The CrowdCloud Blog

Read this blog for thoughtful points about social media, curation, and the world around you. For more about what CrowdCloud is, check out www.crowdcloud.com and/or follow us on Twitter (@CrowdCloudApp) and Facebook.

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Social Media and the Future of Hospitality Services

Social media is developing many uses these days, from being used to showcase breaking news to being a focal point for discussion during any major global event. It’s also being used by hotels and other hospitality companies as a means of communication with their guests. How exactly can companies use this? Well, for one, they can have personalized communication with their guests, whether it’s about how their day was or responding to any issues they’ve had. Having a constant finger on the pulse of company Twitter or Facebook accounts, or more ideally keeping the conversation focused on a property-specific mobile app. Are you a casino resort? Is one of your guests tweeting about where to go to play poker tonight? Reply to him and give him recommendations. At other hotels, a guest might wistfully ask about dinner recommendations. Surprise that guest with a list of your concierge’s personal recommendations, personalized for that guest, and remaining open for further interaction. But that’s really just the tip of the iceberg for using social media to further the hospitality market. That kind of personal touch can be used in many ways, making guests happier and allowing the staff to do their job better. It’s the ultimate comment card, and even better: you can react to it right away, dispelling negativity before it can really start. At CrowdCloud, we believe that social media is part of the future of the hospitality market. We’re interested in using our refined back-end system and social media prowess to allow hotel guests to be able to keep a tab on the world around them while they are on vacation. They’ll be able to keep up on great restaurant and event deals, check to see what’s going on around them while they relax by the pool - all while on their phone. That sure would be nice, wouldn’t it?

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Why White-Label for Applications?

Most companies that aren’t focused on technology are facing a new dilemma: how do we make an app for people’s smart phones? It’s becoming, as time goes on, a key part of most company’s strategies. The amount of people with smart phones is growing fast, and the amount of apps those people download is growing even faster.

So, if you’re wholly unfamiliar with apps and you raise an eyebrow when someone says “iOS,” then maybe white-labeling is the way to go. White-labeling involves working with a developer who customizes their software to work for you. It allows you to have total brand control and ownership over your app. Ideally, it is all easy to use and customize, and working with a flexible provider helps out, too.

One huge benefit of white-labeling is the speed in which it can be implemented. The groundwork is already in place; all you need to do is work with the provider and customize it to your liking. If you work with the right company, it should be a painless and simple process that produces a nice-looking branded app in no time at all.

Especially if you decide to white label with us here at CrowdCloud. We’ll give you access to the whole CrowdCloud suite of products, allowing you to customize them all to your specific needs. You’ll be able to check out all sorts of back-end analytics and statistics on our admin page. Even better, if there is something else you want to add or tweak, all you have to do is ask us and we’ll work with you to make the perfect app for whatever you want to create.

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App Downloading, Especially On The Go, Is Growing

Smart phones are prevalent and app downloading is at an all-time high, and thanks to the flexibility of where you can download apps (virtually anywhere), they’re downloaded without much hesitation usually, whether they are free or 99 cents. In total, according to Apple in June 2012, more than 30 billion apps had been downloaded just from Apple’s App Store. The total money made from the sale of these apps is close to eight billion dollars. And, to reiterate, that is just from one app store available. That does not factor the Google Play store or any other app-selling avenues at all. Most of those apps, it turns out, were bought when the user was on the go. Part of that comes from the fact that your phone is always with you, and if you have downtime, you might go check out the App Store and download something to pass the time. It also happens because users have very little downtime to reconsider their purchase. There is less time to forget about a potential purchase. For example, you could walk into a store, and see an advertisement for a movie you want to see. Since you’re not able to go to the movies right that moment, you might forget about it and never see it. On the other hand, if you saw an ad for app (or maybe even an app related to the movie), you could take out your phone, download the app, and go about your day. Most app purchases don’t take place in the home, we discovered. Usually, people download apps on the go, and some even do it a lot while travelling, mostly to learn about the area where they are going to. People are generally more susceptible to downloading apps they see advertised when they are on vacation. If you’re in a new area and an app is advertised that could give you more information about the local surroundings, it only makes sense to download it to get a better understanding. The great thing about that concept is that CrowdCloud, the site where this very blog is on, can deliver that. CrowdCloud can provide curated content for local areas that can be presented in app form. It can advertise local restaurants deals, attractions, events, and much more. It can even keep people abreast on local and world news.

