I’m heading to Austin, Texas this Sunday for a whirlwind tour of the South by Southwest Interactive festival. While there, I’ll be giving advice to entrepreneurs at the meals with mentors event, giving a talk on the risks of NOT building your personal brand & the 5 most critical words every entrepreneur should know, and I’ll be meeting with VCs on some big ideas… and that’s just in the first few hours after I get off the plane!

Not everyone can afford to go to SXSW, but that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on all the action in Austin! Today I’m going to show you how to follow along with an app called Banjo.

What is Banjo?

Banjo is a unqiue app because it aggregates all the social media conversations from all the different channels (like Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Vine & more) and puts them together in one (geographical) place. What do I mean by that? Well, when there’s an event like SXSW, you can go right into Austin and see the live social media conversation as it unfolds from people that are actually there! Not people at home talking about SXSW. People at SXSW, talking about SXSW.

From pictures, stories and videos people are sharing to an interactive map of where they’re sharing it, Banjo gives you a detailed portrait of the entire social conversation in one convenient place. You may even be able to uncover opportunities for you or your business from the conversations taking place at SXSW.

So even if you can’t actually get to Austin to experience it all first hand, you can still fire up the app and tap into the conversation, see what people are saying and sharing, and even insert yourself into the SXSW conversation from the comfort of your own home!

So give the Banjo app a test run, and let me know what you think in the comments below.