curiouser & curiouser

My final team teaching presentation on crowd-sourcing. Enjoy!

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 13:20:51 -0500

My final team teaching presentation on crowd-sourcing. Enjoy!

Crowd-sourcing: the deep dive

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 13:18:09 -0500

As the final wrap-up to my “Social Media U Need 2 Know” class with @dr4ward, we were challenged to design, implement, and and present a multi-media presentation about any social media practice or use. Myself, along with two other classmates, chose to study and present an in depth analysis of crowd-sourcing, which included basic introduction and background information, a step by step how-to of crowd-sourcing, case studies of successful uses of crowd-sourcing, and lastly a crowd-sourced activity that the class engaged in. Other final presentation topics included how social media has affected the music industry and the way music is shared; sharing television viewing experiences on twitter; and how colleges are using Twitter in their admissions process just to name a few.

Given that this project was all about social media, it only makes sense that our project management and group collaboration would play out on various social media platforms. After choosing our topic, my team started by coming up with a team name, #XplatformSM, and used this as our twitter backchannel to track all of our project-related tweets. We created individual twitter lists to better manage our twitter streams. We also created a “Crowd-sourcing” team on Pearltrees and used this as another online source where we collected relevant articles, infographics, etc.

The many Google platforms were also very helpful for sharing and collaborating with my team. We created a Google Docs word document that we used to share group contact information, manage our project checklist, divide up assignments for the presentation, compile interview questions and post responses for our four interviews, and post relevant articles or excerpts from articles. We shared this Google Doc with our professor and teacher assistant, @HeatherCosson, as well so they could track our progress. My teammates and I also connected on Google+ and created a team circle: NewhouseSM4 Group Project. We used this less for connecting with one another and more for connecting with our professor @dr4ward. As part of the team-teaching process, we were required to set up a video conference using Google Hangout with our professor. This was a very helpful step during which we shared project updates, links, and videos and got feedback from our professor, which included suggestions for a classroom crowd-sourcing activity that we could do during our presentation. We also set up Google Alerts that were streamlined through my Google Reader to research and monitor new crowd-sourcing trends.

As part of our researching process, we were required to interview four industry experts. We used the Advanced Twitter Search to find and follow people and companies that worked in the crowd-sourcing industry. This is how we learned about or interviewed employees from @CrowdFlower and their annual crowd-sourcing conference; John Winsor from @VictorsNSpoils, the first advertising agency that entirely crowd-sources its design process; and Brent Frei from Smartsheet which uses crowd-sourcing on a daily basis to manage projects and collaborate online. We also listened in on an online conference called “The Future of Crowdsourcing” presented by the Daily Crowdsource.

My teammates and I culminated all of our research, interviews, and insights into one final team teaching presentation that we uploaded to Slideshare and that you can view here. Lastly, we tracked the reach and the impressions of our presentation using HashTracking.

My pearltrees

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 15:20:59 -0400

My pearltrees

cultivating pearltrees

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:01:48 -0400

In my most recent social media undertaking I tackled Pearltrees, which after some initial confusion turned out to be a relatively easy undertaking. Pearltrees is essentially a smarter bookmarking system that allows you to “pearl” your favorite sites under groups of “pearltrees.”

Likes: the design; ease of “pearling” and connecting with others with similar pearls; makes for a great homepage where all of my sites are combined into one

Dislikes: not really sure if this made my life more or less complicated however this will definitely come in handy for research projects

Check out my pearltrees here: http://www.pearltrees.com/karlybader

managing multiple streams into one big ocean

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 18:00:40 -0400

With so much tweeting to do, so many people to follow, and such little time Twitter apps that manage your Twitter streams offer an easy interface on which to oversee it all. This week I explored 6 different applications to discover which app worked best for me and my tweeting habits:

TweetDeck: My favorite! Although at first I was skeptical of downloading the program, it makes it easy to tweet, add columns, and change the columns in view. I also liked the “see what’s popular in this column” feature which made it easy to see quickly what the tweeters in each of my columns were talking about. My biggest dislike was the stupid and rather annoying “tweet” noise that plays every time a column is refreshed but this can be easily muted.

Hootsuite: I liked the more modern design that this site had- everything was organized in a very natural way which made it easy to use with a box to tweet from clearly displayed at the top and a dashboard on the left. I also liked that you could control how many feeds appeared on the screen without having to scrolling over.

Seesmic: Very similar to Hootsuite in its layout but had a brighter design which I appreciated. Easy to tweet from and search. I also liked that they gave you the option of downloading the desktop version or launching the web version as I don’t always want to commit to downloading something.

Socialoomph: I was not a fan at all of this management system. It seemed outdated and complicated and was way too overwhelming visually. If Twitter has taught us one thing it is to simplify. I like the dashboard template that TweetDeck and Hootsuite use and thought that Socialoomph required way too much clicking to get me to where I wanted to be. The only positive was scheduling tweets was easy.

TweetGrid: I like that it gives you plenty of layout options (1x10 to 3x3 to 3x1) so that you can customize your feed based on how much tweeting you want to take in or likewise ignore. I am not at all a fan of the interface however and found it extremely ugly and almost amateur.

Monitter: It has a very simple, basic interface which makes it easier to navigate and use than some of the others. However, I wasn’t the biggest fan of it’s simplistic black and grey design. I also experienced difficulty at times getting my different columns to load—some would and some randomly wouldn’t.

Overall, TweetDeck was by far my favorite Twitter app and I will continue to use it long after this post is published. I also downloaded the TweetDeck app to my iPhone which is equally easy to use. The following is a screenshot of the TweetDeck app:

who doesn’t love a good adventure

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 17:06:04 -0400

who doesn’t love a good adventure