“I’m a PC, and I’ve been turned into a stereotype,” says the John Hodgman lookalike at the start of Microsoft’s new Seinfeld-free commercials. Then they jump to all sorts of people saying “I’m a PC”.
The message is simple: PC users aren’t all nerdy puffy white guys in tweed suits — many different people use PCs and they leading interesting lives and do cool things with them. If the goal of Microsoft’s new ad campaign is to counter Apple’s “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads and rehabilitate Microsoft’s and Windows’ sagging image, these ads are doing a much better job than the Seinfeld/Gates” ads (here’s the first ad, here’s the longer follow-up) about nothing.
Welcome to the fourth installment in Joey’s Unofficial RubyFringe Guide to Toronto, a series of offbeat articles to acquaint attendees of the upcoming RubyFringe conference with Accordion City.
There’ve been three articles in the series so far:
When I visit a city that’s new to me, I try to get a sense of “the lay of the land”. What sort of areas are around where I’m staying? Which zones come alive at what times of the day? If I started walking in this direction, what sort of neighbourhood would I end up in? Where can I see some interesting stuff, and where will I end up running into something I could easily get at home? These are the sorts of questions that I’ll try to answer for Toronto in these “Lay of the Land” articles. In this article, I’ll look at what’s within a couple of blocks of the conference hotel.
What’s Near the Conference Hotel?
The map below covers the area that’s within about a ten-minute walk of RubyFringe’s conference hotel, the Metropolitan Toronto. The Metropolitan is represented by the red marker with the letter “A” (it’s very Hester Prynne, isnt it?). I’ve added some annotations to give you a general idea of the sorts of neighbourhoods that surround the Metropolitan.
A City of Neighbourhoods, A Pocket of Boring
Accordion City can best be described as a city of neighbourhoods put together like a patchwork quilt, each patch having its own character and offerings. This is good news: it makes life pretty interesting for the locals, and it should be doubly so if you’re visiting.
There’s bad news, I’m afraid: the neighbourhood in which the Metropolitan is located is a pocket of boring. How boring? So boring that this is the most interesting view on the street where the hotel is located:
The curved backside of New City Hall, as seen from a few paces south of the hotel.
Yup, the immediate area is that boring.
It’s a zone of nondescript office and hospital buildings surrounding Dundas Street, which used to be downtown Chinatown’s main drag back in the 1970s when I was a slip of a lad.
(I say downtown Chinatown because we’ve got three Chinatowns here. I’ll elaborate in a later article.)
Downtown Chinatown moved west towards Spadina Avenue, and the offices rushed in to fill the void. There are still remnants of the old Chinatown that still dot this part of Dundas, but for the real Chinatown action — the restaurants, the shops, the lively street stalls that will gladly sell you a big-ass, smelly-as-ass durian, the “holy crap, Blade Runner came true” Chinatown, you’ll have to walk about ten minutes westward.
The Metropolitan Hotel and Chinese Food
Lai Wah Heen Restaurant.
The Metropolitan Hotel is the biggest testament to the fact that the area was once the heart of downtown Chinatown. Most hotels in North America have a primary restaurant that serves your generic “North American” cuisine; the Metropolitan’s all about the Chinese food. Their main dining room, Lai Wah Heen, is a Chinese restaurant that serves some very good food — so good that it’s one of the few hotel restaurants where you’ll see at least as many locals as guests. I’ve been to a Chinese wedding reception in this hotel and it was some of the best wedding reception food I’ve tasted. I’m looking forward to the dim sum conference lunch scheduled for Sunday, July 20th.
Across the street from the Metropolitan is a building that looks like a hotel, but missing the hotel markings. That’s because it used to be the Colonnade Hotel, which used to be the Chinese hotel until the Metropolitan took over (it’s deVilla family tradition to have Chinese food for our wedding rehearsal dinners, and my sister’s was there). It’s now a University of Toronto student residence.
Just East of the Hotel – Yonge and Dundas: The Seething Pit of the Main Drag
Yonge Street, looking north towards the corner of Yonge and Dundas.
Yonge Street (pronounced “young”) is the city’s main north-south street; it divides Accordion City into its east and west halves. The corner of Yonge and Dundas — a very short walk east of the Metropolitan — is pretty much in the geographic centre of the downtown core. You should think of it as the local equivalent of New York City’s Times Square: major retail shopping, “grey market” electronics stores, billboards and lights, bored teenagers, tourists and pizza, pizza, pizza.
