Like many Americans, I studied Spanish in high school. For four years, I learned the obtuse conjugations of irregular verbs and practiced scripted fill-in-the-blank conversations with my other English-speaking classmates. Why then, could I not even so much as order a beer in my first trip south of the border? Well, I had never spoken to a native Spanish speaker before I set foot in that bar in Tijuana.
Enter, stage left, livemocha.com. Livemocha is a website that is harnessing social networking technology to give language learners real-time feedback and conversation practice with native speakers while sparing them the expense of immersion travel or one-on-one tutoring. In the process, livemocha.com is transforming the way we learn foreign languages from a blackboard exercise to a truly learner-driven experience.
How Livemocha Works
Train those language muscles
Livemocha begins with the premise that all language learners are also teachers of the language that is their mother tongue. A basic four course curriculum in over 30 languages is offered for free, teaching the learner basic vocabulary and sentence structure. There are also the traditional computer-scored multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and matching practice exercises one would expect from an on-line language course.
If there’s only one video you’ll watch this month, then make it this one.
Aside from the fact that it’s a sight for sore eyes when it comes to design, this video is a fountain of information that really gives you a complete overview of the state of the Internet today.
Spam is King
One of my favorite parts of this video is their information on spam.
Out of the average 247 billion emails sent per day, 200 billion of them are spam. Wow, yeah?
I don’t really understand why their is so much spam in the world. You’d think that by now, you’d have the Anti-Spam Consideration Front, the PETA of the Web. Why isn’t there such a group yet?
The other very interesting part in this video is about Facebook’s exponential growth, with a staggering 6 million page view per minute. Does that make Facebook the queen of spam? :)
Google is unleashing its sharp teeth on to social media, with its latest service, aptly called Buzz, which is built on top of Gmail. Buzz basically integrates your social media services, like Twitter, into one ecosystem that works out of your inbox.
According to Todd Jackson, the product manager, they decided to build it on Gmail as “the inbox is the center of many people’s online social experience“. True that!
My question is: When did Google become design gurus?
Social media is what we love to talk about at Thoughtpick. In a effort to allow you to better understand and grasp the right use of social media for your upcoming campaigns, we are dedicating this regular section for you tailored to analyze old, new and current campaigns in terms of audience, success, lesson learned and more so you could learn about social media by example!
Campaign Stat Box
Brand: Ford Fiesta (Automaker Industry) Campaign Website: http://www.fiestamovement.com/ Channels Used: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Blogs Appeal: Win a car. Target Audience: 18-30 age group in the US Date of Campaign: 2009/2010
In Tough Economic Times: Can You Sell a Car Through Social Media?
After a gut-wrenching year for American automakers, Ford wanted to change its fortune with the all-new 2011 Fiesta.
After all, this Fiesta is not a very American car. Small, compact and fuel-efficient, the Fiesta is more tastefully European than insensibly American.
But it is not the functional design that has raised the numbers for Fiesta, it’s actually their fantastic social media campaign. The Ford marketing team spent a lot of effort in making sure it got buzz on the Web.
The Idea: Drive Your Car Through…
What they did was simple: they invited a 100 “social agents” to try the Fiesta for six month, and share their experience with the world. They had them promote the car through different social media sites, including Twitter, YouTube and blogs.
Obviously, since our last bout of complaining about how Facebook should realize it won’t ever be Twitter, way back in August, Facebook is still trying hard to become more like the micro-blogging platform.
This decision eludes me; I feel like there’s a main distinction between the two social networks, where Twitter is external and Facebook is internal. Facebook is more about friends and Twitter is more about content curation. Facebook is about digital communication with our real-world friends, while Twitter is about interaction with other netizens.
Eluding or not, Facebook started rolling out a new feature this week for its users. This feature is basically its own version of “retweet”, where the user can share what their friends shared, while sending an automatic hashtag “tag” a la Twitter as a notification.
How It Works
You are reading something a Facebook friend shared and you think “WOW, I want to share this with my friends too“! All you do is click a button, smartly placed next to the familiar “Comment” button.
The "Share" button is right next to "Comment" and "Like"
Social media didn’t get the warmest welcome from the educational system, and it was always looked upon as total waste of time and a distraction. There are various reasons of why the use of social media tools in the classroom is still frowned upon by many educators, from the worries of content privacy and the over sharing nature of the classroom to others that rise out of lack of understanding of the social media environment itself. They might be valid reasons but they try to stop the wheels of time rather than go along with them.
