TAKA DESIGNS

At SXSW Interactive, it really occurred to me how much social media can influence our daily lives. So I thought it would be fun to show what a typical day can look like. One of the fun things about SXSW Interactive is the amount of free food offered by tech companies that take over food trucks, stands and restaurants all over Austin to promote themselves. Knowing how to find them is the trick and luckily there’s a whole suite of tools right inside your mobile phone.

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Tucked in the middle of a tiny strip mall on the corner of Overland and Woodbine lies an ice cream shop. You’d never notice it driving by, especially at night, because there’s no permanent sign up yet. Only a small banner hangs above the entrance that proudly reads “Scoops Westside.” The shop’s interior is minimal at best: a few tables and chairs, a small coffee press that serves Intelligentsia coffee, and a laptop with speakers playing music from Pandora. But drop by in the evening on any given day of the week and there is a continuous flow of people coming in and out. They’re eagerly anticipating a menage e trois of flavors such as coconut white chocolate wasabi, brown brown bread, salty white chocolate and black sesame chai. At times the shop has gotten so busy that it has to close early because it’s run out of ice cream.

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A look at what’s happening in social media, branding and marketing on the web.

Back in August, Facebook launched a location-based service called Places, which allowed users to check-in to any location using their mobile phone. It was nothing new at the time. Location-based services such as Foursquare have been around for a while, but the number of users using these services has remained relatively small.  A recent study released by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that only 7% of adults who go online with their mobile phone use a location-based service. (Note, this report was done between August and September, right as Facebook Places was being launched)

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A while back I wrote about UCLA Happenings implementation of Facebook’s Social Widgets using the ‘Like’ button, and how it can lead to higher click-through rates, traffic referrals and more engagement for websites. To quickly recap, “The ‘Like’ button lets a user share your content with friends on Facebook. When the user clicks the ‘Like’ button on your website, a story appears in the user’s friends’ News Feed with a link back to your website.”

A recent article by CNN talks about the impact of the ‘Like’ button and the results are impressive:  “ABC News reported a 190 percent increase; Gawker’s traffic shot up by 200 percent; Sporting News said their site traffic was up by a shocking 500 percent; and NBA.com said that Facebook had become their second-largest referral source.”

Since implementing in April of 2010, UCLA Happenings has also seen a large referral of traffic from Facebook.  Facebook has become one of our top ten referral sites for traffic and continues to be an important factor in keeping users enagaged on the site.