My Le Bui's Social Media Adventure

Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Throughout this semester in Social Media Innovation class, I have discovered much more about social media than I thought I would. This class has provided me with the basic foundation in order to cultivate a community within the Internet. I have learned what its take to build online communities of loyal followers. Social media is about a two-way street communications, you share information and people give feedback. You must be consistent in providing meaningful yet engaging contents for your online community. It’s fun to be a part of this class to immerse myself in all the diverse strategies to share information whether it is through blogging, video, online presentation, animation, picture and many more.

This is a slide I have put together to recommend some social media website. We all know the popular one such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to name a few but htere are so many out there. It’s good to explore and try it out to see if you can implement into your social media strategy. Enjoy.

Traditionally, we are used to witness communication through a one-way communication channel such as television, radio, newspaper and advertising, among others.  These methods are very limited since consumer of such information can only soak up the information provided and nothing else. You cannot give your thoughts on the matter.

Social media is new and different because it’s a two-way street that allows interaction capability between its message and its audience. The best way to describe what social media is precisely is to break it down to pieces. Media is tool on communication, like newspaper, magazine, TV, and radio. Therefore, social media is a social tool on communication. We can share information and ideas with other people. Social media will be meaningless without participation and collaboration of the people.

As you can observe, social media is much wider than what the majority of people believe. We could claim that the first Usenet, a form of distributed discussion system, developed in 1980 was already social media. Perhaps it has been around longer than we realized. How about the telephone? Would that be a form of social media, since it’s a media where two people are communication with each other? Maybe it has been around longer but we don’t recognize as such. We all communicate; it’s just a different method to communicate with social media.

Since social media is a term that is fairly recent, organizations and businesses may need some time to explore what is needed in order to utilized it for their purposes. The objective for using social media for business and individual are dissimilar. When business decided to use social media, they must educate their employees on this new media. They’re building a brand through this medium just like any other that they use previously. But, they must understand this medium and what strategy will be best suited for their goal.  

It would be interesting to see where social media will be in the future as it get more establish.

After this whole experimentation with Foursquare, I realized there are a range of different perspective on this social media platform. Foursquare is a location-based mobile platform that makes navigating through places easier and more exciting to explore. This service is available to users with GPS enabled mobile phone, such as smartphones. Simply by checking in you can share your current location with families and friends while accumulating points and virtual badges. To read more from my previous post, click HERE.

My View on Foursquare: I am an explorer at heart, therefore naturally I love the location based social media site. I have fun going out and discovering all the hidden gems within the city. Sometimes, I realized I love check-in only when I am out in town. I don’t normally remember to check-in at every single little places, like school building, library, etc.  It’s actually more fun when you have more friends on Foursquare, then it turn into competition. I believe Foursquare will get bigger within the near future. However, it may face firece competition from Facebook location based application which have similar feature and ability. I think after so many check-in, you will get bored with it and will stop. Perhaps, this is why they create the badge system which let you earn badges for completing a certain citeria of check-in. This is great for business that relies in people checking into their venue. People also are able to leave tips about a particular places which helps the businesses. Overall, I love Foursquare, but I feel it can get repetitive unless I travel all over the places. Some people may view this as stalking behavior to have your friends know where you’re at. The only way to solve this, is not to check-in at every single place or private location such as your home. I won’t mind checking into a public places and letting everyone know. I guess it’s all a matter of preference. You must experiment it for yourself before determing if it’s for you or not.

Classmate Blogging about Foursquare:

Hanh Huynh: From Hanh’s blog, I get the impression that she enjoy using Foursquare. She did a recap of her Foursquare usage in the first 10 days. She make a great point about the leadership board she say that,  ”in order to have a high ranking in the leadership board, you need to check-in often instead of trying to rack -up the points for the whole week and then do nothing after that.”

