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).”
