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.

360i Uses Google to Predict American Idol's Winner

If you haven't checked out 360i's blog Digital Connections, now's a pretty good time to start. I'll dispel two possible myths before you do:

1. I'm not the 360i blogger. I'm one of them. You can read bios of the ten contributors and see for yourself.
2. It's not all about 360i. There are a lot of industry perspectives shared there that have nothing to do with 360i, even if all of the insight draws from the agency's experience.

Alright, now that all of that's cleared up, you should check out 360i's American Idol's predictions and historical review based on Google data. There's a very detailed piece in Mashable showing how Google data has played out for Idol over the past few years, and the charts are embedded via SlideShare below.

American Idol Search Trends

View more presentations from 360i.

Doing More With Less: You Can’t Run But You Can Hide

Today, I’m following fewer people on Twitter than I was a month ago, even after major events like SXSW and iMedia Breakthrough.

I’m friends with fewer people on Facebook, even though I’ve made many more connections.

My blog, cluttered as it may be, has far fewer links along the right-hand side than it did earlier this year, and the links that are there are far more likely to be current.

It’s all with the goal of trying to do more with less and focus on the objectives and ties that matter.

Facebook is perhaps my favorite case in point, as I’ve come around on the redesign in a big way. I couldn’t stand what they did at first, and I still in many ways would prefer to have the old layout back, where its algorithm picked which stories to highlight in my News Feed (the central update list on the homepage for registered users). It was far easier to make sense of what’s happening on the site, especially with over 1,000 “friends” there, when Facebook prioritized the updates that were mutually of interest to a number of my connections. Now, it’s a fire hose, spewing out everything.

Yet Facebook has one feature I absolutely love, and I wish Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and others would copy: the “hide” button. There are many people I want to be friends with on Facebook to stay in touch, see what events they’re going to, send birthday wishes, and that sort of thing. I’m fine giving these people access to my full profile, and once in awhile when I’m curious what they’re up to, I might want to view theirs. Yet I don’t need to hear from them on a daily basis. And if they post a few updates a day to the site, if not more, I really don’t need to be that close.

Enter the Hide button. In one click, they disappear from the News Feed, and their updates are gone for good. I can still see all the hidden posts, but now the hidden posts almost always outnumber the posts in my News Feed (especially because hidden posts are often from people who post excessively). I can alternatively hide updates from applications if I love the person but hate the app. That led to my recent Facebook update:

just took the Which Facebook Quiz Are You? quiz and found that he's the quiz that just LOOOOOOVES seeing his news feed overrun with Which ___ Are You quiz updates.

On Facebook, I’m feeling a greater sense of control. Hopefully that will get even easier on Twitter and other services too. On Twitter, there are people who I follow because I’m friends with them, or I want to be able to direct message them, but I don’t need all their updates. Increasingly, I’m choosing to break my ties with them, which creates other problems.

The Hide button, though, is elegant, efficient, and solves that information overload problem in the most user-friendly way I’ve seen – one that won’t harm any relationships in the process.

Update:

For further reading, see Jeremy Epstein's take, calling the hide button the "Facebook's line item veto."

Don't Google Google.com on Google Trends

I'm checking out the new Google Trends feature where you can compare sites. I heard this was supposed to launch Tuesday so they jumped the gun. There's great coverage in Search Engine Land and Mashable.

With the new feature, you can supposedly compare unique visitor estimates over time for various sites, making Google trends compete with Quantcast and Compete. Despite various screenshots posted, I can't see the unique traffic numbers for any site I try.

A bigger surprise is that you can't see any traffic estimates - even estimates! - for Google.com.

Click the image to enlarge further.

The Links You Need to Click

I love how Matt Dickman and others do their link roundups, and there are always quite a few I want to share, though it's so much easier to just post them to del.icio.us than actually get them on the blog (Andrew Raff used to have great link roundups on his blog before resorting to del.icio.us as well).