Kiara Robinson: One of my classmate, Kiara, express a dislike for Foursquare. She stated that, “For me personally, I am not a fan. It was fun to check into my apartment the first time, but after 16 times of checking in, I got bored and started to forget.  More importantly, it kind of creeps me out to know where my friends are all the time. I only have like 6 Foursquare friends but the app I have for my phone notifies me when they check-in somewhere. So I literally see where they are like 15+ times a day. Some stalkers might enjoy that type of thing but I feel more comfortable texting them if we need to meet up.”

GoAnimate.com: how to use twitter by lelebui

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!

For all those who are new to the Twitter social media website, this is a video for you. It’s a simple and straight to the point of instruction on how to use Twitter.com. I created this video in GoAnimate.com, I find this animation video fairly easy to create. It’s FREE to set up an account, however, it’s place a limit on how long your video can be, so be careful not to go over broad with your video and you should be fine.

What is twitter exactly? Good question, newbie! Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allow you to answer the question, “What are you doing?” by short message updates that consist of only 140 characters. The short format of the twitter tweets (update status) is a core of their service, allowing informal collaboration and quick information sharing. Twittering is also a less gated means of communication. You can share information with people that you wouldn’t usually exchange in email or IM messages with, opening up your circle of friends to an ever-growing community of similar interests. So, if you haven’t created a Twitter account, it’s about time you do. You can simply create it to test it out. Perhaps, you will love it and keep it for regular update!

Vietnam is one of Asia’s fastest growing economies and youngest population which make it such an intriguing Asian market. Bear in mind that 57 percent of population is under the age of 30. This will be a generation that lives on the Internet.

 

 

Vietnam’s Internet is increasingly a social, mobile, and private.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social: access to social networks is skyrocketing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mobile: more people are getting online via mobile, especially in Ho Chi Minh City.

 

 

 

 

Private: people are getting access to the Internet at home rather than through work or an Internet café.

 

 

The major problem in Vietnam is not that companies are incompetent of understanding. They don’t need to. By comprehending online and social media is admitting that online could boost an existing brand to greater altitudes.

 

 

 

 

 

Vietnam has about 100 million people with about 28 million of them online. They’re spending. They chat. They read. But there’s little association that companies here want to connect between those two activities. There’s unbelievable opportunity present within online areas because no one is truly establish yet. Vietnamese residents actually do feel that Internet advertising is random, unknown, and irrelevant. You can recognize this in how they approach it, how they budget for it, how serious they take online versus traditional media.

 

 

 

 

If Vietnamese businesses lack anything it is their attention to detail, such as customer service. There must be an understanding of why customer service is essential. At the core of social media is its customer service. The potential for Vietnam in social media is limitless.

 

 

 

Well-Known Brand

 I have decided to pick Victoria’s Secret as the brand I will be investing on their social media effort. There is no doubt that Victoria’s Secret is a powerhouse fashion and retail brand. The brand has focused its social media efforts on where its fans already are accessible: Facebook and to a lesser magnitude because of the limitations of the platform, Twitter in addition to YouTube. An immediate verification to the brand’s social media activity is the noticeable 12 million plus of Facebook fans. If judging from that number alone, Victoria’s Secret social media efforts could be confirmed an accomplishment. However, the brand has done much more. Utilizing all the means offered to commercial Facebook users, including, most staggeringly, customizable page tabs. The page encourages comments and it gets them probably over on average of about16,000 comments per status update.

Something on a Smaller Scale

 

For something more local which is also my favorite childhood memories is the Philadelphia Zoo.  What truly capture my attention is on their homepage a section of links to their social media outlets. Their social media outlets include: Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Each link is in a form of an image icon with animal attached to each one. The Philadelphia Zoo social media effort focus on connecting followers with fun and interesting information relating to the zoo such as photo of the week that consists of various animal from the zoo itself. There are uploading of videos that capture all the wonderful events and animals. Followers do engage in conversations by sharing their thoughts and ideas when asked.