The Eaton Centre, as seen from across the street.
I’ve been to nerd conferences where I’ve wished that there was a computer store handy because I needed something like a cable or a USB key. That’s not going to be a problem at RubyFringe, as there’s both a Best Buy on the southwest corner of Yonge and Dundas and a Future Shop (a Canadian electronics/computer big-box store) on the northeast corner.
(There’s a far more interesting electronics store — Active Surplus — not too far from the hotel. I’ll cover it in a later article.)
If you go south on Yonge, you’ll hit the Eaton Centre, the major downtown shopping mall. It’s got the sort of shops you’d expect at a mall; the only surprise for American visitors is that Sears in Canada isn’t as ghetto as it is in the U.S. (that’s because Sears in Canada took over the Eaton’s chain of department stores after they went under).
Interior of the Eaton Centre.
It’s tempting to dismiss the Eaton Centre as just another shopping mall, but for a lot of Torontonians, it’s also one of the most-used and useful pedestrian routes in town. Spanning the distance between two subway stations on Toronto’s busiest line, the mall remains open even after its stores are closed (it closes when the subway closes), making it effectively a covered sidewalk for Yonge Street between Dundas and Queen Streets. (Urban planning nerds should see this article for more.)
Just South of the Hotel: Nathan Phillips Square: Wasn’t it Blown Up in Resident Evil 2?
Toronto’s City Hall.
You may have seen Toronto’s City Hall in Resident Evil 2, or perhaps you caught a glimpse of it in either the original series or Next Generation version of Star Trek. It’s architect Viljo Revell’s modernist masterpiece and one of the more distinctive features of our city. It’s worth the short walk over from the hotel, and if you’re into taking pictures, it makes a pretty good subject.
If you walk into City Hall’s lobby and turn to the right, you’ll see this:
It’s a wall mural made of thousands of nails. There’s a local tradition: take a penny and drop it into the mural, among the larger nails on the left or right side of the mural. It’s descend, pachinko-like, making a musical noise along the way. Here’s a video:
Just North of the Hotel: Nothing, Really
Well, I wouldn’t say nothing — there are a number of hospital buildings, including some world-class institutions of healing like “Sick Kids” (a.k.a. the Hospital for Sick Children, where Pablum was invented) and the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre.
The atrium at Sick Kids.
If you’re an architecture nerd, you might find a visit to the atrium of Sick Kids worth a visit — it’s so bright and airy that it’s easy to forget that you’re in a hospital. Having said that, my guess is that the last place you want to end up during your visit to Toronto is a hospital.
Toronto Bus Terminal.
The other place just north of the hotel is the Toronto Bus Terminal. It’s nowhere near as scuzzy as a lot of other big city bus terminals, but the usual parade of off-their-rockers and off-their-meds are often milling about.
Just this evening, while the Ginger Ninja and I were walking past the station, a large woman in a motorized wheelchair started a conversation with us.
“I gotta go to the hospital tomorrow,” she said, as she took a sip from her large frappucino. “I got the diabetes.”
“Sorry to hear that,” we said.
“It’s not funny! I’m goin’ fuckin’ blind from the goddamn diabetes!” She took another sip and poured on the speed, disappearing down the street to stew in her own juices, which I assume are made of high-fructose corn syrup and bad life choices.
There are a couple of conveniences to the north: a Starbucks and a convenience store, both at the corner of Dundas and Elizabeth, a block away from the hotel.
Next Time…
I’ll cover what’s west of the hotel, which is where things get interesting. For starters, there’s this:
Meghan Warby, who blogs at 2nd Floor Living Without a Yard and who works for PR firm Hill and Knowlton, invited some Toronto bloggers to the Air Canada Centre last Thursday to take part in Brew 2.0. It was an event hosted by Molson where they would showcase their beers and introduce a new brew in their lineup. I was among those Toronto bloggers invited, and not being the type of person to turn down an invitation for free beer, I accepted the invitation and brought the Ginger Ninja along as a fellow beer aficionado and my guest.
