I head up a group at allen & gerritsen called the Digital Incubator. It is an emerging technology and emerging media strategy and lab environment, so naturally I am at SXSW to test out all of the hot technologies. In a discussion of goals for SXSW with Graham Nelson, I told him that I wanted to meet the Gowalla team, particularly CEO Josh Williams.

Within 8 minutes, I had accomplished this goal. When I checked into the Austin Bergstrom Airport, I got an offer! I was delighted. I was not sure how many other people had received the offer and knowing that I was on a plane full of social media nerds, I looked around the plane. I did not see anyone jumping and hitting their heads on the cabin ceiling, so I smiled and accepted.

I checked the email and made my way to baggage claim and standing there, holding a sign with MIKE is Josh Williams. He hands me a t-shirt and I try to fight the urge to launch into a zillion questions about the application, their revenue model and surprises for SXSW.

Brad Mays form Chevrolet and jumped into a brand new Tahoe and headed to our hotel. On the way, he told us about Chevy’s plans for SXSW.

This is a great story about a brand thinking about online and offline experience and the payoff of location based social networking promises to go beyond checking in. While this probably will not do much more than create buzz for Chevy and perhaps change a few minds about the ability of American big auto to think creatively, it is a definite step in the right direction.

Chevy has a bunch of interesting activities with Gowalla and QR codes in action at SXSW. If you find a Chevy pin when you check in, you can get some limited edition Hot Wheels at the Chevy Volt recharge station. They staged a big road trip for several content creating teams heading to SXSW, there are Chevy test drives and I am told there are other surprises planned. Now if only they drove people to a community where they could capture and nurture the relationships they are building.

SXSW has its share of great big parties. Why does everyone really flock to Austin?

The volume of quality content per hour is staggering. And if you are not engaged in a session, the hall way conversations are just as beneficial (if not more in some cases). Everyone is there and everyone is ready to meet and converse with you.

My priorities for SXSW:

Create

Some of the best content creators from all over the world will be at SXSW. This is our chance to collaborate. The resources to do so are for all intents and purposes (no, it’s not “all intensive purposes”) infinite. I am looking for opportunities to talk shop or perform spectacle with colleagues from Boston, Austin and Seattle (The Triangle of Awesome), the RDU Triangle, SFO, everywhere. I love to talk Social CRM, Paid / Owned / Earned media, instant video, crowdsourcing, segmentation and location based networking.

If you are interested in making videos or blogging about those topics or beer, burritos, modern rock, tea, SXSW, Chinese – talk to me. I am very excited about the chance to work with you.

Some good Boston folk have talked about putting together a daily recap of the cool happenings for people who missed the event or who just plain did not go to the same sessions or have the same conversations we did. SXSW is enormous. It is literally impossible to consume even half of all of the content. Just ask George G Smith Jr. He literally slept for about 5 hours the entire time in an attempt to take it all in.

Meet

I want to meet you. In my new role as Vice President, Director Digital Incubator, I am responsible for staying ahead of the curve. My group figures out how to make the shiny objects useful for our clients. We put them through the paces and define the roadmaps for products and services. This means I am going to be eager to talk to location based, augmented reality, massive data, visualization, social media measurement, community, video etc. etc. vendors while I am in Austin. if you have an offering on an emerging platform, chances are I want to meet you.

Learn

At SXSW, I think the motto is “kill then with content”. I likened last year’s SXSW to going to college with all of the people you wanted to be there with. This year there are so many appealing session, I am triple and quadruple “booked” on my schedule for some time slots. There simply will not be enough time to take in everything. I am not worried. I do not think you can lose at SXSW. If you do, the next session is bound to change your attitude.

If you would like to meet me, please see my google profile. http://bit.ly/smgoogle. It has all of my various connection points including location based (stalking) stuff. I am looking forward to seeing you at SXSW.

What about the parties? I am sure you will see me at a party or two, but I will not choose them over beers in a bar with local craft brew, a chance to make a cool video or a opportunity to meet with the Wired, Gowalla or WOXY gangs!

What are you hoping to get from SXSW?

