TAKA DESIGNS

Has Twitter become so ubiquitous in our lives that brands and journalists are now using tweets readily as endorsements and quotes? It’s been happening for some time now, but with the rise of major brands like American Express and The New York Times now on the bandwagon, Twitter continues to be a major source information and value. Let’s take a look at some examples of how tweets are being used.

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LinkedIn recently made headlines when it decided to automatically opt-in all 120 millions of its users to a new feature that exposes profile information such as names and photos within ads for third parties. All done without any direct notification to its users. As you can image, users were outraged.

Surprisingly, it isn’t uncommon as companies like Facebook have been notorious in the past for opting-in users to new features that affect privacy settings without direct notification. So I was pleasantly surprised when I recently received an email from United Airlines Mileage Plus encouraging me (now there’s a new concept) to update my profile settings to receive future email updates for offers and announcements.  In return I would earn 500 bonus miles.

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Recently I had to update my email on websites that I regularly use. As I began the process, I quickly discovered how insecure some them were. On websites such as Bank of America, Citi and Foursquare, it was frighteningly simple to change my email address with very little security or confirmation.  While others such as Ebay, Facebook and Twitter had some of the best security combining confirmation links sent to the new email address, unique security codes and a confirmation box to re-enter your password even though you are logged in.

Chances are many of you probably use at least a few of these websites.  So I thought it would be interesting to detail the best and worst examples of them.

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About a year ago on Happenings, UCLA’s event calendar, we implemented Facebook’s “Like” button (we renamed ours “Recommend”) for every event to help create a more social and engaging site. It’s been a huge source of engagement for our users and is the 5th largest referral source of traffic to our site.

Yesterday, we launched a new feature called “Most Recommended” that takes this one step further.  Users can now see every event that has been recommended in Happenings from the most popular to least popular. It’s a truly crowd sourced list, showing popular events happening around UCLA as recommended by our users. Even though it may seem very basic, it’s a direction in which the web has been heading towards for some time.

Bing has already integrated Facebook’s “Likes” within its search results  and Google with +1.  As the web continues to evolve and integrate closely with social, we’ll see even more extremely personalized and targeted recommendations for everything from social connections, product recommendations, news and information. We’ve just begun to scratch the surface.

Kogi BBQ as most everyone knows here in Los Angeles, is famous for starting the whole food truck craze with their Korean BBQ tacos and by utilizing the power of Twitter to build their loyal following.

Alice Shin, the co-founder, recently gave a speech at TEdxOrangeCoast where she spoke about Kogi BBQ’s early days trying to do traditional advertising by the book and it completely failing. How every mistake they made was a result of doing things the way people told them it should be done. Finally, after one failed attempt after another, they decided to simply start listening to their customers online through social media such as Twitter.

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