Evaluation

I believe both Victoria’s Secret and the Philadelphia Zoo did a remarkable job on their social media communities. Especially Philadelphia Zoo for incorporating their social media into their website so visibly while Victoria’s Secret social media links on their website is not really out there (it’s all the way at the bottom of the page). On top of that, Victoria’s Secret only promotes Facebook and not Twitter or YouTube which they do have presence on. Both have dedicated followers who interact within these various social media communities. The right balance is maintained through engaging their target audiences with information, encouraging dialogue rather than just having them at the receiving end.

The purpose for these companies to have social media presence is to involve their customers with their brand. Social media obsession is sweeping the world and has taken over traditional media to a large degree, due to its immediateness, influence, knowledge sharing and networking. I believe the key to measure the success of your social media effort have many factors. Traffic is the more obvious ways of measuring social media, but you must remember that quality often beats quantity. Participant is a valuable indication for success. Engaging followers is a highly valuable one. It’s key to improving satisfaction and loyalty rates and revenues.

A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization. It’s individual, and it’s based on emotions and not driven by marketing messages. So by having an official and strong presence on social media channels is vital to businesses nowadays.

This is a video I have created on Xtranormal. It’s about a brother, Bobby and a sister, Sally. These two are at home on a Friday night playing dress up when they heard a noise coming from upstairs. Bobby decided to go check it out while Sally would rather update her facebook‘s status on the situation. Just poking fun at people who use social media in emergency that require a more immediate response.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/15650991[/vimeo]

Play the video above for the basic overview of what’s Flavors.me is all about.

Check my FLAVORS.ME page out: click here

If have multiple online presences distributed across various social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare, and so much more then you should definitely consider creating a Flavors.me account. Flavors.me makes creating a single spot for all of these social media outlet simple and easy.

The service is fairly simple. After completing a basic sign up form, you link your Flavors.me page to any of the online services they allow you to link. It’s self-explanatory in how you would customize your Flavors.me’s page. What I really love about this service is their minimalist approach in term of style.

Flavors.me is free for its basic feature and produces revenue through its premium subscriptions, which is $20 per year. The premium features include the capability to use your own custom domain name, real time statistics, and to include a contact form in your page. I strongly recommended that you check this out. You can use this flavor.me link to add in your e-mail signature in order to promote your online presences.

Check out the directory of flavor.me for examples of what others are making.

5 Widgets I selected

In order to properly install the widgets into my class blog, I have did a little exploring and getting use to the Fox MIS community site. Although, I have a bit of experience in term of using the blog, I am still fairly new to its functionalities. After a few clicks here and there, I finally figure out how to install widgets into my blog! Well, what is widget anyway? It’s basically movable and sharable mini-applications. Each blogger will have reason for using the widget they selected. In the end, it’s to enhance the experience and traffic on your site.Widgets are easy and simple way to add flare to your blog. Whether you like to display the number of currently online visitors or show a list of your favorite links, you can do it with widgets.

Here are the steps

(1) Go to your dashboard

(2) To the left of the dashboard menu will be a list of options, click on “appearance”

(3) Then click on “widgets” and start adding the one you like

(4) To add the widgets to your page, you can drag the widget you want to the right sidebar

Widgets I pick and why

(1) blogroll – This is to simply showcase some of the few favorite websites of mine. Besides all of my blog posts, these links on the side will definitely attract visitors to click on. It will also give you a taste of what I like.

(2) search – The search bar is to easily find topic that are of interest to you that I may write about. (tag may help) It’s allow visitors to search for specific content within the confines of my blog. I also purposely put it first on the list of widget.

(3) archives – A collection of blog that is categorized by the month and how many post within that month. I just want to look back on the post later. And maybe, readers would want to go back, too – that if they like what I have currently.

(4) tag – In my opinion, one of the more powerful and underutilized blogging tools is the ability to tag your posts. By using tags I can provide a more granular way to break down the content on the blog. This break down can provide alternate navigation paths to the content for both humans and search engines. I figure it would be useful.

(5) google’s analytic – I am just curious.