Or, Why i’m F***ED in the Cogaoke Competition

Why am I doing this competition? I do like Karaoke.

A lot.

But I’m also way more than a little curious about response rates in social media.

Climbing a BIG Hill

I appreciate your votes friends, but let’s take a look at what your friendly, neighborhood Schneider-man is up against.

I need to be in the top 15 to be in the competition. Let’s assume that I have 50% active following. That would be ~1350 people.

• I currently have 218 votes and sit in 28th place.
• TonyBGoode is in 15th place with 583
• RogerNiner is at the top with 1153.

This means I need 365 incremental votes just to overtake Tony and 935 to get to Roger.

Awesome! If my active followers each have (on average) 2 browsers and are savvy enough to use them, that means I need between a 14 and 35% response rate to get into the game! And this all assumes that people stop voting for anyone but me! There are still 3 days left and you can vote from each browser daily.

Recent efforts from me and from friends (I love you people) have resulted in between .01 and 1% response rates depending on their audience sizes. Yes, I’m counting responses as votes, not just clicks on the URL.

So. Who wants to help prove the numbers wrong? What response rate ranges have you documented for similar requests?

Here’s the URL: http://bit.ly/smcogaoke if you want to promote it. Or click here to vote now

Google Buzz has the potential to be THE ultimate social media dialogue and content aggregation machine. Here are three short-term ideas that will make it infinitely more usable and convert the skeptics.

Compact the Content

Problem: Showing the buzz and all the comments (even just 10 – and how are they decided?) is really noisy. Particularly when you follow people who get serious engagement like Jason Calacanis, Pete Cashmore and “Mr. Noisy” Robert Scoble. Users will decide when they want to read the comments. Result: more content is read. I do not see a decrease in engagement. The people who don’t like to read comments were not going to read them anyway.

Filter Out Channels

Problem: Some people are still using multiple social media tools. They want to continue to use them for what they like to use them for and they are not coming to Buzz to have that content duplicated. OK. Let them remove the content they do not want to see. Caveat: They can’t remove Buzz original content.

Here’s a quick and easy way to remove the content you do not care about.

Clicking “Filter Channels Options” takes your to this screen that allows you to set options globally and also to change your mind if you decide you want the content back. (Yeah, I grabbed the channels from FriendFeed).

Make Buzz Post to Twitter

That’s game over.

The Chinese Spring Festival (Chun Jie 春节), what we call Chinese New Year, is currently in progress. This is the biggest holiday in China and has many awesome traditions. One of these is the Lion Dance.

Often mistaken for Dragons, the Lions will be in Chinatown this Sunday, February 21, 2010. The Southern style lion dance is a ritual to scare away evil spirits and bring good luck and fortune to a shop. The local Kung Fu troops will be parading through Chinatown from ~10AM-5:00PM.

So how do you enjoy the event without having any idea what it is about?

Don’t Just Stand There

This isn’t a typical parade. You can actually follow the action from shop to shop and there will be plenty of gong fu troops with (usually) 2 lions, a buddha, firecrackers and a drum. Shopkeepers place a bowl full or lettuce, oranges and red envelopes in front of the shop. The Lions come to the shop, jump on the bowl, eat the lettuce, throw the oranges and grab the envelopes. Then they go into the shops and restaurants to scare away the evil spirits. When they leave, the shopkeeper tosses firecrackers at them to scare them off.

The Lion dances can be a little intense with the firecrackers, so keep the kids close. They like the colorful costumes and enjoy the dance, but sometimes the bangs can be a little much. If they get scared, then go to a restaurant or bakery.

Plan to Eat

Come early to Hei La Moon, Chao Chow City, Emperor’s Garden or China Pearl to have dumplings, buns and tea. This is called dim sum. Har Gao / Xia Jiao is a shrimp dumpling. Shu Mai is a pork dumpling. The sticky rice in lotus leaf is delicious and has meat and other delights inside. Ask for pork buns or “nai wong bao”, which is a delicious custard bun. They’ll be surprised you even know about this one. My kids love it.