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Five Ways Mobile Apps Can Make Hotels Better

When you think of how hotels could improve their user experience, it's assumed your mind doesn’t immediately go to mobile applications. It should, though, because there are several ways that hotels could leverage mobile applications to improve communication between them and their guests, and just plain improve their guest’s experience at their hotel.

Checking In Just imagine being on your way to a hotel, and you’re at that time when your room might be ready but you’re not sure. In theory, you could just pull out your smart phone and check to see if your room is ready. A process that involves phone calls and lots of hemming and hawing can be simple and practical. Or, if you do arrive at your hotel and your room isn’t ready, you can go enjoy a drink at the bar and await a simple push notification to let you know your room is ready. A mobile app used like that would make guest’s lives easier and better, and likely prevent any unneeded frustration on either side.  

Dinner Reservations A hotel could partner with local restaurants, or even just feature in-house restaurants, and offer a simple, effective way to check waits and book reservations. Imagine being able to just open up an app and see that the big fancy Italian restaurant down the road has a table open in a half hour that you can book right that minute. You could even use the app to have your guests offer reviews and recommendations for other guests.

Nearby Attractions Remember the brochures that litter hotel lobbies? Sure, they still get used, but having that information provided for by the hotel in an intuitive mobile experience would get the point across much quicker. You could also use the app to do things like buy tickets for an amusement park, check out what’s new at a local museum, or find out what performances are going on at nearby venues. You could find these things elsewhere, but wouldn’t it benefit everyone involved if they were in a central place, curated by the hotel staff and guests to create a wonderful tourist view of the area?

Improving Customer Service A mobile application could also instantly better customer service, more so than any comment card would. If you offer some sort of incentive for guests to use the app, then they would update it with how they like the service around the hotel. Is an ice machine broken? Well, you might be able to get the word out quicker with the mobile app. Is the pool overly crowded right now? Guests could share that info and make the experience better for all parties involved. All of this would make the experience smoother and face less bumps along the way.

Geo-Location Geo-location can be used in these mobile apps as well, and you'll be able to help your guests navigate around the new, unfamiliar area they're visiting with unprecedented ease. Actually, geo-location could fit into the four other ways we mentioned. You'd be able to see where restaurants are in relation to attractions.

There are many more ways in addition to what we discussed here. Feel free to let us know some of your ideas for how mobile apps can make hotels a much better place to be.

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Tracking the Social Media Footprint of the Olympics

When we last updated, the Olympics were just days away from beginning. Now, the 2012 Olympics in London are all wrapped up. So, how did it impact social media? Well, as far as primetime events go, it wasn't quite gangbusters compared to other marquee primetime events in North America.

The Opening and Closing Ceremonies both underwhelmed compared to the Grammys (13 million comments) and the BET Awards (8 million comments), as the Opening Ceremony had around 5 million comments compared to the 2.7 million comments of the finale.

The fact that such a notable worldwide event didn't spark that much social media spark is either a testament to the social media landscape's distaste for pomp and circumstance, or more likely, a sign that most people don't care much for the ceremonies being delayed to be in primetime.

In total, throughout all of the events over the 16-day period, Twitter reported that roughly 150 million tweets were posted relating to the Olympics. Usain Bolt won the lion's share of the attention, with around 75,000 tweets per minute during his 200m and 100m races. In total, Bolt was at the top of the 10 athletes who generated more 1 million tweets. The other big ticket events were Andy Murray's gold medal in tennis (57,000 tweets per minute), Jamaica winning the gold and setting the world record for 4x1000 relay (52,000 tweets per minute), and Team USA beating Spain for the gold medal in basketball (41,000 tweets per minute).

The 2012 Olympics easily set social media records, mostly because of the surging growth in social media. It might have suffered some setbacks with outrage over tape delay (and a certain commercial-free episode of an NBC show interrupting the finale), but people cared about the Olympics on social media and it showed. Brazil should get even more love in 2016, as social media will likely be even bigger.

