The Social Path

Google HotPot: The best app you didn't know existed

Toward the end of 2010, Google quietly launched a great new review application called HotPot. It's sleek, user friendly and thorough. You can search and rate everything from restaurants to toy stores to parks, all from one easy application. 

In order to vote, all you have to do is sign in to Google (so if you're on Gmail right now, you're already logged on). You also must create a username. The voting has a few easy, fun steps to complete, all without leaving the main page. When you select the star rating for the item you'd like to review, the selection flips like a baseball card. Then you can fill in your stats, write a description if you'd like and submit.

In addition to submissions from HotPot, Google aggregates reviews from all over the Web - so instead of nine crummy reviews from one application, you get a true measure of the place's value. 

HotPot is built into the Google Places iPhone and Android applications (without the HotPot name attached at all, which is weird) and is every bit as simple as the Web application. Google recently announced Twitter integration of HotPot in its Google Maps for Android app, but Twitter sharing is noticeably absent on the Web-based and iPhone applications.

This is one of Google's best ventures into social applications, and in time I believe it will become the most reputable and popular. So be sure to step up and claim your business to get into the game early.

The Social Path's vote is five stars! Great service, atmosphere and value - but now we're starving.

Kammie Avant is a social media planner for Luckie & Company. You can contact her by e-mail or follow @KammieAvant on Twitter.

The crowd has spoken. And it likes puppies.

Huge thanks to the more than 1,000 of you who voted on how Luckie & Company should dole out the rest of our holiday charity fund.

In case you missed it, we asked the Internet to help us choose between Puppies, Children and Creatives. The percentage of votes received by each would determine the percentage of our $6,000 donation pool that would go to a related charity.

Here's a screenshot of the final tally, followed by some hard dollar amounts:

Puppies: 63%
Thanks to a strong grassroots push initiated by Jessica at Dogingham, the Greater Birmingham Humane Society will receive a $3,780 donation from Luckie.

Children: 22%
While they didn't quite pull like the puppies, children still came in second, netting $1,320 for Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of Alabama. This is a fantastic organization that supports victims of child abuse when they need it most.

Creatives: 15%
No, we're not really giving the money to our Creative staff. They'd just waste it on ironic T-shirts and Widespread Panic tickets. Instead, we'll be donating $900 to Pre-School Partners, a Birmingham organization that teaches creative skills to at-risk kids.

Thanks again to all who participated! We'll be connecting with these organizations soon to hand out the cash and give them a bit of a financial boost for 2011.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

This holiday, help Luckie dole out $6,000 to charity.

Just wanted to let you all know about a fun holiday project we've launched here at Luckie & Company. We're letting the masses — including you — vote on how we should divide up our remaining $6,000 in charitable donations.

Just visit Holiday.Luckie.com and vote for your charity case of choice. And please take a moment to share it with your friends, if you'd like.

What's great is that this is only one piece of Luckie's charitable contributions this year. The Luckie family and our Executive Committee deserve a lot of credit for keeping our agency so focused on giving back to our community.

David Griner is a social media strategist for Luckie and Company and contributing editor for Adweek’s blog, AdFreak.com. You can reach him by e-mail or on Twitter.

 

10 examples of how crowdsourcing is changing the world.

The mind-bendingly awesome podcast RadioLab once told the story of a 1906 country fair at which attendees were invited to guess the weight of a large ox. Hoping for a cash prize, about 800 people made guesses, though no one got it right.

Afterward, a statistician analyzed the written guesses and discovered something shocking: the average of all the guesses was a mere one pound away from the exact weight of the ox.

The moral? Sometimes a crowd can be smarter than any one of its members, even when they're not actually working together. This is just one of the many, many things that fascinates me about crowdsourcing, the idea of taking almost any task and farming it out to the masses.

Today I wanted to highlight a few clever uses of crowdsourcing, just to show how it's quickly changing almost every aspect of online commerce, research and even human interaction.

The list begins, in no certain order, after the jump.