Remember, the lions come into the restaurants so have your camera ready.

If Dim Sum is not your style or you come later in the day, Vinh Sun has extremely delicious Hong Kong style food with roast pork that melts in your mouth. They also have dishes served in sizzling hot clay pots that are winners. It’s better to get a group together when you go for Chinese food. Dishes are meant to be shared. Shabu Zen’s cook-as-you-eat hot pot is a unique and delicious experience. They have 2 locations. One is in Allston, one in Chinatown. It’s kind of like Japanese Tapas. Hei La Moon’s “feasts” are authentic and incredible. Ask for the Chinese menu. They have seafood and non-seafood feasts for 4, 8, 12 – more.

Hit the Bakery

My favorite is Hing Shing. I love their custard buns, cookies and coconut bars. The cookies are also delicious and the prices are insanely low. Other people swear by Ho Yuen and Eldo Cake House. There are plenty of bakeries in Chinatown to enjoy and no one, except maybe the owners, would fault you for going to more than one!

Follow the Action

When you are not eating, follow the action around. Throw a kid on your shoulders and follow a gong fu troop. It’s a great way to get to know Chinatown. Pop into the shops, talk to the people, grab a bubble tea, a snack, or menu for next time.

Chinese Lesson 中文

Try these out when you’re in Chinatown

新年快乐 : Xin1 Nian2 Kuai4 Le4 /Shin Nee-en Kwai Luh/ This means “Happy New Year”
恭喜发菜：Gong1 Xi3 Fa1 Cai2 / Gong She Fa Tsai / This also means “Happy New Year” but literally means “Congratulations on your Riches”

Happy Year of the Golden Tiger! Hope to see you there.

FriendFeed is the ultimate Social Media communication and aggregation tool and Google recognizes this. Enter Google Buzz 1.0 which is basically a clone. The big advantage over FriendFeed is that it has an instant, enormous audience.

FriendFeed is like fine china. It’s beautiful. It’s elegant. It makes you feel happy to use it, but you rarely do. Google Buzz is like your everyday plates and bowls. At the end of the day, they both do pretty much the same thing, but you use the more ordinary of the two a hell of a lot more often.

People are taking a serious look at Google Buzz. According to Mashable, Buzz has had over 9 million posts at the time I published this post. People are in test mode. The question is whether or not it will stick. If Google wants to keep the buzz going or even be a buzzkill for Twitter and Facebook, there are 3 key features that will all but guarantee they become the preferred platform

Analytics

Integrate with Google analytics.They could start with “URL shortener style” analytics for each buzz. Engagement metrics are key. Give people an idea of how often and how long people are engaging with Buzz content. Hits over time, sliced by location would get everyone very excited. “Time per Buzz” would also be very cool.

Mobile Apps

One of FriendFeed’s downfalls was that it had nothing resembling a mobile application. It’s not enough to be able to contribute content through the web browser, people want native apps. Once Buzzdeck, Buzzmic, HootSuite for Buzz and Buzzie hit the iPhone apps store or are downloadable to Blackberry, you can stick a fork in Twitter. Google Buzz launched with an API., so this is most likely around the corner. If you are working on a Google Buzz iPhone application, I would like to talk to you.

Filter

This feature is also known as the Scoble volume control. Is it me or is that guy noisy? As Google allows more sites like posterous, tumblr, foursquare, gowalla, brightkite, digg, de.licio.us etc to be aggregated, streams will become more Scobley (noisy). Google Buzz allows us to setup groups, which essentially are the same at lists in Twitter, but it would be awesome to be able to filter out content.

(Did I mention Scoble being noisy? He sure is.)  For instance, lets say I do not care, or it is against my religion, to know what is happening in Twitter. Or lets say that on Tuesdays, all I want to see new blog posts. If Google Buzz would allow me to filter out channels, it would succeed where FriendFeed failed.

What else would you like to see in Buzz?

Article title by Kevin Long: http://www.longshotsprophoto.com

Google’s social network killer is upon us and it is called Buzz. It is the tool that has Facebook screaming in agony, twitter paralyzed with terror and tumblr, posterous, gowalla, and foursquare raising a collective eyebrow.