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How Social Media Might Affect The 2012 Summer Olympics

As usual, the Olympics will be a global event watched by millions upon millions across the entire world. However, this time for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, there will be more options to view the Olympics than ever before. No longer will viewers be shackled to watching the games over cable. Now, they can keep up on Twitter, watch events on online streams, and use nearly every other form of social media under the sun.

The last Olympics, held in Beijing in 2008, were quite active in the social media space, but things have changed a considerable amount in four years. Facebook has gained nine times more followers, jumping from around 100 million to 900 million. Twitter featured only a few hundred thousand tweets per day. Now? There are more than 400 million tweets per day. That is more than 1,000 times more content. And remember: Google+, Foursquare, Pinterest, and Instagram didn’t even exist in 2008. The social media landscape is completely different for these Olympic Games.

So what does that mean for the average user? At face value, not much. Everything will be the same as we’re accustomed to at this point. Twitter will blow up during any notable event. Facebook will become rife with posts about the latest feel-good story of the games. Google will be teaming up with NBC to offer unprecedented streaming. Truthfully, that last part is what online Olympic purveyors will notice.

To prepare for this, NBC and Google have been executing online war games to protect the myriad of streams from hackers and other malicious threats. With more than 3,000 hours of coverage set to air in 64 different territories, NBC and Google are hoping to shatter the record for the most viewed event on the Internet, which was set by the Beijing Olympics in 2008 with 75.5 viewers.

The one caveat for all this is that viewers who wish to watch these live streams need to have a cable plan featuring MSNBC or CNBC. Highlights and clips will be available online post-event, but for those who want to stream the events live, you still need to have cable.

Regardless, social media should still be able to keep you informed, as it’s very likely that tweets/posts per day records could be broken during the Olympics. The Olympic Games are one of the few worldwide event that nearly every country pays attention to. In 2012, there are more ways than ever to pay attention to them, ranging from TV to live stream to Facebook to Twitter. How will you watch it?

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What DuckDuckGo Does That Google Doesn't

Before Google ruled the world of search engines, there was quite a bit of competition with AltaVista, Dogpile, Lycos, Infoseek, etc. Now, in this Google-run world, the only other major search engines are heavily backed products, such as Microsoft’s Bing.

However, a challenger to the throne has been gaining steam since its September 2008 launch. DuckDuckGo is a search engine site that gathers information from sources such as Wikipedia. In that basic sense, it’s not terribly different from Google. However, it doesn’t record any user information, which is something that Google does in spades. Using DuckDuckGo, every search result of a phrase is the same; it isn’t tailored to what the search engine thinks you want.

DuckDuckGo offers a focused set of search results, and a variety of useful keywords, such as !bang, which lets you search one of hundreds of websites using DuckDuckGo. There are also a wide variety of other “goodies” to help expedite your searching experience. Those goodies are likely the most confusing thing on the entire site, as the rest of it is a very no-frills presentation.

All of these enhancements and features have been refined (and continue to be refined) into an attractive product that has seen traffic skyrocket, up nearly 300% monthly compared to late 2011. Every day, DuckDuckGo gets close to 1.5 million direct queries. Its rapid expansion still pales in comparison to Google (around 3 billion per day) and Bing (around 50 million per day), but it’s something.

The “slowly but surely gaining more steam” trajectory of DuckDuckGo is reminiscent of another company’s trajectory. This company started up in 1996, trying to build a search engine that made more sense to use, eschewing the idea that searches should be based on repetition of the phrase and putting forth the idea that sites should be ranked for quality of content and relevancy. That company, if you couldn’t guess, is Google, which began with two students making a search engine and ballooned into a multinational company employing more than 30,000 people.

Who knows if DuckDuckGo will ever reach those heights, but big things have small beginnings.

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How Nintendo's Wii U Miiverse Isn't Too Different From CrowdCloud

In case you weren’t aware, E3 2012, the Los Angeles-based event where upcoming video games are shown off, took place last week. There was a social tilt to some of the conference, but the starkest reveal was off Miiverse, the new online arena that will be included in Nintendo’s next system Wii U. Miiverse, oddly enough, is quite similar to what we do here at CrowdCloud.

