Mentor Interview: Wayne Liew

It gave me great pleasure to welcome Wayne Liew as a Mentor to the SitePoint Forums Content Team. The other day, we sat down and although our chairs were a few miles apart (his in Malaysia and mine in the U.S.) I got to know him a little bit better. Here’s what we talked about.

What brought you to SitePoint and why did you stay and become a Mentor?
SP is one of those large, active forums that have successfully maintained the personal touch between members and forum staff. I really like the personal touch and how members are featured and awarded for their contributions and quality posts. I noticed that most threads here get a reply from staff members, be it Mentors, Advisors, Team Leaders and even the Community Admin.

If you have read the book,The Go-Giverby Bob Burg and John David Mann, you’ll understand why I like it here.

What areas do you think could stand some improvement?
Overall, participating in the forum has been a great experience for me. If something has to be pointed out, it would be the fact that I still see many unrelated or low quality replies from members who are looking to boost their post count so that they can start publishing links.

Yes, there are still quite a few members who still don’t understand that post count here is not related to signature links and that links here are all no-follow.
I know the team is working very hard to counter this problem. Personally, I try to improve this by posting quality replies myself. Yes, it’s a small effort but I deeply believe in like attracts like.

I so agree! I have really enjoyed reading your posts, especially those in our Social Media forum. From several of your posts, I see you are quite knowledgeable about Social Media. What is your favorite social platform?
Facebook but increasingly, Google+.

Facebook is a relationship and people-based social network while Google+ is increasingly positioning itself as a content or interest-based social network.

Facebook has been very efficient in mirroring our actual social graph. While Facebook makes it easy to find offline friends, discovering new like-minded people is not easy. We generally don’t subscribe to or friend people that like similar pages because liking a page requires too little effort.

On Google+, however, the social network highlights the best posts for us when we search for our interests and the search results are not meaningless status updates. Google+ updates are often meaningful and valuable. It’s also amazing how these valuable updates are able to pull in lengthy discussions and quality comments.

To be honest, like many others, Google+ is still behind Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. While lower on my priority list, it’s definitely not something that I will write off in the near future. With features like robust photo editing tools, live hangouts on air, integration with the main search engines, authorship, and events (integrated with Google Calendar), I can see how it can become the next popular social network, especially for influencers and content creators online.

What do you see as the future of Social Media?
Although this might sound a bit creepy, our social media identity and real identity is going to integrate tightly one day. It’s already integrated today if you think about it. For example, recruiters are now Googling your name before considering hiring you. But imagine this, people could walk down the street one day and, through their wearable gadget, find out the social media profile of another guy or gal wearing a similar gadget with her profile privacy set as public. It’s a wild guess but I’m a tech geek so leave me alone. :stuck_out_tongue:

I see that you like to read. Do you like novels or are you more into technical writing?
I’m into non-fiction and business-related books. Once in a while, I might pick up books on psychology and social studies.

Have your read any good books lately?
Do More Faster by Brad Feld and David Cohen

What do you do when you aren’t posting at SitePoint?
I read. And I also love discovering new restaurants and food!

What I have read and seen about Malaysia makes it one of my favorite places to learn about. What is your favorite thing about Malaysia?
The food here is simply awesome because we have many races here with their own traditional food items. Food cultures from all over the world are slowly crossing our borders, too, because of the rapid development that we are going through.

What is your favorite food?
Loving salad more by the day but my favorite is still a nice hamburger!

Favorite animal?
A dog.

Pet Peeves?
I’m afraid of all creepy crawlies. :stuck_out_tongue:

If you could travel to anywhere in the world, where would you go?
Visiting all of the 50 states in the United States is on my bucket list.

Just make sure Minnesota is at the top of that list! Do you have a favorite quote that inspires you?
There is no luck, you work hard and study things intently. If you do that for long and hard enough you’re successful. -Jason Calacanis, Founder of Mahalo.com

What else inspires you?
Startup entrepreneurs that are out there hustling and crushing it every single day.

Do you use a PC or Mac and do you prefer a Desktop, Notebook, handheld?
PC Notebook.

To close, here’s your chance at blatant self promotion! Your profile says you are the founder of Sprout Geek. What can you tell us about your site? Care to leave a link?
Sprout Geek is currently an online publication for startup entrepreneurs and small business owners. More features are on the way but feel free to enjoy the awesome content while the team and I are hard at work.

That was a great intereview! it is great to get to know to our new members of staff and I so agree with Wayne in so many ways.

Thanks to both, Shyflower for doing the interview and Wayne for letting himself being interviewed

Yes awesome Wayne and Shyflower. It was great to learn about Wayne and Malaysia!

:slight_smile:

It’s nice to get to know you better, Wayne. I really find your posts useful, so keep up the good work! Thanks to you and Linda for this entertaining interview. :slight_smile:

Now I’m thinking of Snow Crash except the “real” world knows who Hiro Protagonist is, and aaaaw at him instead of making him stoop to being a samurai pizza delivery guy for the mob.
Actually, that’s still awesome.

When I go to Perl conferences there are still some people who are mostly called by their Perl handles rather than whatever their “real” names are… and frankly, those are their real names. I guess that’s what you get when the community forms online and people meet for real later.

Also, congratulations!

I almost missed this interview, but fortunately catched up on it today :slight_smile:

I’d have to agree SPF Staff are extremely busy and do a great job and do try to involve and interact with the members and that is why there are so many of us - and mentors are generally particularly good at that role.

Wayne yes there is a small infestation of low quality posters though occasionally we do get some quite nice replies and posts that luckily outnumber the miscreants. We do deal with forum miscreants swiftly to improve user experience and lessen some of the shoddy posts.

I’d agree with you about some of the social media aspects and like how it appears you are using a common sense approach by being more selective and choosing quality over generic content. We’re glad to have you aboard Wayne, and no I am not late with this reply. :slight_smile: