Use Podcast in Language Learning

I am thinking about ideas to promote the culture learning program in Confucius Institute at NC State these days. One successful case can be referenced to is CSLPod

It effectively employed podcasting to promote its Chinese teaching programs.

CSLPod is located in Beiiing, the capital of China. They teach practical, real live Chinese to all level of students at physical classroom settings. On February 8th, 2007, CSLPod published its first Podcast. And now they have more than 700 podcasts and transcriptions offering lessons at three levels: elementary, intermediate and advanced. Through podcasting, their Chinese Language learners increased from those studying and working in Beijing to all over the world of more than 100 countries. Their podcasts are downloaded 100,000 times or more monthly.

Their success is not a coincidence.

First, they select the right media—podcasting. One of the most advantages of podcast in promote the culture program is to help people learning Chinese as the second language. Podcast is based on one-way communication and audio format, which is perfect for practicing Chinese listening skills, especially for the entry level students, who needs to spend a large amount of time to get used to the pronunciation and tonality of Chinese.

Second, podcasting release learners from fixed classrooms and class time. They can download the contents and listen to them with them wherever they go and whenever they like. It creates a good language learning atmosphere.

Third, the success of podcasting, in large part, relies on its contents and ideas. When you log into the CSL’s podcasting host website, you can see that CSLPod provides new lessons every weekday providing most fresh, useful, interesting Chinese phrases and sentences covering business, travel, sports, medicine, shopping, entertainment and other fields of daily life.

Fourth, integrate the podcasting with other communication channels: website, printing media such as books, email interaction etc, CSLPod overcomes the disadvantage of podcasting: one-way communication lacking of interaction, linear style inconvenient to control the playing of the contents.

I will go on researching this case, and figure out best mix of social media for Confucius Institute to use. If you have any ideas, welcome to drop a line here, let’s have a brainstorming!

Consumer Engagement Tools on Social Media

There are more and more big brands aware of the importance of social media in their consumer relationship management, brand promotion and sales driven campaigns. Dell reported that it has generated sales of over $6.5 million via its presence on Twitter. According to the Watson Research Center, part of IBM, there are around 100 million blogs that use RSS feeds, which provide another way for businesses to identify relevant electronic word-of-mouth. Accompanying such perception of social media and the targert consumers, those social media forerunners create several new ways of doing business, in today’s blog, I will introduce some of them.

First: Integrated Q&A tools for answering questions of consumers at instantly.

Dell and Samsung subscribe to a system called BrandAnswers which shows all questions about their products across different media platforms and gives the manufactures one place to inform all inquisitive consumers at once. The analysis shows that answers from manufacturers are most helpful to consumers. Answering customers’ questions can help maintain good brand loyalty. Moreover, it can help manufactures get first-hand insights into the types of questions they have. All this information then gives product managers valuable information that drives product enhancement and development.

You can see more details on how the BrandAnswers function by clicking the following video play button:

Second: embedded instant chatting tools to support the online shopping sites.

This makes the online shopping experience more personalized and point-to-point. Bank of America credit card application and Backcountry outdoor gear shop adopt a system from LivePerson to provide online instant chatting service for consumers. At the same time, they can collect first-hand information on consumer insights before selecting the brands. (See the pictures on the top of this post).

Third: directly embed social media sites into the company official site.

Doing so the hosts can keep the visitors, at the same time, those social networking sites make it incredibly easy customers to share promotions and positive word-of-mouth marketing about brands in a single click with his or her network of friends. For example, if an e-commerce site owner uses Facebook Connect, it will let members log in to their Facebook accounts without leaving the e-commerce site. This is important because when they log in, the site has access to profile information about the member that can be used for personalization. E-commerce Web sites can make it easy for their customers who use Facebook to post the things they find and like on their Facebook Wall — where their network of friends will see it.

5 Ways to Engage Customers on Twitter

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Top 8 Twitter Trends at Super Bowl Night No. 5-8

No. 5 #Sb44: as the official hashtag in twitter, it really gathered huge amount of people’s participation. Even now, several hours after the game, the tweets are still increasing. Yes, twitter create and promote a forum of dialogue. People’s voices can be heard there. However, according to my observation, most of the tweets in this hashtag were expression oriented with a one-way communication style, in other words, people tweet for express their feelings, ideas, and don’t care too much about gaining new information from others, they just gain some feedback echo their voice at most. Those people just coming and going, they may participate several rounds of conversation but never the real dialogue.

No. 6 Count On Losing The: this is the only one trend about the losing team. Unfortunately, as the trend title shows: Indianapolis COLTS gets an ironic meaning of abbreviation—Count On Losing The Superbowl. It may be created by some disappointing Colts fans. However, such creative idea makes it a top 10 hot trend. We can see how situated creativity makes a hot topic.

No. 7 Mardi Gras: the name of a parade day for New Orleans, because of the wining of its team, it become the symbol of celebration of this triumph. People tweet mostly about their wish to join the parade, plan a trip, or sharing their excitement about the day. We can see here that people’s excitement can be kept warm with some following event or promotion.