Adam Moffat, Manager of Marketing and Brand Public Relations for Molson
We were also introduced to some of the ingredients that went into Molson’s beers, such as the hops, which we were invited to smell and taste:
This was followed by quick a primer on beer, which included this family tree:
I was eager to sample Rickard’s White, which I’d never tried before. It’s a pretty nice white beer in the same vein as Hoegaarden’s. It has a creamier mouth feel than Hoegaarden, which I like, but Hoegaarden edges it out slightly in taste. Still, it’s probably easier to come by, and by following the recommendation of tossing in a slice of orange puts its flavour back in Hoegaarden’s league. I put away a couple of pints of the stuff before the tasting began.
Beer-Food Pairings
Once the introductions were complete, it was time for the main event, the beer-food pairings. While a lot of people are now familiar with the idea of pairing wines with foods whose flavours complement them, the idea of pairing food with complementary foods is still a new one to many. In this session, we were presented with a number of dishes matched with cocktail tumblers filled with matching beers. Since it was around dinnertime, I was really looking forward to this part of the evening.
Pairing 1: Molson Canadian and Chicken Skewers
The first food the waiters brought from the kitchen were these chicken skewers:
They were paired with Molson’s flagship beer, Molson Canadian.
(American readers who started drinking in the 1980s may think of Molson Golden as the flagship beer, since that’s what Molson promoted most in the U.S. for a long time. These days, they seem to be promoting Canadian as their primary beer in the U.S. as well.)
Canadian is a pretty standard “macro” beer, the sort of thing that just about every bar will carry. If you’re American, it’s about as common and findable in Canada as Bud or Miller Genuine Draft in the U.S.. I’d definitely pick Canadian over Bud and most U.S. “macro” beers any day.
Canadian is a pretty straightforward beer that I normally associate with burgers, wings and fries in sports bars that only carry macros. It works pretty well with a nice simple dish like the chicken skewers.
Pairing 2: Coors Light and Sliders
“Sliders” isn’t a term that’s in popular use here in Canada. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s used to refer to mini-hamburgers. The White Castle chain uses the term a lot.
These sliders are what we Canadians call “banquet burgers” — for my American readers, that’s just shorthand for burgers with bacon and cheese. They were quite tasty, but alas, they were paired with…Coors Light!
The only positive thing I can say about Coors Light is that it’s inoffensive — it at least doesn’t have that “off” taste that pervades Labatt’s Blue. Coors Light is, to borrow the Monty Python line, like making love in a canoe: it’s fucking close to water.
Still, Coors Light managed not to detract from the flavour of the delicious sliders. I switched to the extra tumbler of Canadian that one of the waiters had left on the table and the classic burger-and-beer pairing improved dramatically. A Creemore would’ve been my preferred pairing.
Pairing 3: Heineken and Sweet and Sour Fried Oysters
These were really tasty. I lucked out and got a double serving of these because the waiter left an extra dish of these at our table:
Heineken is my choice when I’m at a bar where only domestic macro beers are available. It’s got a little bit of “bite” and worked surprisingly well with the sweet and sour friend oysters.
Tis was one of my favourite combos. I wonder if The Clam Box carries Heineken…
Pairing 4: Veggie Tacos and Corona
Next up: veggie tacos. For the first time ever, I think I ate something that had too much sour cream! These might as well have been nachos and salsa.
Still, I couldn’t resist posing with the nachos…er, tacos:
Because tacos are Mexican, they were paired with a Mexican beer. Unfortunately, that Mexican beer was Corona, the Mexican answer to Labatt Blue. The only thing I can say in its favour is that it’s marginally better than Coors Light.
This was my least favourite of the pairings, but things were looking up.
Pairing 5: Rickard’s Red and Steak Skewers
Rickard’s Red, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, can be classified as a “red ale” (hence the name) or an “amber ale”. It’s a little richer than your typical macro beer, with a flavour that can be described as “bready” or “nutty”. It worked quite well with its paired food, steak skewers:
I think that Rickard’s Red would work well with ribs as well.
Pairing 6: Rickards White and Citrus Shrimp
Next on the menu were these tasty lime-infused grilled shrimp. I liked these a lot, and was quite thankful that the waiter left an extra dish of these at the table:
The citrus shrimp paired perfectly with Rickard’s White, especially when it had a slice of orange added. I can see the White going well with a lot of grilled seafood.