The idea behind Miiverse is to give players a venue to discuss the games that they are playing or want to play. It also takes the game from just being tied to a console, and broadens it to your mobile phone, PC, and Nintendo 3DS. It presents a stream of comments from players, much like Twitter and CrowdCloud does. But Nintendo’s intent is to have this go hand-in-hand with games. If you’re stuck in a game, consult the Miiverse and see if other people are having the same issue. You can even communicate with players who aren’t by their console, thanks to the phone and PC connection.

The aspect that really brings home the similarity to CrowdCloud is the way Nintendo is planning to filter the noise. They will have a filter to remove foul language and other unwelcome words. CrowdCloud offers the same functionality, with customizable filters. The next step is user-flagged comments that will then go up for review. Following that, every post is reviewed by Nintendo employees.

The whole process is very reminiscent of how things work here at CrowdCloud. We filter through the noise to bring you the most up-to-date and refined content. Now if only we made Super Mario Bros…

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What's Up With The Google Knowledge Graph?

If you Google the term “Google Knowledge Graph,” you ironically won’t see a Google Knowledge Graph. If there were one, it might lead you to information about search engine developments, the evolution of Google, and more. This graph, not so much a graph as it is just an organized list of other search terms and information, would display to the right of your regular results, doing nothing more than adding functionality to Google’s already very functional search engine.

Google’s latest addition is, in their eyes, revolutionary. The Knowledge Graph uses semantic intelligence to build up a flow of information that remains relevant to the search terms.

Searching for a TV show, like for example, NBC’s Community, brings up a sidebar that displays all sorts of information about the show, including the first air date, the creator, the stars, and other related shows. You can click on any name or show that is displayed and then search for them, creating a feedback loop that is similar to the one that Wikipedia has proven is rewarding and successful. A muted form of the enjoyable Wiki Game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Game) could be played using the Knowledge Graph.

But right now, the Knowledge Graph isn’t completely pervasive, and there are limitations to it. For example, details on companies don’t seem to appear, though you will get groups of related people to display in the Knowledge Graph sidebar. The potential for a one-stop spot for all your internet needs is there, but as with most Google products (see: Gmail’s five-year beta process), the content available at launch is only a taste of what that potential is.

The greatest success of the current iteration of the Knowledge Graph to the average person is the middleman it cuts out. Places such as Wikipedia and IMDB are the places to go for information about people, movies, and more, but now you can stay on your search engine and use that information. Considering how integrated Google already is into everything ranging from personal computers to smart phones, this could be big.

Then again, it could be Google Wave. The only way to know for sure is to see how it develops over time.

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Summer Movies and AR Apps: A Marketing Future

Last week, Sony released The Amazing Spider-Man AR iOS/Android application, which uses augmented reality (AR) to show Spider-Man in the real world. The free download lets users use their phone’s camera in conjunction with various images found on the official movie website, in an issue of Entertainment Weekly, and in Hardees/Carl’s Jr. restaurants to place Spider-Man in the real world using augmented reality functionality. You can even take pictures of your experiences and instantly tweet them or post them to Facebook. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s continuing a recent trend in blockbuster movie marketing.

A week before that, Marvel launched the Super Hero AR application, which they developed in conjunction with Walmart, to advertise the box office smash The Avengers. Billed as the first of its kind, the app asks users to go into Walmart to find Avengers displays to unlock more content.

These two applications are representative of a growing shift in marketing for summer movies that has been brewing for several years. The multimillion dollar advertising campaigns are still around (go turn on the TV. I bet you will see an Avengers ad within five minutes), and they aren’t going anywhere. But in addition to the traditional marketing, this sort of offbeat marketing is becoming a bigger focus of selling a film, and it’s becoming a replacement for some of the big-budget games that came out alongside these types of movies in the past.

