Word of Mouth

Social media can no longer be ignored. They are unarguably a great way to gather customer feedback. What your consumer are saying about you online form a great pool of ideas to improve your business. Hence, the importance of monitoring the conversation that are happening around your Brand.

But another important piece is the fact that everything you can see, your competitors can see as well. In fact, these are public discussions that anyone can track and monitor. What does this mean? As a Brand, you must spot the need, and be the first to fix it. Otherwise, the entire world is watching to take that opportunity.

A recent example is “Fancy” which Ali raved about in her blog. Pinterest caught everyone’s attention early last year. However, since its beginning, users had often had the issue of not being able to find an item that they desperately desire sold anywhere. We all know or have heard of someone speeding through the retail stores trying to find that “thing I saw on Pinterest”.

“Fancy” took this opportunity and created an entire businesses model. I have not yet become a regular user of this site, but from what I gathered so far. It is a lot like Pinterest minus the things that people keep on complaining. They allow users to mek immediate purchase on anything they see on the site. They also look a lot more like Tumblr than a pin board which some have complained that it was too overwhelming.

The future of “Fancy” is yet to be determined. I am excited to see how loyal the Pinterest customers are.

I had just discovered a great post by Agatha about how Translink is using Twitter to connect to their users.

I must say that I share her excitement. Translink’s official twitter page has a majority of replies. When they are making announcements  they always make sure to hashtag #RiderAlert. So I looked though a few pages of the tweets to see how are commuters’s taking advantage of this service.

1. Questions about services, mostly buses not showing up  or breaking down. Translink’s response in this department is so precise and personal. Not to mention the quick speed. Within 3 minutes, Translink avoided a potential frustrating rant and offered good information for the user to make an informed decision.
2. 
3. Positive Feedback: Translink’s tweeter is not about the negative either. This is also a platform that allow people to appreciate the drivers who go out of their way to make our days better.
4. 

Essentially, I am very impressed with what Translink has been able to achieve. Their spokesperson, Erin McNeill gave an interview with October 17 Media about how they use social media. McNeill spoke about an very important issue that I had not previously given any thought.

With so many communication channels available, companies try to push everything through every channel with hope that it would reach as many people as possible. But most people are both on Facebook and Twitter and they are likely to have other social media accounts, they do not want to get the same information repetitively through all the channels. It would probably drive them to unsubscribe. What Translink is doing is target different channels with different messages. Community events on Facebook and live updates only on Tweeter. It keeps people engaged without getting the same message repetitively.

We watched the Internet produce unimaginable beauty such as this 185 online voice choir.

But the exact thing that the Internet thrives on is also its weakness.

Anyone can spread ideas about anything. People can claim expertise or even worse, authenticity. Indeed, we can rarely be sure who is sitting on the other side of our monitors, and know even less about their intentions and affiliations.

Apart from the more obvious topics such as identity theft or never trusting what one reads online, there s a more disturbing fact of using social media as a new form of censorship.  Counter-intuitive, yes I know. But it has been done.

Please take the time to watch this video. Internet does not always bring freedom of expression. Similar to greenwashing, the availability of information and easy of access enabled by the world wide web may just have given us too much confidence in it. Here’s how Russia and China have both used the trust people have in bloggers and online influencers to silence a curious population.

Internet was a novelty concept for GenXers, but for Millennials, it represents unlimited potential just waiting to be uncovered.

What the internet offeres is access.

It breaks down financial barriers by allowing anyone to easily raise funds from anyone who believe in them. With website such as Indiegogo, creators are no longer restricted to convincing the bankers and high-interest creditors to lend them money. It allows for diverse projects that serves the interests of many to grow and flourish.

It breaks down social barriers by allowing every niche groupe to find people who share the same interests as them across the world. People are coming together under the things that they have in common. There are countless forums with thousands of active users for any topics imaginable. Whatever your strange interest is, the one that no one else likes in your school, town, city or country, there are probably many others who worship it as much as you online.

It breaks down information barriers. Wikileaks is the most recent and prevalent proof that democratization of media is inevitable and those in political power no longer hold information power.

But what about language barriers?

Machine translation is still very very veryyyyyy far away from being a substitute for human translators. For English speakers, it might seem like the internet already gives us more than we could ever process in ten lifetimes, but there are still so much knowledge hidden in the millions of pages in foreigner languages. Also, for instance, the Spanish Wikipedia page has 900,000 pages compare to 4,000,000 pages in English.

These are the two reason that set off a dream for Luis Von Ahn, who wanted to translate the internet. Every single page. in every language possible. Ambitious? Definitely. Impossible? Definitely NOT.

Take a look at Duolingo:

The website was launched in 2011 and has been successfully running for a year.

I do not wish to learn a new language, but I feel a desperate urge to join the team, using the two language that I am fluent with to help translate the web. Sounds crazy, but I believe him. Do you?

For more information, check out his Ted talk:

Duolingo