Pairing 7: Creemore Springs and Bratwurst
They saved the best for last! My favourite of all the beers made by Molson is Creemore Springs Premium Lager, known simply as “Creemore”. Creemore was created by the Creemore Springs microbrewery located in — naturally enough — Creemore Springs, Ontario, and it gained popularity through word of mouth rather than by advertising. Unlike most macro beers, it earned its popularity, one beer lover at a time. There was some concern when Molson bought out Creemore Springs Brewery in 2005, but as far as I can tell, the only result has been increased availability. They don’t seem to have messed with the recipe.
Creemore is an all-malt lager with a deep amber colouring and rich, malty, rye-bready flavour with a little bit of a citrus bite. It’s a lager for people who think of lagers a being a bit lame.
They paired it with the brats in the picture shown above, and it was a perfect match. This was another one of my favourite combos of the evening and ended the tasting session on a high note.
All in all, it was a great session. I had fun, and even learned a little bit about matching beer and food flavours. By way of saying thanks, I provided a little entertainment with you-know-what:
Pouring a Better Draught
After the tasting session, we were broken into two groups: one that toured Air Canada Centre’s mini brewery and one that saw a presentation on pouring the perfect draught. Afterwards, the groups would switch places. I was in the group that saw the presentation first.
Steve Reilly from Draught Prophets, a company that helps bars and places that serve draught beer serve it properly, made the presentation. He started with a slide of this guy:
…and went on explain ways to serve the best possible draught beer. He explained the difference in shelf life between pasteurized and unpasteurized draught beer:
(It doesn’t last as long, but the unpasteurized stuff tastes a little better, since it wasn’t heated.)
He talked about conditions that made draught beer better:
…and showed us this slide, which showed good vs. bad beer glasses:
In the photos above, the beer glasses on the left are the good ones; they’re clean. A clean glass gives a better head because it doesn’t have oils that interfere with its formation. The foam in a clean glass also creates “lacing” or stripes, as seen in the good glass in the pair of photos in the lower right-hand corner of the slide.
One way to keep your glasses clean and oil-free is not to touch their insides, which a lot of people do when carrying empty ones in threes or fours.
A Tour of the Brewery
After Steve’s presentation, we were taken on a tour of the brewery. That’s right, the Air Canada Centre has its own brewery, which produces some of the beer served at the adjacent bar, Lord Stanley’s Mug. It’s an impressive room, lined with steel and copper tanks:
It’s probably the best-smelling room in the building. Maybe that’s not so impressive considering that it’s a sports arena, but still, there’s nothing quite like the beautiful bready smell of beer brewing.
We were shown the path that ingredients take, from the ingredients storage area shown in the photo below, all the way to the tanks:
In addition to producing beer for Lord Stanley’s Mug, the mini-brewery is also a test kitchen for new beer recipes.
Introducing Kasteel Cru
The final part of the evening was devoted to showing some new Molson products. One was the Heineken mini-keg, while the other was that new label for Coors Light that turns blue when the beer is cold enough.
What interested me was Kasteel Cru, a new beer that was developed in the U.K. and soon to hit stores here. It’s made with champagne yeast, which as the name implies, is used to give champagne its bubbles. Kasteel Cru’s carbonation is more like champagne’s than beer’s, and its colouring is quite similar.
Taste fatigue — not to mention the fact that I’d helped myself to a few extra pints of Creemore — meant that I’m going to have to give Kasteel Cru another taste before passing judgement on it.
A Little Disclosure…
In addition to free beer and food, I was also given a coupon good for 12 free bottles of Molson beer and a Molson-branded USB key (1 GB capacity).
Finally…
I’d like to thank organizers Meghan Warby and Tonia Hammer for putting together this event, as well as Ian Douglass, Bryan Eagan, Steve Reilly for doing the presenting. It was also good chatting with Adam Moffat about beer and “park parties” in Sherwood Forest Park, an important element of any delightfully misspent youth in Toronto. I had a blast, and even learned a little something. Please feel free to invite me to more of these events!
If you want to attend this event, please visit the registration page. If you can’t attend the event, you can still make a donation using the registration page.
Canada’s digital future is at a crossroads, and our community has an historic opportunity to help protect and shape that future for the next generation.
Bell Canada’s bandwidth throttling of third party ISPs has thrust the political battle over Net Neutrality and related issues, which have raged for some time in the United States, onto the front-page in Canada. The stakes are high. Canada’s digital future must be shaped by citizens, entrepreneurs, Internet innovators and the free market. We will work together to prevent that future from being negotiated by a handful of lobbyists for monopolist carriers and major media conglomerates behind closed doors.