Here are a few notable links from the past several days:

* Babelgum: Here's another TV streaming service similar to Joost. At first it's easy to feel bad for it given how much PR Joost got and how little attention Babelgum received. Yet Babelgum has all the negatives of Joost (slow, requires a download, limited content selection) without the positives that Joost offers (many social features, fairly intuitive interface, and at least some content worth viewing). It's still early in the game for any of these sites, though I'm not convinced there'll be a need for either. All the TV networks are already offering some increasingly better experiences for streaming TV shows, and I (like everyone else) am eager to see how the NBC-Fox joint venture holds up. If you still want to try Babelgum after that rave review, download it here.

* Webware 100: Vote for your favorite web applications. For a good roundup of what's new on the web, read about the finalists in every category. You could easily kill a day here.

* I Google Myself. It's a play - about a gay porn star. Best title ever. Thanks, Manhattan Users Guide, one of the few newsletters I've subscribed to almost as long as eMarketer's. For a lighter take on Googling yourself, check out what happens when Marge Simpson does it.

* Ask.com: It's new. It's improved. It's not good enough to matter, but it gets a golf clap. And it probably gets the next column.

* Wikigroaning: Compare character counts of various topics and you'll find that there's major nerd bias at Wikipedia. Internet Dating beats Dating, and Lightsaber Combat beats Modern Warfare. I checked further and Lightsaber Combat even beats the article on War.

David Siegel on Web 3.0

There's some kind of blog karma in the world today.

In my MediaPost column today, I mentioned David Siegel's vision for the semantic web and Web 3.0. Today, he emailed me, "I update my blog once or twice a year, and today's the day. I'm launching my definition of Web 3.0."

Check out his full article at dsiegel.com.

Discovery: The Anti-Search

This column picks up from a post mentioned on this blog about two weeks back on how this is the Year of Discovery. The idea's fleshed out more in the MediaPost column below, which continues in the extended entry.

Discovery: The Anti-Search
By David Berkowitz

If some visions for the future of search are realized, then we'll be surfing a Web where search doesn't matter. The emphasis will instead shift to discovery.

Through discovery, when you read your favorite newspaper online, you're presented with a wealth of links from around the Web that should be of interest to you, including other articles, related books or products, or video clips, whether or not you'd expect them to be directly relevant. Amazon.com does this regularly, such as when it told me that customers who bought the Black & Decker 3.4 PS550B Handsaw also bought a 5-pound bag of Haribo Gummi Bears and the movie "Borat." It's through the power of discovery that a site like Home Depot could suggest, "After busting your butt with this handsaw, why don't you unwind with five pounds of Gummi Bears and a satire about a Kazakh journalist touring America?"

The better discovery gets, the less search should matter, at least in theory. Discovery is the lazy man's search, and I mean that in a positive way. If you can bring someone what they want "serendipitously" (really, it's done through sophisticated algorithms and targeting), then you save him the trouble of ever searching for it.

Here are four examples of how discovery plays a role online and who's making it happen:

Integrated Asset Digitization: The One Trend That Explains All Others

What's Integrated Asset Digitization, and why can it illuminate so much of what's going on with media and advertising right now?

I came to the topic in a roundabout way, at first contemplating how media buyers and planners will be affected by companies like Google trying to broker ads across all media from a single starting point. My gut tells me the media buying profession won't go away anytime soon, yet I kept turning back to Eric Schmidt's keynote at Web 2.0 and thinking about his case for technology to do a lot of multi-channel campaign optimization.

Ultimately, the column it spawned was far bigger than media buying, or Google, or any of us.

The column, originally published in MediaPost, starts below and continues in the extended entry.

The One Trend That Explains All Others
By David Berkowitz

What do all of Google’s acquisitions, the proliferation of social media, the long tail of search, and other search engine marketing developments have in common? They all connect to Integrated Asset Digitization, an emerging trend that encompasses several of the most significant issues marketers, publishers, agencies, and consumers will face for years to come.

