Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

The Truck Stops Here

Here's today's Social Media Insider, originally published in MediaPost. Photo credit: Me.

In the future, will all of our restaurants turn into roving trucks? You may not ask yourself that question every day, but answering it will reveal a few things about the evolution of social media.

This megatrend of trucks serving gourmet food is one of those cataclysmic events that can only be brought on by a slew of events that were never supposed to happen at the same time (think "The Day After Tomorrow"):

·  A recession that caused consumers to be thrifty when eating out while also giving the jobless and underemployed more time than they're used to.

·  GPS technology accurate enough to locate restaurants on wheels.

·  The advent of Twitter, which allowed truck-food proprietors to economically broadcast where they are, along with empowering consumers narcissistic enough to tell people they are on line waiting for a truck chef to serve them.

·  Finally, the emergence of Dr. Scholl's shoe inserts so comfortable that truck chefs can be gellin' without having their feet resemble snapshots from the podiatric-themed issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

New York City has a multiplying fleet of truck chefs. Battles for the streets have become so intense that one truck food purveyor told The New York Times a few weeks ago, "I should not have to carry a baseball bat on my truck in order to sell cupcakes." I've visited two trucks for food this month alone: Van Leeuwen artisan ice cream by the High Line park (after trying the vanilla, "artisan" must be a synonym for "bland"), and the CupcakeStop.com truck that I found via a colleague's tweet, which served the best red velvet I've had east of the Mississippi (either side of it, you can't top Sprinkes).

The most famous, uber-hip food truck isn't driving near my office anytime soon. It's Kogi, the Los Angeles-based Korean barbecue truck fleet with over 35,000 followers on Twitter. Proprietor Mark Manguera seems to have an Oprah-like command of his followers, with hundreds of them lining up for Asian-Mexican food whenever his trucks tweet.

How much further will this trend go? Here are a few ideas:

·  The locations of these trucks will be crowdsourced. It's the converse of the drive-thru: instead of the truck saying where it is and people tweeting about it, people will tweet and the truck drives to where the most buzz is.

·  Mobile applications will instantly show which food trucks are in your area. Trucks will be sorted by cuisine type, location, and the length of the line.

·  A market of line-savers will emerge. Someone spending $10 on dinner from a truck may well pay another $20 not to wait on line for an hour or two (I couldn't find anyone offering or requesting this on the Los Angeles Craigslist boards). A secure arrangement between the parties using SMS and PayPal could ensure timeliness and accuracy. A more sophisticated system could have the person on line periodically checking in via GPS to confirm their location.

·  Trucks will eliminate all of their selection and will tweet the day's option along with the location. One day, it might only be steak fajitas, while another it's shrimp tamales. And the same people who waited two hours to get what they wanted from the truck would wait four to have no options to choose from.

·  Trucks will tweet the wrong locations intentionally. This will weed out the fans from the superfans. Anyone can follow a truck on Twitter and find it and wait on line for food while telling all their friends about it. But imagine if people had no clue where the truck was, and even their friends tweeted the wrong locations to throw them off? The same people who waited four hours to eat food from a truck with only one menu item would spend another four hours trying to find out where the truck really is before waiting another four hours for food.

Thanks to social media and the mobile technologies facilitating it, these trucks may in time lead to a super-race of Twitter users. Consumers already too thrifty to gorge themselves will spend four hours running around after a truck and four hours longer standing in line, all to consume undersized portions designed to easily fit in their hand for on-street consumption. While engaging in these tweets and spending ample time with their fellow line-waiters, they're bound to comingle and eventually reproduce. These offspring will in turn exhibit the genes for fitness and tech savvy that will give them disproportionate advantages in the centuries ahead.

I'm not sure I'll be one of them. Sunday night, while walking home, I discovered a Vietnamese restaurant in my neighborhood and ate my first banh mi sandwich. I had read no reviews, whether by professionals or consumers. I saw nary a tweet about it, and didn't tweet it either. Monday night, I went back for another banh mi. It won't be my last. The whole time, the restaurant stayed in the same location, there was no line, and I sat down while waiting. I'm clearly not cut out for the future of truck-based food consumption, though if it's carrying red velvets, I may make an occasional exception.

Why Skittles Killed Its Website

Image via Wikipedia

Here's today's column, originally from MediaPost:

When I was six years old, I wrote my first letter to a company when a box of Rice Krispies didn't contain a pack of Rain-Blo bubble gum as advertised (I received a letter back, with two packs of gum). Many more letters followed over the years, from when I discovered the Magnetic Doodle Balls game had only 91 balls instead of the promised "over 100," to when, at age 16, I noticed a version of Broderbund's Print Shop software only represented African Americans as jazz musicians and tribal warriors. It's a hobby I still revive on occasion, while sometimes adapting it to new communication channels -- as with my recent PowerPoint photo essay on a horrible Las Vegas hotel experience.

20 Reasons The Luxor Sucks

View more presentations from David Berkowitz. (tags: trips vegas)

Today, when contacting a company, the first place I'd likely turn is its Web site. I'm saying that tentatively, as Skittles makes me wonder if corporate Web sites will be around much longer. The company's new site seems to herald the fact that the corporate site is nearing its expiration date.

Go to  Skittles.com, which relaunched yesterday, and you'll see very little branded content. All that's branded is a small box the size of an average widget hovering over the top-left of the page. The background, which takes up most of the screen, is a live feed from Twitter Search showing results for the term "Skittles." Tweet a link to this column and mention the word Skittles, and you'll soon see that link appear on Skittles.com (let me know too; I'm @dberkowitz ).

Here's the message Skittles is sending: What consumers say about the brand is more important than what the brand has to say to consumers.

Skittles.com isn't exactly a top destination online. Compete, Quantcast and Google Trends respectively report the most recent month's Skittles.com unique visitors as 18,000, 15,000, and too few to track. To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson, Skittles.com's just another word for nothin' left to lose.

By just about any rational indication, Skittles went too far. Highlighting Twitter Search in particular seems absurd, especially since Twitter tends to skew older relative to other social media properties, and Skittles seems to target a younger audience. I came home and showed Skittles.com to my wife. Her first reaction, before I even told her why I was showing it to her, was, "That's it?" Then she added, "What happens if you don't care about Twitter or don't know about Twitter? It seems like it's only for people who are really technical. I just wouldn't care."

But why would anyone care about what Skittles has to say? What, pray tell, could Skittles ever say that was so important, unless we woke up one day to find out that eating Skittles is the world's tastiest cancer cure, or alternatively that Skittles lower men's sperm count. Then, perhaps, the world will listen.

Consider the alternative. On Facebook, Skittles has nearly 600,000 fans. In other words, Skittles has over 30 times the number of fans on Facebook than it has monthly visitors to its site by the most generous estimate. It's little wonder that one of the six tabs on Skittles.com links to its Facebook Page, in the same way as it does for Twitter Search with the official mini-site as an overlay. The Media tab links to Flickr and YouTube and unearths some interesting brand research; a good number of the photos on Flickr seem to be of pets named Skittles. Maybe Skittles.com should add another tab linking to pet social networks Dogster and Catster.

There are risks to what Skittles is doing, the biggest of which is a brand hijack. When I checked earlier yesterday, someone wrote, "Skittles suck! Skittles suck! Skittles suck! #skittles". When I checked later, it devolved further, with several posts including "Skittles" and the word "gay" written repeatedly, along with "Skittles" paired with a derogatory term for African Americans. Other posts were nonsensical or irrelevant, such as when an Ohio man named Nathan wrote, "Funny. Skittles was the name of the twinkie that was hitting on me Saturday night (because I was in the kilt)."

Most brands don't need to scrap their sites. Brands are allowed to control their own spot on the Web and offer something of value to their visitors best as they can. If they do highlight their social media presence, it should fit as part of a more coherent strategy. Otherwise, they'll have to face people like my wife, who will wonder what else there is and why they should care.

Praise Skittles for making a statement, though. Through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia, it can reach far more people than it can through Skittles.com. Skittles still needs Skittles.com, if for nothing else than controlling its own domain and posting some nutritional facts and contact information for the handful of people who need it. Yet its social media strategy is a mess. While Skittles.com is dominated by Twitter Search,  twitter.com/skittles has one follower, three updates, and is run by Sara -- who appears to be a cat.

Epilogue:

Between writing this column and its publication less than 24 hours later, Skittles apparently got skittish over the user-generated content on its homepage and set the default background to its Facebook Page. Still, the Twitter Search feed is live under the Chatter tab.

User-Generated Content Measurement Presentation from Digital Media Measurement and Pricing Summit

I had a great time at Strategy Institute's Digital Media Measurement & Pricing Summit this week. It was a bit of a sleeper, one where I wasn't too sure what to expect, but they had some very strong speakers (including a commanding keynote from Canoe Ventures CEO David Verklin) and a great bunch of client-side marketing practitioners in the room. I'd have blogged some of the sessions, but there was no WiFi and outlets were as scarce as Republican votes for Obama's stimulus bill.

