TAKA DESIGNS

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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One of the great things that I love about Foursquare are the tips that people leave for restaurants and venues. When trying a new restaurant, one of the first things I do is check and see what food tips people have left. If you like a tip you can also “like” it. Think of it as the “Like” button for Facebook, but on Foursquare.  Tips are also listed by the number of likes, with the highest at the top.

So when I decided to check-in to Urth Caffe in Santa Monica recently, I noticed one particular tip that had over 800 likes. However, it wasn’t from a person. It was from a brand. Not just any brand – it was Bravo. They had leveraged their TV personality Patti Stanger from the show Millionaire Matchmaker to endorse Urth Caffe by leaving a tip.

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StumbleUpon was one of those sites that I had always heard about, but never really spent much time looking into, until more recently. A few days ago, I decided to visit their website and was quickly frustrated because I was having a hard time finding out how their service worked.

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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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