The first iteration of Buzz is nothing more than a light version of my personal favorite social network, (queue angelic music) FriendFeed. It allows you to aggregate content from other social networks, including twitter, and also create your own content via a picture, link or text driven buzz. From the content it is possible to create threaded conversations, an area where Twitter is sorely lacking [Hashtags are horrible. You drop and disrespect them all of the time. Admit it.] and that Facebook and Friendfeed both have very firm handles on.

What’s the Point?

With any new take on an existing platform you have to ask yourself what the point is. This point is to steal market share [of course.] Buzz basically validates that Google thinks that FriendFeed was the correct approach. So what does it have that FriendFeed lacks? Nothing, right?

Wrong.

The answer is prominence¹.

FriendFeed is out of sight out of mind, but there are over 146 million users of gmail² and they were all greeted with a splash screen that told them about Buzz. So while Google may have plans to differentiate themselves from FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter in the future, right now the fact is that they have exposed themselves to an audience that is larger than the size of Russia. If Buzz begats buzz, look for Google to make a larger investment and a more feature-rich platform. Analytics anyone?

¹Yes, the mobile app has some cool location based features too.
²Arrington, Michael (2009-07-09). “Bing Comes to Hotmail”. Techcrunch. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/09/bing-comes-to-hotmail/. Retrieved 2009-07-11. “Hotmail is still by far the largest web mail provider on the Internet, with 343 million monthly users according to Comscore. Second and third are Yahoo (285 million) and Gmail (146 million).”

everybody loves merit badges

This year’s Boston Wine Expo was not at all what I was expecting. Never having been to one, I figured it would be a pleasant affair where well mannered folks waited patiently to taste and discuss their favorite expensive grape juices*. Instead it was ravenous wine fans pushing their way past others to get every last drop of wine and every last piece of stinky cheese possible. I also expected to be able to taste more than 4 or 5 varietals. Most booths had Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay and and sometimes a blend of the aforementioned. There was not a map of the booths and the wines and the wine vendors themselves were horrible marketers. No flags, just nearly invisible-through-the-crowd signs to mark their tables.

Needless to say, I was a little disappointed with my first wine tasting, but I knew that Gary Vaynerchuk could change my mind. It is no secret that I am a big fan of the Thunder Show, Vaynermedia and #CRUSHIT. I’ve seen Gary speak a half a dozen times and he usually brings something interesting to the table. I have seen 100s of episodes of Wine Library TV, but this was the first time I had a chance to drink wine with him as his “Expland Your Palate” session.

We were situated in a conference room at the World Trade Center each with a scoresheet and 8 numbered wines, 1 rose, 3 whites and 4 reds. Gary starts off by greeting us, giving us the Reader’s Digest version of his spiel and then starts to teach us how to taste wine the GaryVee way.

The boomer couple sitting next to me has never heard of Gary. They just bought the tickets because they thought the talk sounded interesting. They are in for a treat. The guy was Austrian. He loaned me a pen. “Schneidermike, you didn’t come prepared? Where’s your iPhone pen?” says Gary. I look sheepishly at my iPhone and Zi8.

After taunting Patriots (and a few Colts fans) he starts off with the aroma. “First, let’s start with the sniffy-sniff. I want you to get your nose as far into the glass as possible.” He urges us all to sniff first, before we swirl the wine. He wants us to experience the wine before and after. He gives me some stink eye for swirling my glass before sniffing. I learn and do not make the same mistake again. “Schneidermike, you wine noob. We have to get you up to speed.” he says. When swirling, you really need to beat the wine up. Swirl it like you mean it. Tasting? That’s “giving it a whirl.”

