My Thoughts questioning Facebook Questions.

It has been a few weeks now that the Facebook questions feature has gone live to all the Facebook users. Before that , I have not used it but I heard from a few peers in the social media industry that it was going to be a cool feature. But in my experience, it really has not been effective so far.

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I think there is a thin line between a question and an opinion poll. If all they wanted to do is to make people create polls and do some voting I guess they are already loads of applications already there on Facebook. I strongly feel the Facebook questions feature should confine to a limited number of people that could be filtered or chosen from the social graph .Though even now you can limit the question to your friends but the question here is "Are you asking the right question to the right people?". The key for the feature to be more effective is people should have the flexibility to choose whom to ask. For example, the question should be able to reach a "friend of friend" who is from a certain college, community or network. Obviously , you cannot directly approach a friend of friend who is not in your social network but they are other subtle ways to do that. May be Facebook could start using "Sponsored stories" section for this or a it can go as a "recommended question".

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It all boils down to the news feed, the user should be given more control customizing the news feed according to his choice with reference to Facebook questions. But like all the other Facebook features which have come into place , including the news feed we might slowly start liking it.But I would still say , they should have rolled this feature exclusively for pages .


What is your experience about this feature? Do you see any positives in this feature? If you would want to tweak this feature a bit, what would you do so to make it better? Let me know in the comments sections.

How your company sales team should "not" embrace social media ?

My trip to Bangalore a few weeks back was actually very eventful. It would not have been so , had I not met some wonderful people in social media there. I wanted to talk about the one I had with Lakshmi Sharath. Till then, I have known Lakshmi , more from the angle of a travel consultant who happens to get a chance to visit some awesome places and envy us by her travel updates on twitter. :)

But when I met her , I was surprised to know her deep background in the Media (TV & Radio to be more specific). Of all that we discussed , the major topics were Travel 2.0 &  Social Media Industry in general. Thanks to her. But the most interesting point of discussion was her perspective on social media with a focus on content & media. I wanted to discuss one key takeaway during that discussion.

An Indian perspective on the cause "Water" -- Blog Action Day - 2010

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The Blog Action Day this year is happening on the 15th of October. The cause that is being supported this year is Water. They have in their website suggested a lot of ideas and topics to blog. Below are some of the suggested topics.

28 hours of wandering - All that was left was an amazing experience and a broken clutch rod

Since childhood, I had the opportunity to travel exhaustively through the north of India.Lately for the last few months, the south of India has caught my fascination. Hailing from Hyderabad, South India I always felt guilty that I could not travel much in this side of India.Though I have been to the glorious temples of Tamil Nadu , the gardens of Bengaluru and almost other famous hill stations in the south of India I have never ever had made that crazy super unplanned road trip in the south. Here I am, wanting to share one of my amazing stories in the state of Karnataka.

At the heart of the Hyderabad's  dust , traffic and rush  Dilsukhnagar( A major locality in hyderabad), as the weekend was dawning into our lives.We are stranded in the middle of a major traffic jam and suddenly my mind becomes completely blank. This was one of the times where your mind  want to take a break  and then your zany spirit shamelessly wants to unwind from the shackles of the daily wear and tear.

The Number Game - How many twitter followers/facebook likes does your client ask for?

Lately, I have heard from a quite a few social media peers here in India that clients are bent upon talking social media purely in terms of numbers. By Numbers I mean number of followers on twitter or number of likes on their facebook page. For someone who understands the very essence of social media, they would be able to see a clear distinction between qualitative and quantitative measurement. I think social media is all about focus on the qualitative aspect of measurement.

Anupam Mishra on traditional water harvesting methods in Rural India

Today, while I was just browsing through some videos in TED. One speaker who caught my attention is the eloquent Anupam Mishra. He is an environmental activist with focus on smart water harvesting methods across water challenged desert lands of India.

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