Gary Vaynerchuck, host of the popular video podcast Wine Library TV, visited Des Moines this weekend and spoke at East Village Books.

Gary V. is a new form of celebrity, self-made through tireless enthusiasm, infectious energy, hard work, and the ability to leverage powerful social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook. He actually interacts with the community he’s built — Gary typically receives 1,000 e-mails a day and he takes the time to answer each one personally. This is refreshing, especially in a media landscape that likes to package, produce and force-feed us “celebrities” that have zero relevance other than attending parties and appearing in garbage reality programming.

It was a pleasure hearing Gary’s thoughts on building a business and his full-throttle obsession with changing the culture of wine. After his talk and signing at the book store, some of us from the Des Moines TweetUp crew kidnapped Gary and went out for food and cocktails. (Above is a quick video interview that I captured in the back seat of Rob Jensen’s Camry.) Podcasting News also has a fantastic, in-depth interview that you should check out.

Thanks again to @garyvee for visiting Des Moines!

As the flood waters rise here in Des Moines, I am keeping a close watch on IowaFlood.com, a website that aggregates content from various citizen journalists and mainstream media outlets.

The site was created by Andy Brudtkuhl (of 48Web) within just a few hours, built with Yahoo! Pipes and Wordpress. Content is pulled automatically from various sources — alerts from NOAA and the National Weather Service, tagged photos on Flickr, YouTube videos, hashtagged chatter on Twitter, blog posts, articles from outlets like WHO-TV and the Des Moines Register — and all woven together into an incredibly robust, informative news experience.

The cool thing is how seamlessly old media and new media are working together. IowaFlood.com pulls in RSS feeds from the Register, meanwhile, a Register employee on Twitter is hashtagging his tweets with #iowaflood to ensure that his newspaper’s updates are correctly pushed to IowaFlood’s front page.

This creates a nice blend of reporting from authoritative media sources and human, block-by-block coverage that armies of citizen journalists can easily pull off. Thus far, IowaFlood.com has received over 16,000 visitors, generated over 1,000 posts, and survived one database crash — mostly due to word-of-mouth.

If only we had the internet back in 1993…

UPDATE 6/13: On Friday afternoon I went out and grabbed some video of the Des Moines river nearing it’s highest levels since 1993.

UPDATE 6/21: At Thursday’s Des Moines TweetUp, I asked Andy a few questions about the logistics behind building IowaFlood.com on the fly.

Good communication between employees is vital to all businesses, large or small. E-mail, unfortunately, often falls into the “bad communication” category. Tone is misinterpreted, context is lost and messages go missing.

That’s why today many companies are experimenting with internal wikis and private social networks to improve communication among their team members. Think of this as just an evolution of the corporate intranet.

By adopting the social features that have made online destinations like Wikipedia and Facebook successful, businesses can transform their stagnant, one-way intranet into a bustling expressway of shared thoughts, insights and collaboration.

Here are a few quick pointers for initiating a wiki project within your business:

• Start small. Choose a team within your organization to start using the wiki — not everyone at once.
• Develop a strategy to roll it out internally. (Hint: Don’t announce it via e-mail.)
• Give the wiki time to evolve. If users aren’t taken by it immediately, keeping pushing ahead, keep the faith and keep training.
• Determine what success is. Reduction of e-mail volume? Better communication? Knowing your goals ahead of time will allow you to justify the project later on.

If you’re ready to get started, there are multiple resources available, ranging from free, hosted services such as PBwiki, all the way to enterprise-level applications like SocialText. Good luck on starting up your wiki!

There’s a common perception that integrating video content into your website can be expensive. However, this isn’t the case any more — video-to-web is fast, easy and affordable.

Showcasing your product with video creates a much more intimate connection with your website visitor than just a photograph, diagram or list of services. Probably the best example is BlendTec’s "Will it Blend" video campaign, which illustrates the blending power of their products on objects such as iPhones and marbles.

Additionally, if you use a video-sharing application to host your content such as YouTube or Blip.tv, your video is instantly shareable in a peer-to-peer fashion. These services allow you to cast a wider audience net outside of your own website.

So how do you get started?

1. Equipment. Depending on the final quality you’ll need, you can hire a freelance videographer to shoot it, or simply create your own content with affordable digital video equipment such as the Flip cam.
2. Get it on the Web! This is much easier than it sounds. There are many video-sharing websites out there to choose from — I mentioned YouTube and Blip.tv earlier, but there’s also Viddler, Veoh, Revver and many more. It’s a snap to upload your video file to any of these websites and they will take care of file hosting and bandwidth for you, usually for free.
3. Integrate it. All video-sharing applications allow you to easily embed your video content into your website, blog, or social network profile. Typically this is as simple as copying and pasting a snippet of code.

In summary, there’s no reason to drop $10,000 on an expensive video shoot for your website. With the right tools and a little curiosity, you’ll be on your way to integrating video in no time.