No. 8 Reggie Bush: another member of the winning team. But it is his star girl friend makes this a hot trend. Kim Kardashian, the girl friend of Reggie Bush, tweeted during the whole game supporting her boyfriend Reggie Bush, even pain her nails and worte on twitter: “Check out my gold Minx nails!” Kim’s Twitter page was devoted to the big game over the weekend. “In route to the stadium. Let’s go Saints! The energy is in the air!” Kim Tweeted on Sunday, following a Saturday night Tweet, “Praying I can even fall asleep! Tomorrow is such a big day!” From here we can see that some funny background stories, anecdotes can win people’s interests.

Top 8 Twitter Trends on Super Bowl Night No. 1 -4

The 44^th Super Bowl has just finished, Drew Brees and the Saints are NFL champions, rallying to beat Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts 31-17. The whole Sun Life Stadium becomes a sea of cheers and happiness. And what’s more important there are hundreds of thousands of others, almost at the same time, join such celebrating moment through shouting out their cheers in twitter. You may not able to see the game at the scene, however, through twitter, undoubtedly, you can still experience the same excitement and enjoyment of sharing your ideas with the whole world.

Like those football fans who benefits a lot from twitter, the PR practitioners also gain a lot of benefits by taping twitter for their own use. For example, one of the top 10 trends of tonight is the Super Bowl official twitter hashtag: #Sb44. The tweets are growing with the speed of more than one hundred tweets per minute. Here is the top 10 trends of tonight from 1^st to 10^th :

New Orleans, Super Bowl, Drew Brees, Superbowl, #Sb44, Count On Losing The, Mardi Gras, Reggie Bush, #nowplaying, MVP.

You can see except the hashtag #nowplaying which is about the music/movie people are watching, all other nine trends are related to tonight’s game. A short content analysis of these trend titles, may shed some light of the insight of these football fans, which can help us to better communicate with them.

No. 1 New Orleans: the name of the winning teams’ host city. In the tweets, according to my observation, people mostly use it within the name of the winning team—New Orleans Saints, or use it as the short form of the team. Of course, winner is always gain most of the focus.

No. 2 Super Bowl: the name of the game. There is no doubt people use it frequently. It appears in all kind of topics related to tonight’s game.

No. 3 Drew Brees: the MVP of 44^th Super Bowel, Drew Brees completed 32-of-39 passes for 288 yards and two touchdowns as the Saints won the game. He was the super hero of tonight. Besides the winning team, the specific individual who contributed most to the team becomes the hot topic. The tweets are mostly positive to Drew Brees, congratulations, cheers, and some of the background discussion like his son etc.

No. 4 Superbowl: another form for the name of the game.

1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + . . . + 1 = 1

Today, I want to talk about how Ford innovatively uses video postings from hundreds of the consumers and makes them into a popular Vlogging of Fiesta.

First, Ford utilizes video as the format of its message communicating to the outside world. Unlike those text blogs, Video extends the power of the blogosphere for organizations and visual impact of the message being promoted. Also, video can help generate additional web traffic and interest for Ford, compared with traditional print ads, PR advertorials, website banners and text links.

Second, abandons the traditional one-way media promotion, Ford chooses social media as its powerful social networking generator. It selects 100 “agents” to participate in Fiesta Movement, who are social media experts with huge following in a wide variety of social media sites. The networks are including thousands of MySpace fans, YouTube subscribers, Facebook friends and followers on Twitter. Their firsthand Fiesta experiences of these agents can reach out the public and makes the audience number increasing in geometric progression.

Third, the smartest tactic is that Fiesta Movement hosts the YouTube Channel, and special website to promote those Fiesta experience video posts from agents. All these sites are with the same interface design, color and graphic tone and manner. Although different agents may come out with different videos presenting various lifestyles, such method integrated those isolated, individual attitudes, beliefs, hobbies, lifestyles into one message: Fiesta is social, energetic and popular, and it suits for all kinds of young spirits. I see this video channel as a Fiesta Vlogging rather than video post contest, there is not a single Vlogger who produces all the video contents, but everybody is the producer of the video contents; there is not a single style that represents Fiesta, but everybody is representative of Fiesta. However, when we sum up all these isolated ones, we get a big one—the Fiesta, a Vlogger who understands everybody’s needs, echoes everybody’s attitudes, and produces videos suits everybody’s taste and entertains them.

Here comes the equation: 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + . . . + 1 = 1

Ford "Fiesta Movement" Social Media Campaign

I want to start this week’s blog with the quote of Connie Fontaine (Ford’s Brand Content and Alliances Manager):

“These agents are ready for adventure and eager to spread the word with their friends, fans and followers. They’re going to take our Fiestas on missions across the country and share how much fun they are having.”

It describes the experience of Fiesta Movement, a successful Ford Fiesta launch campaign which integrates PR + Advertising under the social media umbrella. Ford innovatively develops the way to integrate social media sources (YouTube video posting, Flickr photo tagging, facebook communities and twitter groups) and creates a platform, through this event, gathering consumers’ firsthand car ownership experiences and maximizing their impact. You can see more detail about this campaign in the following Web accounts:

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/fiestamovement
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiestamovement
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Fiesta-Movement/73386615309
Twitter: http://twitter.com/fordfiesta