9/3 Reading

In Chapter 3 of Gillin’s Secrets, he divulges his best ways in finding certain topics entangled in the World Wide Web. On page 41 he states, “The first step to social media engagement is social media awareness. That means learning what’s being said about your company, people and products.” It’s easier said than done though. I, for one, wasn’t aware that Google indexes less than 20% of the web (42). I assumed, like probably most of the rest of the population, that Google was the end all be all of website search engines.

Gillin does a great job in communicating how to search effectively on the web. By mainly using one particular topic surrounding Quebec, Canada, he is able to walk us through all the different sites and ways we could go about finding information on this one particular location. He also points out that sometimes it’s not about where you do your searching, but how you are phrasing your search. For example: using italics and searching “best Quebec hotels” gives you a measly 7 results on Google in comparison to the 2.3 million results when you lose the italics.

It is also interesting to the see how some of the most popular social bookmarking sites aren’t even the most functional. It’s all about user opinions though as Gillin points out with the bookmarking site Del.icio.us on page 55.

Chapter 3 of Howard’s Design to Thrive is entitled “Why Invest in Social Networks and Online Communities?” He starts by giving ten reasons as to why you should build these social networks and communities and then going into more detail of each one as the chapter progresses.

On page 30 he discusses the point: enhance and sustain intellectual capital. This section struck me because it was exactly something I had just been a part of, but didn’t think twice about. In that section he talks of a problem he was faced with where he was able to log into his closed, private community of professionals pertaining to usability testing and user experience design in order to obtain valuable solutions from his colleagues in a very short amount of time thus saving him (and his client) time and money.

That situation reminds me of the time where I was in the process of changing phones and wanted to be able to use a certain phone with a certain company. From an open online forum, I was able to pour over mountains of data in order to learn about the differences between unlocking and jailbreaking, as well as the crucial differences between carriers that ran off GSM or CDMA. The data I was able to take in proved useful as it helped me make the best cost efficient decision for my cell phone and what kind of future it would have.