NET RESULTS:Social media sites are transforming how Americans prepare for Thanksgiving and Christmas, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON
CALIFORNIANS WERE considering pumpkin cheesecake while the midwest seemed to be longing for cheeseballs. The southern states fixated on cornbread stuffing while states east of the Mississippi pondered broccoli casseroles.
Thanks to an analysis of the most popular recipe searches by US region on Allrecipes.com, such curious information emerged in advance of the annual extended eat-and-shop-athon that was the Thanksgiving holiday last week in the US.
The New York Times helpfully highlighted such culinary preoccupations as the nation prepared to stuff itself on turkey, pumpkin pie and all the fixings.
According to Allrecipes.com, the day before Thanksgiving Day is its heaviest day of site traffic – up to a million page demands per hour at peak – and server capacity is designed to be able to handle the onslaught for that one day. Afterwards, usage doesn’t rise above 50 per cent of that capacity until Thanksgiving approaches the following year.
The breakdown of what the nation wants to know may seem little more than a frothy topic for a quiet holiday news week but actually such detail was causing marketers to salivate. Knowing where real-time regional micro-markets are for particular products brings fresh marketing opportunities.
Social media sites are also transforming the holiday period leading up to Christmas. Safeway, the giant supermarket chain, is using YouTube to post up video how-tos on vexing topics such as how to cook a turkey properly.
Meanwhile one of the largest turkey producers in the US, Butterball, expected to see demand for its helpline service shifting from the phone to its Twitter.com account.
Twitter was also in heavy use during the sales that follow the Thanksgiving holiday, traditionally the biggest shopping days in the US. Many store owners and managers were tweeting out sales specials to the people following them on Twitter.
Consumers were also busy tweeting information on the location of the best bargains in the stores.
The New York Times was again on top of the trend, noting that companies including JC Penney, Toys ‘R’ Us, Staples, Gap and Bloomingdales were all on Twitter. The paper quoted Greg Ahearn, senior vice-president of marketing and e-commerce (yes, that is his actual title) for Toys ‘R’ Us. Twitter is “one of the greatest emerging communication channels out there”, he said. “This is a way people can stay connected with the brand in a way they’ve never been able to before.”
Twitter has gone underground as well – literally. As I waited for a subway train below Market Street in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day, the overhead electronic notice boards listing trains occasionally broke to highlight that route and delay information was available on Twitter. Caltrain, the commuter train that runs down through the valley from San Francisco, also has a Twitter feed.
The subway notice board occasionally flashed up a website address for developers interested in writing their own applications for the web or mobile phones to link in to travel data for these commuter services.
What a contrast to the Dublin bike scheme operators, who disabled a handy iPhone application that let users of the service see the number of available bikes at various pick-up spots around the city. You’d think the intention would be to increase usage of a service, and make such data openly available to smart application developers.
As the lazy four-day holiday period flipped back into full speed ahead of work mode on Monday, the San Francisco Chronicle was highlighting the Valley’s changed view of Microsoft on the front page. The shift has been clear to any Valley watcher over the past decade.
Microsoft, based up in Washington state, has always been a Valley outsider even though it has some operations there, including an RD facility at which computing pioneer Gordon Bell is a fellow.
Microsoft used to be both feared and disliked – start-ups used to keep a wary eye on the software company, anxious that Microsoft would either spot them and introduce a competing product or service or try to buy them out. More established companies too were worried they would end up either having to compete with Microsoft’s marketing might, or have to partner a powerful company that could dictate the ground rules, or become a hostile acquisition.
The Valley pretty much erupted in a mass outbreak of schadenfreude when the company was whacked by the Justice Department’s anti-trust ruling against them a decade ago. Now, much of the bad vibe has vanished and the company is seen by many, especially smaller start-ups, as a benevolent partner, investor and developer.
Is that due to a reformed company post the anti-trust trial, or a less powerful company in a changed tech landscape in which it no longer dominates?
Now that’s one to keep the Valley’s chattering developers arguing over their lattes and breakfast bars.
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