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.

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

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.

Originally written for and also published at my employer, allen & gerritsen’s site.

Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, the crowd has a really good idea about what you do during a given day. iPhone and Android’s onboard GPS has given way to location based social networks like BrightKite, Foursquare and Gowalla, which allow you to tell your friends where you are and how often you go there. Location based applications are the next frontier, and in fact are predicted to be next year’s big thing, offering unlimited possibility for communication by geography and, of course, advertising.

My last two sessions at SXSW 2009 featured players in location based social networking. I remember being fascinated by how they approached it primarily because Gregory Ng and I concepted our own in 2007 (prior owning an iPhone and iPhone’s “reliable” GPS).

Applications

Each of the location based apps have the ability to figure out where a person is located. The user “checks in” to locations, signifying their arrival. In addition, the user is able to send messages to let people know what they are doing.

BrightKite allows you to post a status update and a picture.

Foursquare gives you points for creating and “checking in” to a location. It also has has a leaderboard to see how you rank against your friends and your city.

Gowalla’s check-ins are similar in that you can post a note, but the app also has quirky little items that you find and leave for others. For instance, I currently have an espresso, a silk robe and a tour bus in my inventory. I am never going to drop that tour bus. That is awesome. You can either exchange items for items left by others, or drop an item to become a “Founder” of a spot. I cannot say that I fully understand the purpose, although Gowalla says that they use the items as proxies for how important a particular place is.

Each application relies on the users to create locations at spots and rewards them for doing so.

Integrations

Each of the services works with Twitter and Facebook, allowing you to connect with friends from those networks and to post notifications. Some might call this oversharing (particularly if you are friends with people on Twitter, Facebook and the Location based network).

Foursquare has recently also announced an API that is will make it even more appealing to the community.

The secret to extension of social applications is the ability to integrate it into a grander scheme. With integration with Twitter and Facebook already functional, the API combined with its game-like addictiveness will give it an advantage over all other LBSNs. BrightKite also has an API, but adoption has been much slower because people simply do not have a lot of incentive to use the platform even though it is probably the best in terms of geo-location. BrightKite needs to evolve and add incentives for use in order to stand up against its competitors and survive.

Advertising Features

Foursquare appears to be the leader in advertising and monetization. I’ve started to see some “nearby special” bannerettes pop up when I am about to check in to a place. Foursquare allows locations to give special deals to mayors. A mayor is the person who has checked into a place the most. This creates a little bit of competition between loyal customers. There’s a great opportunity to generate social buzz and loyalty by being an early adopter.

Who Wins?

The winner is the one who makes money. There are a couple of ways for an organization to do so. One is to be acquired by another organization who is interested in your compelling technology. The other way is to actually have a business model that makes money. Obviously it is desirable to have both going for you. The winner will also have a very compelling API which will allow them to scale and proliferate rapidly. FourSquare’s looks to be based largely on Twitter’s which has been wildly successful. Foursquare has already begun selling ads that are based on where a person is physically. I have noticed ads when I go to check into a place. They say something like Deal Nearby and offer you a click path to that location with an easy back to your original location. Brightkite has some banner ads that display after you check in to a location. I have not noticed similar features on Gowalla yet.

Behavioral Data and Analytics

The real win here is that location data can be linked to conversations on both the application’s platform and on associated Twitter (and soon perhaps Facebook) streams. You can get a clear picture of how a person behaves by where they go, how often they go there, where their friends go, how often they meet their friends and what they talk about when they are there – or after they go there. An analytics offering segmented by demographics and interests would be very valuable to marketers. They would also pay to see analysis of popular places so that they know where to place their ads.

We know where they go and we know what they’re thinking.

Now we just need to get them to buy something.

Given the amount of information we have, I am sure we can find something appropriate to sell.

A public service message from Team Boston

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