AR marketing didn’t just sprout over night, though. It’s been steadily used over the years, primarily through webcams. However, with the advent of smart phones with cameras built in, AR marketing has evolved, and now it’s more than just having something pop out of a card. Using your phone and images on the internet or in stores, users interact with the app, shooting webs as Spider-Man or dispatching foes with Iron Man. It’s light engagement that appeals to a broader range of users than a $60 Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 release that has a stigma of being a rushed tie-in. At least with these apps, no one is expecting high quality, and developers don’t have to close when they’re finished, such as the developers of 2010’s Iron Man 2 game.

The app stores on iOS and Android devices will soon become a primary delivery spot for these types of movie marketing, and it wouldn’t be a shock to see these AR apps to start becoming more advanced and in-depth. Also, tying these apps into other brands extends their reach, making the ostensibly simple applications a masterful stroke of marketing and co-branding, bring Marvel and Sony into closer relationships with different stores, magazines, and restaurants.

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Celebrity Monetization on Social Media

What is the importance of being a celebrity on Twitter? Well, according to Sponsored Tweets, it’s pretty damn important. They put a price on stars that dictate how much their social media posts are worth. For someone like Jersey Shore’s Snooki, it’s about $7,800 per tweet. Scoff all you want, but even celebrities that the world isn’t fed up with, such as comedian Michael Ian Black ($6,500) and actor/musician Jared Leto ($13,000) demand a pretty penny.

On the other end of things is Facebook, which hasn’t gotten as blatantly monetized as Twitter. The most-liked Facebook pages, which contain music luminaries such as Eminem and Rihanna, are surprisingly non-interactive. That’s likely due to the disparity between celebrity social media accounts that are valuable, and ones that aren’t.

Breaking down Eminem, he has 56 million likes on Facebook. However, only a fraction of 1% of his fans interacts with his posted content in any meaningful way. Likes are easily doled out, and are, in the high stakes Facebook profiles, not as poignant. Liking requires one absent-minded button press. Sharing or commenting requires engagement. People that do those actions regularly are invested in the celebrity.

That’s why accounts such as Star Trek star George Takei’s are just as valuable as Eminem’s. Takei only has 1.7 million likes, but he has almost the same amount of interaction as Eminem, who has 32 times the amount of fans.

The reason why Takei’s social media accounts have so much resonance is because of his personal activity in it. Eminem, with all his fans, doesn’t have his personality, even in a fake way, shown through his accounts. Takei shows humility, self-deprecation, and a sense of fun. He clearly enjoys being active on Twitter and Facebook, while others see it as a necessary evil and update it soullessly.

Circling back around to the Sponsored Tweets, look at the two somewhat-unknown celebrities (Michael Ian Black and Jared Leto). They might not be household names, but look at their Twitter accounts. They engage their followers. They seem to enjoy what they’re doing. That’s why their Twitter accounts are worth thousands of dollars a tweet, while Eminem’s Facebook account isn’t worth much of anything.

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Why Is Instagram Worth $1 Billion To Facebook?

On Monday April 9, Facebook, the social network so big they made a movie about it, dropped $1 billion to buy Instagram, which most people use to post pictures of their everyday life with kitschy sepia filters. From an outside perspective, the idea of Facebook buying what is widely considered to be nothing more than a photo-sharing app for that substantial sum of money is blasphemous. However, it might not be as crazy as it appears.

You see, Instagram was beating Facebook at its own game. A section of Facebook’s early notoriety came from the ability to post and share photos. Even when it was nothing more than a collegiate enterprise, the phrase “Make sure you post those pictures to Facebook” was common. As mobile phones got smarter, this became a more instantaneous production. Despite Facebook’s best efforts, they didn’t corner the market on mobile photo sharing; Instagram did.

Facebook as a whole realized this, even with people such as James Pearce, the company’s head of mobile developer relations saying to writers: “Had Facebook been built today, it would be mobile.” Those words were downright prophetic considering that Facebook would go on to buy Instagram mere days after the comment was made.

Instagram went from zero to 30 million users in 18 months. Since the start of 2012, their userbase has doubled, starting at around 15 million in early January. They’re valued at $500 million currently, but with the ascent of the company’s expansion, it would likely continue to go up. The app only recently launched on Android devices, and in six days, it crossed the five million download mark. Instagram is a hot piece of social media right now, and it’s only getting hotter.