Last week I discovered an interesting project called Brand Tags (Brandtags.net), a website that lets visitors “tag” globally-recognized brands like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, GE, etc.

Tagging is a common function built into peer-to-peer social networks and web-based applications. For example, while watching YouTube videos or looking at photos on Flickr, you may notice a cluster of descriptive words to the right. Those are “tags” that the user has added to help categorize where the video belongs. Brand Tags works in a similar fashion, except that you tag based on your perception (not categorization) of the brands.

Brand Tags is fascinating because it gives us a window into the collective mind of hundreds of thousands of people and how they currently perceive large companies — companies that spend billions of dollars to shape our perceptions.

Below are a couple examples of brands and their corresponding tags:

Brand: Apple
Tags: Cool, Design, Awesome, Innovation
http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php?id=72

Brand: MySpace
Tags: Annoying, Friends, Music, Kids, Teenagers, Ugly
http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php?id=41

Brand: Google
Tags: Search, Everything, God, Evil
http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php?id=2

Brand: McDonald’s
Tags: Cheap, Fat, Food, Unhealthy
http://www.brandtags.net/browse.php?id=47

The Brand Tags project is just another example of how social mediums have leveled the playing field between large organizations and their consumers.

New social networks and applications pop up every day, causing many to suffer from what is known as "socal network fatigue." You’ve got too many usernames and passwords across multiple platforms to remember, and you’ve got different circles of friends spread across all the networks. This deluge of information can be difficult to manage.

Now, services are springing up that aim to help us with the social networking overload. One of particular interest is FriendFeed. Basically, you sign up once, enter all your logins for the various networks you participate in, and FriendFeed spits out a "life stream" of data about what you’re doing.

Imagine all of your recent Twitter and Facebook updates, Flickr photos, blog posts, Upcoming.org events, StumbleUpon bookmarks and favorited YouTube videos mashed together with what you’re currently listening to on Last.fm — all in one central feed.

FriendFeed serves as a chokepoint for all of the scattershot data we post about ourselves online, and time will tell if it’s a temporary cure for social networking fatigue.

Internet entrepreneur, author and renowned geek Chris Pirillo was in Des Moines this weekend and we (the #dmtweetup crew) joined him for an impromptu TweetUp. I got a chance to interview Chris about how Twitter has replaced his RSS reading habits, and I asked him what Des Moines (and Iowa) can do to retain and attract creative talent.

More videos and photos of the event can be found on various Flickr photostreams.

Special thanks to Andy at East Village Books for donating the location space, free coffee and Wifi.

In the coming weeks I’ll be talking about social media as a connectivity, communication and research tool a lot. Below is a round-up of upcoming speaking dates. If you’re interested in attending any of them, please contact the organization/club sponsoring the event, or just shoot me an e-mail.

Thursday, April 17th
Ames Area Public Relations & Marketing Group (PRAM)
12:00 pm
Somerset Clubhouse
Ames, Iowa

Monday, April 28th
Wednesday, April 23rd
Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication
3:30 pm
Hamilton Hall, Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa

Friday, April 25th
CIRT (Central Iowans in Radio and Television) luncheon
11:30 am
Holiday Inn Downtown
Des Moines, Iowa

Wednesday, April 30th
YPC of Des Moines (Young Professionals Connection)
12:00 pm
Greater Des Moines Partnership Building
Des Moines, Iowa

Friday, May 9th
Rotary Club of Des Moines
7:00 am
Wakonda Club
Des Moines, Iowa

The concepts of networking and being connected have been critical components of doing business for ages. Technologies like LinkedIn and Facebook have allowed us to expand our professional networks online.

However, the one social network that I’ve derived the most professional value out of thus far has been Twitter, hands down. For those that aren’t familiar with Twitter, it’s a growing social network of about one million users, built upon short, 140-character status updates (or "tweets") between participants.

Twitter is virtually spam-free and has connected me to dozens of like-minded people working in similar industries here in Des Moines, and beyond. Eventually I’ve ended up meeting most of these connections in real life, either through Des Moines Twitter Meetups (we call them "TweetUps") or at industry conferences.

So, if you’re a freelancer, a small business owner, an entrepreneur, or in a sales role, I would absolutely recommend adding Twitter to your social networking toolbox. (I’m assuming you already have a presence on LinkedIn - but if not, you should do so.)

One thing to note about using Twitter: Unlike LinkedIn, you’re expected to not just have a presence there, but participate in all the conversation going on. Twitter’s value comes from the quality of conversation you engage in and the quality of connections - not the quantity.

Happy tweeting!

This is just a glimpse of the patchwork of business cards that I collected during the SXSW Interactive festival. Of course, the festival isn’t about biz cards - it’s about new friends, valuable connections and absorbed insight that will last for years.