Mass Innovation Night Foodie Edition #MIN29

Banana from Edible Arrangements

It's not every day that you meet a guy in a banana suit at IBM. This must be the annual foodie edition of Mass Innovation Night. Edible Arrangements is promoting their new tropical collection and they did it up with lots of tasty samples and great costumes. I loved the coconut-coated banana. 
Edible Arrangements wins the best prop award this time for their fruit costumes. Aris wins best hat again, of course. Aris' hats are becoming a regular feature. Aris was chatting with Lisa from IBM when I ran into him. IBM Waltham did another great job hosting. They even led off the presentations with a video about sequencing the cocoa genome. Big thank you to IBM.

Aris and his hat with Lisa from our host, IBM Waltham

The four chosen presenters were:

• Brew1 Single-serve Coffee Brewing System - great tasting coffee, recyclable capsules.
• Local Pickins -  online guide to all things fresh, local and edible in the ever expanding local foods marketplace.
• Evocatus - a community for discovering, sharing, and combining new tastes.
• Smiling Sauce - unique, whimsical cooking sauces and condiments.

The crowd filtering in. By the time the presentations started it was SRO.

I enjoyed talking with Adam from Evocatus about  combining tastes and Caleb's presentation zeroed right in on how to cut thru the web clutter of opinions on food and beverages.

Adam from Evocatus

The condiment queens from Smiling Sauces presented "the next condiment." Zing is a healthy hot sauce, spicy, whimsical and local. I fell in love with it at first bite: the flavors that jumped out at me were cilantro and jalapeno with tomatillo underneath. I immediately imagined adding Zing to egg salad.

 Condiment Queens from Smiling Sauces

Brew1 is taking on Keurig with  a single serve coffee machine. I tasted the Peruvian Dark Roast and agree that they have it all over K-cups on taste. And the capsules are recyclable! I can see this as a great system for office coffee.

Brew1 brews up a delicious cup of coffee

I also managed to check out:

• Perfect Fuel Chocolate - Endurance Chocolate, dark chocolate fortified with ginseng to fuel triathletes and runners.
• Chococoa Baking -- delicious whoopie pies from Newburyport.
• Foodies of New England Magazine - a new magazine covering the New England food scene.
• Absolute One Home Drinking Water Filter  - innovative water filter for your tap water.

Perfect Fuel's Endurance Chocolate is delicious. I'm partial to dark chocolate and this is plenty dark.

Perfect Fuel

Chococoa Baking's vanilla cream Whoopie pie is awesome.

Julie from Chococoa

Foodies of New England Magazine was handing out free copies of their first issue. I enjoyed talking with them about the challenges of photographing food. I hope they visit my favorite North Andover restaurant, Good Day Cafe, soon.

Foodies of New England

Absolute One Water Filter

The turnout for this event was amazing. The place was packed. I didn't get to talk with folks from every one of the 10 products, but enjoyed the ones I did talk with.  The Experts Corner was buzzing with entrepreneurs consulting the experts. Jeff Cutler agreed to pose for the traditional Experts Looking Expert shot.

Experts Corner  includes Robert Gray from At Hand Apps consulting Jeff Cutler

Expert Looking Expert

analytics vs. the real world part 2: Social Mention

 Next up in the experiment with social media analysis tools is Social Mention, a wide-ranging tool that identifies where and how often your brand is mentioned in social media. Options let you choose which media to search, such as blogs, microblogs, video, etc.  I selected "All" and ran the search on my name "Janet Egan" with the quote marks.

My name is very common and there are at least two Janet Egans with stronger brand identity than mine: the fashion designer and the novelist. For that matter, there are a bunch of Janet Egans who go to my eye doctor, order things from Baker Books, or are listed in the local phone book. Therefore, I was expecting the designer and the novelist to be mentioned more than I am.

I was not expecting the first three mentions to be All My Children. Oddly, there is no Egan attached to the Janet in the All My Children videos. In fact, Egan doesn't even occur on the page where it is allegedly mentioned in two of the references. The quotation marks evidently don't limit the search to the exact phrase.

I tried it again from the Advanced Search page, specifying "this exact wording or phrase". Same results.

Some of the remaining results were relevant, some not.
Relevant:

• A bunch of references to a Janet Egan Frisard whose Navy father's remains had been found after 45 years.
• 4 references to the fashion designer
• 5 references to me
• 2 references to the novelist who wrote The Keep

Irrelevant:

• 3 references to Janet Jackson
• 1 reference to a French vampire
• 2 references to videos of Shakespeare plays that do mention either a Janet or an Egan but not both

All in all,  Social Mention didn't give me much more insight into my online brand than I already had. The only interesting insight is that neither the novelist nor the fashion designer are doing much better than I am at advancing the Janet Egan brand.