But Instagram is an app that doesn’t generate revenue. Well, revenue isn’t actually Facebook’s issue; their bigger concern is users and longevity. What Instagram does successfully though, is something I touched on before. It takes a concept (photo sharing) from a broader social media platform and boils it down to its base. In this case, the entire app is just taking pictures, making artistic-looking tweaks to them, and sharing them. That’s it. It does what Twitter did to the Facebook status update, except now, Instagram is playing with the broader social media platform its basic concept spun off from.

Facebook has grand ideas for mobile development, and Instagram helps them get an edge on it. We’ll see exactly what happens with the two companies as time goes on, but the high sum for Instagram might not be as crazy as it initially sounds.

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How Geosocial Networking Can Boost Social Media

Checking Into Geosocial Networking

You might not be familiar with the term, but if you own a smart phone, you’ve experienced geosocial networking to some degree. Geosocial networking is, simply, the concept of displaying your location on a social media service, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or FourSquare. It is that very idea of “checking in” to a location.

Geosocial networking can be beneficial for users who want to get information based on their specific location, or arrange or go to a meet up at an exact area. Services such as Beacon or Find My Friends, which allow you to track people’s locations, show off exactly how this can be used effectively. This concept can also be used by advertisers who are looking to market to people in specific regions.

Your Location And You

Outside of meeting up with people, how else can this make the Twitters and the Facebooks of the world better? Well, first off, it can make them more local. We’ve reached a time, especially with the broad spectrum of the internet, where news all over the world is available at your fingertips. What usually is harder to come by, though, is local news.

As we move away from local print newspapers being necessities, we also move away from local news and experiences being prevalent. There are websites out there, such as AOL’s Patch, that attempt to transpose this onto the internet, but one of the best ways to do this is by tracking where they are when they post by using various location-based services.

Imagine if you could check Twitter and just see who has posted in your hometown. That sort of happens now, but the problem is that people either don’t have geolocation activated, or they turn it off to keep their location-based privacy. The latter is a great concern, because it means that anybody can find out where you are at all times, which is a scary Orwellian prospect.

Privacy isn’t the only stumbling block, though. Tracking your position also eats away quite a bit of battery from your device, sometimes even halving typical battery life. For people on the go, having the phone’s GPS enabled at all times can be detrimental to regular use. And really, the only way for geosocial networking to hit the big time is for the majority of users to play ball.

Location-based services and geosocial networking have a great potential, and it’s reasonable to assume it will become a much bigger part of the social media landscape in the next few years. We might not quite be there now, but soon we’ll get to a point where checking in will do more than just give you a badge you can display on your FourSquare account.

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Social Media and College

Colleges across the country were made the center of a new trend back in 2005 when Facebook began to take the world by storm. Since then, Facebook has become an internet giant, and in general, social media has become more of a part of our everyday lives. Look no further than to see what an effect social media has had on cultural touchstones such as the Oscars.

What seems to have been lost in the shuffle here is the fact that colleges and universities were where this groundswell began. Since Facebook became a household name, social media use has increased more and more in colleges. The one thing that hasn’t, it seems, is smart use by the majority of institutions in using this social media. So how can schools stay relevant with this? Read on to find out.

Facebook seems to have the market cornered, as 98% of schools use Facebook, according to onlineuniversites.com. Twitter has gained much more traction, and since 2008, it has gone from being used by no schools to being used by 84% of them.

But how are these social media outlets being used? Most colleges have both an official Facebook and Twitter page that they use to communicate information to students, whether its school closures or information about registering for classes. Some colleges use this to great effect. For example, Rutgers University maintains an official Facebook and Twitter page that dole out information and also let students keep in touch with their peers. The Facebook usage hearkens back to the days when all schools, by default, would have their own page that would allow students, alumni, and prospective students to communicate.

However, there is still that renegade quality to collegiate social media. “I was turned off by several schools because of the prevalence of heavy drinking and drug use mentioned by people my age on Facebook,” said a soon-to-be-graduated high school senior. There are a rash of Facebook groups and communities for prospective classes that are rife with comments about underage drinking. All of these groups have one thing in common: the school has no affiliation with them. It’s one thing when students use their personal Facebooks to talk about illegal things, but it’s another when it happens in a group called “College Class of 2016.”