As Google CEO Eric Schmidt hinted during his conversation with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Expo last week, Google aims to use its technology to optimize advertising across all media. Google’s Book Search, Docs & Spreadsheets, Picasa, Video/YouTube, and Base are just some of the services that empower consumers to either digitize assets or bring existing digital assets online. Media companies play a major role as well, digitizing TV, radio, out-of-home media, and print media -- both the content and the advertising. It’s the digitization coupled with Web-based access that makes integration possible.

In under 1,000 words it’s impossible to fully cover  just how Integrated Asset Digitization affects all of us, but here are five implications of the trend.

2007: Year of Discovery

Fine, I'm sold on it. I know I'm not the first to say it, but as someone who's been a huge cheerleader for the search space for years now, it feels a bit more like a confession.

A few cases in point:

1. The rumor mill says eBay acquires StumbleUpon. Read Pete Cashmore's 8 Reasons Why at Mashable. I still don't get why this site is so popular. TechCrunch cites comScore numbers that SU's up to 6 million pageviews a month.
2. Google's adding a discovery feature into its new toolbar to send you to recommended sites based on your search history.
3. Two words: Aggregate Knowledge. I met with them when I was out West and they're solving some very real issues with the web. Like, why do I still have such a hard time finding Mother's Day gifts no matter how hard I search? More on that another time. I'm looking forward to hearing what Paul Martino has to say at the Search Insider Summit next month.

More on the Year That Wasn't

The column this week reviewing search trends for the year could have gone on endlessly, and I had to keep cutting to get it down to a remotely readable length of under 1,000 words. Included below are some sections that were snipped from the final version. I've added a few headers and organized them in the rough order in which they would have beein included in the column to help make any sense of this.

Overall Impressions

Yahoo’s search term list seems the most honest, given its reflection of a celebrity-obsessed (and babe-obsessed) culture. Google’s is the most bizarre (Bebo tops MySpace), even more than the one from Lycos (#1 search term: poker), while MSN’s list included the most mentions of soccer players.

Another Take on Google Zeitgeist

Google Zeitgeist’s most prominent feature was labeled “top searches in 2006,” and it instantly raised eyebrows. Social network Bebo ranked as the number one term, followed by rival MySpace. I turned to Google Trends LINK, which expectedly showed searches for MySpace soaring way above Bebo searches.

I wrote Google, and a spokesperson promptly responded, “The reason for this is because the Google Zeitgeist is a regular look at an aggregation of the most popular and fastest-rising search queries as indicated by what people are typing in to their Google.com search box. Zeitgeist means ‘spirit of the times,’ and Google search queries, when seen in volume, tend to reflect what is collectively on our minds day in and day out. People use Google to search for what's new and interesting and top of mind.”

This opens the door to a range of questions. Why call the list “top searches in 2006” if they only reflect the “spirit” of 2006? How can Bebo be top of mind if it’s really far below the top of minds for most searchers? How is Metacafé CHECK STYLE top of mind over YouTube,  which doesn’t make the list?

I can’t help but think, when reading Google’s list, that 2006 was the lamest year ever.

Other Changes in the Year of Inaction

Publisher Judith Regan who was fired over a book that wasn’t released. Donald Rumsfeld left his post too, in a year where he did nothing, and the Democrats gained control of the legislature largely for doing nothing incredibly wrong.

More on Yahoo's Top 10

The celebrities in spots 1, 5, and 10 on the overall list (Britney, Paris, Lindsay) all were photographed baring their genitals in public; that may not be what got them on the list, but it didn’t hurt. Yahoo’s list may not be perfect. If Yahoo was presenting an unfiltered list, terms like Google and Yahoo and at least a couple sexual queries would have likely bumped Linsday off the charts. Yet for what it is, it’s refreshingly real.

The News That Matters

As I wrote this column on a plane to Las Vegas sitting next to Cara and I asked her what were the biggest news stories of the year, she rattled off an eclectic list spanning TomKat to Darfur, and then she sweetly added, “We moved in together.” That won’t show up in any top ten list, but it will be the story that will affect us more than any supposed chart-topper. Only later in the hotel room at 4:30am Eastern Standard Time did I realize how right she was.