Jazz Fest Cubes – Get ‘em or Print ‘em

In celebration of my favorite time of year, Jazz Fest, we’ve put together a set of Jazz Fest Cubes to help everyone wade through the wide array of choices this weekend at the Fest.

We were selected by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation to build the Talent Exchange, a music search engine that enables music supervisors and talent buyers to find Louisisana music and artists.

To commemorate the achievement of building this search engine (in just one month… hey, its beta), we compiled the Jazz Fest Cubes. We’re going to be sharing these with our friends who are attending the An Event Apart conference this week, and presumably sticking around this weekend for some music.

Want one?

Come by the Welcome, Party! connecting AEA attendees with NOLA BarCampers today at Lafayette Square for a special professionally printed version. Or hit me up and I’ll get one to you.

Or

Read this doc on Scribd: Jazz Fest Cubes – Print Yours Now

Print your own version using the embedded files you see in this post. Print, snip, tape, Voila!

We were thrilled to get to work on the Talent Exchange for NOJHF. Here’s what Scott Aiges had to say about it:

The mission of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation is to promote Louisiana’s music and culture. In support of that, we decided to build a search engine that would give music supervisors an easy way to discover music by Louisiana artists for licensing in film, television and commercials, and for festival talent buyers to find artists touring in their region for live performances.

We hired Flatsourcing to build the Talent Exchange for us. With just a month to build it, they fully committed to the project and got to work. The whole team communicated with us every step of the way, and made sure they shared our vision for the project. We’re thrilled to launch the beta version of the Talent Exchange at our new conference, Sync Up: The Jazz & Heritage Music and Media Market. Thanks to the great team at Flatsourcing for helping us get the job done!

Look forward to celebrating this great time of year with all our local friends and everyone else who’s in town. Happy Fest!

Jason Calacanis Crushes My Facebook News Feed

Jason Calicanis Facebook OptimizationI’ve got 99 friends on Facebook but I hear from Jason Calacanis more than anyone. He has turned Facebook into a marketing platform for his human-powered search engine, Mahalo. And he doesn’t pay Facebook a dime for this primo branding opportunity.

Every morning I log in to Facebook and there is a link is posted through Mahalo with the Mahalo logo right next to it. As you can see by the screenshot of my news feed, yesterday (and most days) he had 5 items all with the Mahalo logo right next to it.

So how does he do it?

Well, the next generation of optimization is taking shape. First it was search engine optimization (SEO), next came social media optimization (SMO), and now we’ve got news feed optimization (NFO).

Dave McClure thinks “its effin’ brilliant.” and I’m sure other marketers are taking note. Inside Facebook has a very comprehensive post on how you too can optimize your submissions for Facebook’s news feed. Some of their tips:

  • The most important thing you can do as a Facebook application marketer is to publish engaging, authentic Feed items.
  • Be sure you optimize your Feed items for all of the Feed item elements made available to you by Facebook: title, body, and images.

Now here’s an amazing tidbit from Inside Facebook “News Feed publishes just a little more than 0.2% of the stories it considers.” Meaning Calacanis must truly be the master of NFO.

Now interestingly, Calacanis has taken on the search engine optimization industry before.

The SEO folks got really pissed off at me for saying “SEO is bulls@#t.” last year, but the truth is that 90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman.

Do you consider having your Facebook newsfeed dominated by headlines posted to Mahalo (and using the Mahalo logo as the image rather than an image related to the story) to be Facebook SPAM? At the very least, is the rationale behind posting it “optimizing” links for Facebook, hence marketing those links (Mahalo)?

(Now I know I could unfriend Calacanis or block him from my feed, but thats not the point. How is he getting so much content in there in the first place?)

The point is, is it OK to use what others are using for conversation and updates for marketing. And don’t tell me he’s not, because that is exactly what those 5 Mahalo logos every day are doing there. What do you think?

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