Fortunately, some schools get it. For example, Penn State has an official Class of 2016 Facebook group that appears to be curated by the school. But for every Penn State, which has a reputation of being a big party school already, there are numerous other schools that don’t have a handle over their social media profile.

FourSquare has attempted to solve this problem by creating a specific FourSquare section for different universities. It has noble intentions, but it seems to come up short by not providing much more than Facebook does. And as usual, badges don’t do much except for give people imaginary carrots with no reward. Regardless, FourSquare for Universities is on the right track, and burgeoning social media apps should take note of what they’re doing. After all, Facebook cut its teeth on the college market, and look at how integral it is to everyday life now.

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If Print Is Dying, Then Who Will Curate?

There has been a large sea change in the world of news and communication. While blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and more forms of social media have risen to prominence, the value of newspapers and traditional media outlets has appeared to lessen. For a long time, the mantra around media has been “print is dying” and at a glance, that appears to be true. But is print truly dying? Is Twitter or something similar truly going to be the one way we digest news and current events?

For some people, it is. Most 20-somethings admit to using just social media and faux news shows such as The Daily Show as their primary sources of news. Does that prove that print is dying? Not really. Because of the influx of data, using social media to stay adequately informed is a tall order, requiring lots of personal data curation.

Curation is the beauty of dedicated news sources, whether it’s The New York Times, USA Today, or CNN. Since the dawn of the newspaper, they have been the model of what focused curation should be. Look at your local paper. Each section of it is properly labeled and features content picked out specifically for that region and for that category. Even in this day and age, the local paper is usually the best place to find information about your town or area.

Even without curation, print features quality content. There is an editing process and generally people think before they send something to print. In the realm of social media, the focus is on speed, not quality. Oftentimes, false news will come out of social media. For example, when Joe Paterno was gravely ill, Twitter and Facebook blew up with news of his death. However, Joe Paterno wasn’t actually dead yet; he was still alive, albeit in critical condition.

There are also other instances where people have just made up information that has been picked up by other outlets, all in the scramble to get the speediest updates. When the NFL lockout ended last year, multiple people created fake Twitter accounts saying they had reports of players joining teams that, as was later found out, wasn’t true.

Still, the speed of social media trumps the quality of print and traditional news outlets. When the east coast was hit with an unprecedented earthquake in 2011, Twitter was the place to go to get immeadiate information. The CNNs of the world had accurate coverage, but they didn’t publish it right away.

The blogs and Twitter accounts of the world are viable for news, and so are the newspapers and magazines of the world. They both serve a similar purpose in different ways. Ideally, if there was a way to join them, that would be the key to success.

CrowdCloud attempts to do just that. The application and service pulls from both Twitter searches and verified accounts, which are split into different categories ranging from Things To Do to Restaurants. The idea is to retain the speed of social media while still pulling the quality and curation of trusted outlets. If you’re curious to see if it succeeds, go and check out the app at www.crowdcloud.com.

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Instagram, Pinterest, and the Small-Scale War For Photo-Sharing Supremacy

Photo sharing has always been a main component of successful social media platforms. MySpace was all about profile pictures, and then Facebook made creating photo albums for even the most mundane of life events all the rage. With the growth of smart phones and short-form social media such as Twitter, the need for fast and instant photo sharing is increasing. How exactly do you succeed at creating a great photo-sharing experience? It’s important to look at the current leader in photo sharing to figure that one out.

Instagram is currently asserting itself as the primary purveyor of social photo sharing. Launching in 2010, it quickly took off, exploding in 2011. Why does Instagram work so well, though? In simple terms, it’s the app’s simplicity that makes it succeed. You can take a picture, make it look spiffy with ones of the app’s many filters, and share it with your friends across several platforms almost instantaneously. Immediacy is the key for these platforms. You can use that term to answer why the majority of social media platforms, ranging from Twitter to Pinterest, work.

