or the riches in its every nook and corner.
Himalayas in India. Photo credit: Wikitravel
So here I am, excited at the thought of a social experiment, aching to make my contribution to India’s economy, with an idea to facilitate tourism in India through social & social media collaboration. Here I am, inviting you to join me in this social experiment, because I know you’re aching to be that spark for India too.
Jan 8
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
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.
Feb 13
When gmail meets twitter, we buzz.
Google is shrinking the world into a tiny little capsule, facebook is keeping it intact, and twitter is keeping it on its feet. Brands have a lot of catching up to do to make their space in this compact new web of people.
Pepsi’s abandonment of 23 years of superbowl advertising for the refresh project, a massive social media campaign, is just a baby step for a multi-million brand in the big (not so bad) world.
I’m latching onto the social media buzz in the tourism industry soon. Can’t wait to get my hands dirty!
Mar 2
I recently discovered that a lot of people are unaware of the social media phenomenon, even though they are very much a part of it. As a believer in the power of social media, I owe this post to them.
Simply put, social media collectively describes all tools that enable people to talk online. Often interchangeably used with the term Web 2.0, social media consists of social networks like Facebook, content sharing sites like Youtube and Flickr, blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger, and user-generated information sources like Wikipedia. The term, coined only recently, is creating waves in the PR world. It is a colossal avenue for people to share their insights, opinions and knowledge, through interaction with others like them on the World Wide Web.
Currently, the size of the social media community is estimated at 400 million. According to a study by Strategy Analytics, by 2015, 1 in every 6 people will be users of social media platforms.
Billion dollar companies like Dell, Starbucks and Coca-Cola are reinventing themselves through social media and reconnecting with their stakeholders. Here is a comprehensive list of businesses that have forayed into the social media space. The days of mass advertising and spamming are behind us.
My digital media class in college created a wiki that analyzes the past and future of social media in various countries across Asia. Even though my contribution to the wiki was Japan specific, my research exposed me to the promising world of social media. It’s when I began to look past my Facebook newsfeed, and at the bigger picture. I am a fan of Seth Godin’s blog and his ideas, and I ocassionally read what Guy Kawasaki and Mitch Joel blog about.
The following is the simplest video I could find to explain the concept of social media.
I quit my corporate job in the summer of 2011 and decided to travel for a living. I've lived with the White Thai tribe in a remote Vietnamese village, hitch-hiked along Turkey's Black Sea coast, swum with black-tip sharks on Malaysia's east coast, spent a night in the highest inhabited village of the Himalayas, and fallen in love with so many people and places, that I've lost count.
My travel stories have appeared in National Geographic Traveller Magazine, The Times of India, The Hindu and Lonely Planet, among others. I've been featured as an intrepid woman traveller in the New Woman Magazine and as a volunteer travel enthusiast in DNA, and interviewed on All India Radio.
In January 2012, I co-founded India Untravelled, with an aim to introduce travel enthusiasts to responsible travel experiences in rural India.
Contact me at shivyanath@gmail.com or on Twitter @shivya.
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