Ironically students have been on the band wagon of social media adoption since the hay days of Myspace. The gap between them and their educators has been widening to the extent that when they try to educate their students in “internet” they are the ones taking notes of what is being said.
But things have been consistently warming up for the adoption of social networking as an education tool, and the wheels of the education system mammoth seems to be heading in the right direction. Hopefully ushering in a day where the computer in schools will move beyond its status of an over glorified workbook. So here are some of the tools that will provide the classroom and school with a lot of utilities and still address the concerns of privacy and the lack of control educators feel when using sites like Myspace and Facebook.
Twitter 360 is a nifty augmented reality Twitter application for the iPhone 3GS. What the application does beyond the basics is that it makes use of Twitter geolocation information.
The way that the application uses it is by allowing you to check where your friends (people you follow) are, based on the location of their last tweet. It will display your tweeps using Google Maps and indicate their location.
Twitter 360 in action
The best part of the application is that if you turn your camera on you will be able to see tweets relative to your current location. So, for example, if you have a friend that is physically to your west tweeting, you will be able to turn your phone to the west and see his tweets there. And If a tweep is close by, it will display an arrow pointing to their direction and their distance from you.
Of course, people will have to turn on geolocation on their Twitter accounts to get the most out of this application, and currently only the 3GS is supported because it utilizes its compass facilities.
Now if you are able to ignore the creepy factor of strangers knowing where you are whenever you tweet, this would be a great app. Especially if you follow a lot of local tweeps, and enjoy bumping into them unexpectedly (… or stalking them).
Everyone aspires to be a good netizen, but it’s not an easy goal to achieve. To be beatified by the gods of the net, you will need to surf graciously and illuminate every spot on the web where you are present.
To achieve such lustrous status you need to follow the ten commandments of being a good netizen.
1. Thou shall be omnipresent
Having a blog with Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed and Flickr accounts along with some forums and 2-3 email accounts is about the norm these days. To keep all your friends and contacts happy, you will need to keep everything fresh and updated, and that requires a lot of time and effort. To simplify the task you will have to aggregate your accounts and then consolidate your email accounts into one by using mail forwarding.
2. Thou shall not trust others to protect their privacy
Whether its Google, Facebook or any other company they will not be vigilant about protecting your privacy. So the user needs to be responsible for making sure his privacy is protected by reading about any changes, checking the news, or just making sure he has the correct settings to suit their needs.
LinkedIn seems like the middle child of social networking, and is a hugely underrated site. The fact that it’s a “zero cost” business networking tool should definitely play to its advantage and it will surely hit its prime in the future. Like everybody else, the only reason I got to join LinkedIn is because I kept on getting invitations to it until I gave in and gave it a shot. I spent a few hours filling up my profile and adding connections; the whole business only approach was very appealing and a fresh change from the very personal nature of Facebook. Some even argue that it’s not even a social network.
The goal of every business is to be ahead of the curve. To help bring up to speed on how to use LinkedIn effectively, here are several tips and tricks to help you become a LinkedIn power user.
Tip 1. Connect With People You Have Met
Adding connections to your network will definitely make you more visible. Make sure to add people that you meet in real life to your network. It might be a good idea to include a mention of your LinkedIn profile on your business card since it will serve as a reminder to others to add you. Also be sure to send a custom message of invitation to others because reading the same generic message of invitation gets old really quickly.
The other day I stumbled upon an interesting video interview of Stephen Fry – the famous British actor, writer, comedian, author, television presenter and film director – talking about social media. In the interview, Stephen addressed several issues related to social media and its impact on us and on our social evolution as human beings. His view on things is quite interesting, which led to this article.
Social Qualities of the Web Generation
There is always this pre-judgment imposed on the current generation of youth and the impact of social media on our children in regards to their social development and the long times spent daily on the web. While some may focus on the negative aspects that comes with every new technology, Stephen Fry believes – and I agree with him - that our youth have much better qualities than they used to be in the 1920’s. He claims that “If you take an ordinary semi-educated 15 years old from the 1920’s and compare him to a semi-educated 15 years old now, you would find that the one now knows more, understands more, is more socially confident, more able, and more aware of the rest of the world.“.
To prove his points, Stephen points out his many online relationships with which some are very young. He talks about a 12 years old young girl who astonished him of her knowledge of literature, especially knowing Evlyn Waugh (a famous English writer), reading all his books and having intelligent views about his novels.