Speaking of Pinterest, they are the bleeding-edge newbie to the world of photo sharing. What do they do that makes it one of the surging entities in social media? Aside from the site’s massive appeal to women, Pinterest simplifies photo sharing. Much like how Twitter is basically Facebook with just status updates, Pinterest is like a Twitter or Tumblr but with an even simpler presentation. All you need to do is “pin” a link or image. It’s easy. It’s fast. It’s effortless.

In the social media landscape, there appears to be two key races going on. Facebook and Google are engaged in large-scale platform warfare, as they’re adding small tweaks, features, and functionality that gives users more control and more options. You don’t need to look any further than Facebook’s endlessly in-flux photo albums for an example of the complicated and evolving nature of the site.

Meanwhile, there is another race between companies such as Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram to the simplistic bottom. The goal isn’t a race to the bottom in terms of quality, but in terms of ease of use. In this fast-paced world, photo-sharing needs to be quick and easy. If you can’t post a photo quickly, you might as well give up.

Take, for example, CrowdCloud. To post a photo, all you have to do is create a report, take a picture, add some tags, and post. It’s easy. It’s fast. It’s effortless. That’s how photo sharing works.

Do you think there’s another way photo sharing could work in social media? Is there a better way than this rush to simplicity?

[crowdcloud-blog]

The Oscars and Social Media

On Sunday, the Oscars, much like every other major television event, was given a second screen life thanks to social media, specifically Twitter.

Throughout ABC’s red carpet pre-show coverage, Twitter was heavily integrated. For example, periodically throughout the telecast, hosts on the red carpet discussed who the Twitter community thought was the best dressed, using the hashtag #bestdressed. It was a subtle inclusion, but it was effective as it solidly represented how Twitter could be used in such presentations without being invasive. This wasn’t a host urging the viewer to follow his sporadically updated account on Twitter; this was letting the Twitter community influence what was discussed.

Although social media was used effectively for the promotion of the event, it was also used to create instant memes. Minutes after Angelina Jolie stood in an awkward posing revealing her right leg through a slit in her dress, the account @AngiesRightLeg was created. That wasn’t the only reactionary account made, as @JLosnipple (for Jennifer Lopez’s apparent wardrobe malfunction) and @OscarsAudioGuy (for the peculiar feedback that dominated the show’s audio). Hell, there were two accounts created for Bradley Cooper’s mustache (@BradleysStache and @CoopersMustache) that are currently dueling it out for Twitter supremacy.

Unfortunately, the Academy’s official Twitter account (@TheAcademy) was largely a failure, not adding anything to the experience. The account did what it had to in some respects (it posted who won shortly after they won), but then failed to engage in nearly every other aspect. It offered “exclusive” teases of who was set to present next, but these same “exclusive” teases were already shown ad nauseum on the telecast itself.

The growing trends point towards the more off-beat interactions being successful in the social media landscape surrounding notable television and cultural events. Right now we’re in the midst of our second sports phenomenon in the past six months, as Jeremy Lin, the unsung hero of the surging New York Knicks, has become about as popular as Tim Tebow, the Denver Broncos’ quarterback who led the Tebowing craze and managed to improbably win a division title and a playoff game. Recently, Deadspin revealed that Jeremy Lin was mentioned more times on SportsCenter last week than the NHL and NCAA basketball combined. On Twitter, whenever Lin plays, he is almost always a trending topic for the duration of the game and after.

Despite some of the Oscars’ accolades, the show didn’t hold a candle to other 2012 events, chiefly the Super Bowl and the Grammy, the latter of which set the record for the most social comments about a single event (13 million) according to Bluefin Labs. The Oscars trailed far behind, hovering around the four million range.

The one key take away from the event is that, even if it wasn’t as much of success as its music award show counterpart, it still was a large leap from the 2011 social media performance. In non-exact terms, the amount the Oscars were discussed on Twitter doubled year-over-year. So, the Oscars might not be the biggest event in the world, but Twitter and other forms of social media are here to stay. As time goes on, the constant interaction between viewers will begin to get bigger, and eventually, it is very likely that social media will be fused with the telecast to create one cohesive experience. If that happens, what are you looking forward to about that prospect? Are you wary of social media’s rise? Do you welcome the communal takeover?