Pierre Sparr Cremant d’Alsace Brut Rose

Aroma according to me: mountain snowy ai, apple, sharp cheddar
Taste: The taste is strong. It’s a crisp, apple-like flavor.
Color: Rose
Score: Meh
It’s a bubbly. I would drink it again, but I would not ask for it.
Price: $12/bottle

Santorini Assyritko

Aroma according to me: white pepper, burning plastic (Gary says rubber tire), cilantro
Color: White
Taste: The taste is of vinegar and reminded me of paint thinner.
Score: Meh / Gary liked this one.
Price: $12-$15

Domaine Lafond Lirac Blanc

Color: White
Aroma: cleaner, Mr. Clean, greens, I got some kind of tropical fruit (Gary said it was starfruit).
Taste: Pear, vanilla, pepper giving way to a bitterness.
Score: Like
Gary says if you’re tried a Lirac, you’re a wine geek. If you’re tried a Lirac Blanc, you are one of a niche of uber wine geeks.
Price: $17

Vinoptima 2003 Gewurztraminer

Color: White? Golden notes.
Aroma: Big fruit aroma, pear
Taste: This sucker was pure pineapple with a white pepper finish.
Score: Like/Love
This was my favorite wine. Gary says it is great with stinky cheese. It was the New Zealand wine of the year at one point.
Price: $50

Fat Barrel Pinotage

Color: Red
Aroma: very faint, hard to pick up much on the nose.
Taste: Lot of tastes: cigar, tobacco, jerky, bacon, chipotle pepper, smoke, monterey jack cheese
Gary said this was a meh. He felt it was missing its soul. A woman said that most people say that it’s a mistake to pair chocolate with Pinitage. Gary said he would try it, particularly since his episode in Montreal where a woman gave him bacon muffins. He ate 4. Sounded like the taste was really intriguing moreso than an actual he lusted for bacon muffins.
Score: Like

Bedell Cellars First Crush Red

Color: Red
Aroma: bread, yeast
Taste: charcoal, smoke, persimmon
Score: Hate
I did not like this wine. It was extraordinarily bitter. It sucked the moisture out of my mouth and soured my puss. This is a 72% Merlot / Cab Franc blend. It’s from Long Island. I think someone must have put some of the Hudson in this wine.
Price: $15, but I would not pay $5. I think Gary liked this one.

Clos de Gamot Cahors

Color: Red
Aroma: I forget
Taste: Chocolate, smoke, metal, iron, Gary said hay/barnyard/earth, moss. I also got a fishiness. Gary asked if anyone else got the fishiness. 2 others raised their hands. he attributed it to the saltiness and minerality of the wine. He told me I should try some Alsatian White wines if I like this one. I’ve just learned that some Gerwuztraminers fall into this category so I am stoked!
Score: Meh/Like

Follies Touriga Nacional

Color: Red
Aroma: Wood / Oak
Taste: OAK OAK OAK, acai berry, big wood flavor, cloves
Score: Like, 2nd favorite
Gary was excited that the crowd liked this wine because, not only is it from Portugal–> the price is around
Price: $9

After the Follies Touriga Nacional, a woman in the crowd swore she would only drink French oak and that she did not like the wine because she thought it was American oak. Gary corrected her and told her it was Hungarian oak which she also did not like. She swore up and down that she was tuned for particular type of oak. He swore up and down that he could trick her palate – to the point where he was willing to “bet the house” against her and told her that she had to come and be on the Thunder Show. He said that either way, they would both win because if she was right, they’d go on Good Morning America. If not, at least she would get to be on the show.

All-in-all, not only was a it a great time, I got some great homework. I am off to Marty’s to explore Alsace.

Caveat: This is fun and non-scientific and directional. It took me about 15 minutes. I created three groups of posts:

• all posts about Scott Brown
• all about Martha Coakley
• all posts about Scott Brown and Martha Coakley

And through the magic of Social Media Monitoring (thanks @Radian6)…

Both Candidates are Campaigning Hard

Looks Like Brown Has a Slight Edge in Voting

query: voted for Brown (and not Coakley) vs. voted for Coakley (and not Brown)

Brown’s Supporters Are More Passionate

query: Love / Like / Hate / Dislike Brown (and not Coakley) vs. Love / Like / Hate / Dislike Coakley (and not Brown)

It’s going to be interesting to see how this one shakes out. I am voting later today.