My Experience with Google Local Guide

[Balasmurali]

Hello,

This is Bala Iam a creative designer, from the busiest city Chennai in most populated country India, where the usage of google maps is growing really fast, the usage includes local app based taxi services, food delivery services, and the most important traffic situation . So now as a local guide the responsibility is also needs to be really fast, fast like adding new places as soon as they are open/launched and deleting places as soon as they are permanently closed. The places like Hospitals, pharmacy/Druggist ship, restaurants etc needs to be on the exact location, because here in Chennai places sometime go misplaced to few  miles near, this will be a biggest nightmare for people who navigate to this places end up in wrong location. My contribution here is more often closely watching for the misplacement of the places and dragging it to the accurate location. As iam using app based taxi services frequently I get an opportunity to note the misplacements and mark it accurate. For me this is more like a game play and I enjoy it 🙂

[Gobinath · Accepted solution]

All the best bala...Keep contributing

[Balasmurali]

Thanks Gopi... sure will do

[gervaide]

Hi I'm Michael but you can call me Mick. I'm trying to do the same thing in my country  but not easy cause we got many unnamed roads so gps can lead to a bad place whe you choose to use it. I hope my experience  will help me to add many places in google map to help other people to find the right place to go.

[Viju4u1984]

Hello Friends,
My name is Vijith Vijayan. I was born in Sharjah, UAE in 1984 and an Indian by nationality. I had spend my childhood days in UAE before i went to my hometown for my schooling. i came back to UAE after a long back and continued by studies from 9th Grade onwards till my post graduation. As a part of studying, i was fortunate to stay in different emirates of the UAE and learned the goodness of each place. Each of the emirates are a gem, where Dubai is known for many because of its great achievements.

Today, i work as an Account Manager for an media and advertising firm named Watermelon in Dubai. The company is a Dubai born and groomed agency serving the market for more than 17 years. My zodiac sign is Scorpio and am a simple person with good level of patience. My patience have helped me to be stronger during difficult times, controlled me in such a way for taking right selection. I have a lot of friends. I am very loyal and gives a lot attention to those people who are around, who also cares me and values my relationship. I am a friendly person and have friends from both the genders. The average retainership of friendship is 5+ years and there are relationship which is more than 10 years.

I have friends from countries like Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Ukraine, Georgia, Indonesia, India, Nepal, America, South Africa, China. I am keen to make friends from other parts of the world and create a FRIENDSHIP CHAIN. I love food and having fun catching up with acquaintances. I love to learn new things and make my friends learn through interactions. I am a person who like to try-out things - let it be fashion, food, lifestyle. I love to sleep a lot. In my school days, i used to sleep for close to 18 hours during weekends. There have been days where i slept for 32 hours straight. But since i have started to add new things to my life, i am investing more time for roadtrips, explore UAE, learn new technologies from peers, participation with events to learn industry and keeping myself busy.

Since 2013, i am also addicted to walking and i walk close to 300 kms in a month. I was one among few to get interviewed on a radio show for being active for 30 days during the Dubai Fitness Challenge 2017. The interview carried close to 10 mins and received good support from the audience for my inspirational talks. I am happy to share that my walking stories have inspired my collegues and friends, who also started to walk for a better lifestyle. 

I love to go for roadtrips and have reached to all sides of the UAE borders. Roadtrips and exploring UAE with friends have been my hobby. I love driving and can drive upto 800 kms in a day with good music playlist. Google maps have been my travel buddy on many occassions and helped me to learn the country in a better way. These explorations have helped to be a better explorer and ofcourse have helped my friends to vist the places to enjoy self or with family. There has been many cases where i had drove upto 240 kms to have a cup of tea or a lunch or a dinner with friends/family.

I have plans to do a 3 country trip by road to start with, then upgrade to a 5 country and to a maxx of 8 or 10 country. I have been talking to peers and friends who are passionate to do this from UAE. Hopefully, it will happen sooner. I love listening to Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, English songs. I a big fan of masups and remix versions like Hindi-English, English-Malayalam etc.

Association with Google Local Guide Program has been a great learning experience. When the intensions are not just to rackup points and upgrade levels, the quality of contribution will automatically increase. I started to contribute to Google LG, when i was inspired from my dearest friend, who is a food blogger. I was more interested to try and spend more time with the program when i joined for an Google SEO and SEM certification course through online.

I was always out of recommendations in my neighbourhood, when a tourist or a resident ask me for an opinion. I believe, being a resident of a country for long, one must be ready to serve with some good recommendations to help those who come to spend holidays/time in the country. Since my friends knew i explore a lot, they started asking for options to go with collegues, cafe options to have meetings, Fine dining places for family, Spaces for celebrations, Ballrooms for events, conferences etc. I decided to be a local guide to help people around me. 

I faced a lot of problem to add places or to do edits, the touch response doesnt work most of the times and i gets irritated. I watched youtube videos to make sure, i do the edits correctly. very few times i have succeeded. I am not sure whether it is the problem with my handset or with the app iself. The largest pie of my contribution has been writing reviews, adding photos and answerings. I feel so proud, when i get notification from google that some of my photos had viewed for more than 40,000+. I am very close to reaching level 7. My contributions to the Google LG have been in such a way, where i post reviews and photos of the venues where i have been with family on weekends. I have never did a trip to collect only photos and write reviews in my neighbourhood and hence i believe that my numbers are average or less compared to other contributors. I am soo much excited, when i received email from Google LG inviting application for the Global Summit 2018. I dream every day about this upcoming summit, spends a lot more time in learning how the community works, discovered about the meet-ups, the fellow countrymen organises and much more.

I am sure there is so much to learn and contribute responsibly for every local guide. I believe in delivering quality and definetly the new learnings will help me to be a better local guide. I am sure the global summit will create new partnerships, discover new ways of learning, which will help me grow and ofcourse to have fun catching up with acquaintances. The offline version is a good initiative by Google Map in the UAE. There are glitches of taking to the rider to a wrong places when it is at offline. Hope in the coming days, these glitches will be very minimal.

I would like to recommend, if a local guide can receive a card (loyalty card/membership card) from Google which shows/appreciates being a Local Guide. The card can be issued only to those people who contributes regularly and consitent/reached certain points/earned badges or level. I am sure, this card will inspire us to do more and inspire many others to join the global community. To have such a card in a wallet, is always an HONOUR.