Still, I can share the presentation I gave, covering some of the practical ground to complement the strategy discussed by fellow presenter Dean McRobie, Organic's Executive Director of Technology. I annotated my presentation so you'll be able to get the gist of it even without the voiceover. If you click through to SlideShare, you'll find the link to download it (along with adding me as a contact or, if it really reasonates, marking it as a favorite).

Lastly, while this presentation is meant to be more of a starting point rather than a Mashable-style bible to every link out there, I'd welcome your take on links and resources that are worth reviewing to include in future presentations, or that other readers of this blog might find useful. This is about user-generated content after all, and the biggest form of thanks I could receive if you learn something from this is to share something you've learned in return - and publicly at that, to benefit everyone.

Update: I tried the embedded version and the version on SlideShare, and the slides on SlideShare are generally more clear and easier to read, so I recommend going directly to http://www.slideshare.net/davidberkowitz/usergenerated-content-measurement-from-strategy-institutes-digital-media-measurement-pricing-summit .

User-Generated Content Measurement, from Strategy Institute's Digital Media Measurement & Pricing Summit

View more presentations from David Berkowitz. (tags: metrics trends)

Introduction

•Twitter Search: search.twitter.com

•Twist: twist.flaptor.com

Anecdotes

•Google Blog Search: blogsearch.google.com

Visualization

•Social Media Index: www.vitrue.com/smi

•Facebook Lexicon: www.facebook.com/lexicon

•Google Trends: www.google.com/trends 

•Twitter Tag Cloud: www.brownphp.com

•TagCrowd: www.tagcrowd.com

•New York Times Twitter Chatter: www.nytimes.com

Quantification

•Blogpulse: www.blogpulse.com

•Adonomics: www.adonomics.com

•TweetVolume: www.tweetvolume.com 

Personalizing Politics with Logobama

I know I'm not the first one to cover it, but I love Logobama, where people can take ownership of the iconic Obama logo. Truly anyone can make their own design...

Redefining Content, via Darren Herman

Dang, I have no clue how to classify this post, but somehow Consumer Generated Media fits. Darren Herman offers a wonderful slice of life on his blog, describing how he engaged in content creation with a couple adorable youngsters over New Year's weekend.

You should read the whole story. One excerpt:

According to Dictionary.com, content can be described as: something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts: a poetic form adequate to a poetic content. Since I’ve been wrapped up in reading about all the content creators on YouTube, MySpace, and any other content harvesting website/service, I neglectfully forget that in its’ rawest form, content is created offline. Who still creates content offline? Well, apparently there is a whole world that does… and these girls are the tip of the iceberg. It’s very easy to get wrapped up in the web world but we must also keep in mind that the entire world doesn’t exist online all the time… at least, not yet.

So it brings me back to consumer generated media - this isn't new for the internet age, even if it's only applied to online content. Blocks are always going to outsell Leapfrog toys.

As an aside, I'm no stranger to working with kids. As a camp counselor for eight summers, a substitute teacher for brief periods over several years, and an uncle for nearly sixteen years (now an uncle four times over), keeping up with the younguns is the hardest job there is, both mentally and physically. Give children the tools to create, and they're gods. It's why Darren was so awestruck over his experience.

We do need to keep that bigger picture view of content. Every budding Picasso, Beethoven, Einstein, Edison, and Franklin is dabbling in it, and while there will now almost always be some digital record of it (an online patent filing, a digital photo, an MP3 file), much of the true genius of creation happens offline, and we can't forget to keep tapping into that.

NY Magazine's Brilliant, Highbrow Game

I've been waiting for this - New York Magazine, one of my favorite reads, added an interactive game version of its approval matrix. I don't always agree with it - you can see an example to the left of them knocking Dogster down a peg (Dogster in Chief Ted Rheingold, I'm with you - Dogster should be all the way to the right).

Now, New York Mag has a daily game where you can plot 10 news and culture items on your own matrix, then see how you compare with everyone else. I've included screenshots of my own matrix first and then the group matrix; not surprisingly, my points are far more spread out (click any image for a larger view).

The game is potentially addictive. What would make it even more fun is if you could share your matrix and compare it to another user's, rather than just comparing it to the masses.