This forum will be introduced by Matt Thompson, campaign strategist for SavetheInternet.com and co-founder of the new Canadian coalition SaveOurNet.ca. Matt will sketch out the two opposing visions and plans for the future of Canada’s Internet and innovation economy. He’ll report back on his meeting last week with MP Charlie Angus on Parliament Hill, who just launched a private member’s bill to protect the open Internet and guarantee more competition, transparency and choice in Canada’s broadband space. He’ll also brief us on recent victories for the U.S. Net Neutrality campaign, and what they may mean for Canada.
Also on hand will be SaveOurNet.ca co-founder Steve Anderson, to report on the trajectory of Saving Our Net in Canada, his recent meetings with industry and public interest groups and highlight the newest additions to the SaveOurNet.ca Coalition.
Mark Kuznicki will serve as moderator and facilitate a town hall-style conversation on a number of key questions afterward, including:
What are the Toronto tech/web/media communities’ values, interests and principles regarding the future of the Open Internet?
How can we tap these shared values, interests and principles to protect openness, the common carrier principle and advocate for an improved broadband infrastructure for Canadians?
Who are the strategic partners we can bring together to move this agenda forward? How can we work together?
What does an effective made-in-Canada awareness and advocacy campaign look like? What resources are needed for it to be effective?
What actions can Toronto’s web/tech/media communities take to help? How do we mobilize similar communities across Canada?
Here’s my first full set of notes from the Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto conference — they’re from Fredrick Marckini’s keynote presentation on Tuesday. These were flesh out from notes I typed during the keynote; anything in quotes is a direct quote.
Enjoy!
Eternal Life
“Search is really boring.”
“You think you came here to learn about search — you are here to learn about eternal life.” Thanks to search engines, what you put online can live forever.
Consider Reebok’s 2003 Superbowl ad in which Terry Tate was hired by fictitious company “Felcher and Sons” to boost office productivity:
In a pre-internet world, it would have only been seen by people who watching Superbowl 2003 and who weren’t running to the bathroom or getting a snack. Thanks to search engines and YouTube (which is in essence a search engine for video), it’s been viewed an additional 10 million times.
(And yes, the name “Felcher and Sons” was probably chosen deliberately. If you don’t get the term, I suggest a visit to Urban Dictionary, with the caveat that the definition ain’t pretty. Not one bit.)
All media and ads lead people to search, and not only on traditional search engines. Not everyone uses only Google and Yahoo! for search.
When it comes to search results, the third page. Having search results past the third page is like “posting a billboard in the woods”
Where People Click on Google Results Pages
“We are living in Google’s world.” Google gets 92% of the pay per click in the U.S. and Canada.
What percentage of users click on the pay per click sections vs. the “natural results” section on Google results pages? We did the research, and here’s what we found:
72% of all clicks were in the natural results section; the remaining 28% were in the paid. Therefore search marketing must include SEO. Without doing the work to boost your rank in the natural search results, you’re “kissing using only your bottom lip”.
Search Keywords: The Ones You’re Thinking Of Aren’t the Ones Your Customers are Using
Consider this: it’s a “Housewarmer” candle, a product of the Yankee Candle company:
Naturally, when the Yankee Candle company wanted to buy keywords for Google search results, they bought “housewarmer”, because that’s the product’s name, and that’s probably how they refer to these candles inside the company.
However, when they checked their logs, they found that the search term that people were actually using to find them was “jar candle”.
Your customers might be using different language than you are!
Other examples:
What is “swirl marks” the number one search term for? Believe it or not, auto body shops. People doing this search were looking to have swirl marks removed from their cars.
Institutions that provide loans were buying keywords like “lending”. From their perspective, that’s the business they were in. The problem was that their customer, when doing searches, were searching using terms like “borrowing”, which is how a loans transaction looks from their point of view.
Places offering continuing education were buying the key phrase “prior learning” — in reference to college credit for life experience and on-the-job-training — and it was performing badly. Why? Because it’s jargon used within the field of continuing education but not by the general public.
The take-away: understand how your customers use language!
It uses keywords in its headline tags (headlines are important — search engines work on the assumption that web documents are written in a hierarchical format)
It uses keywords in the activated links
SEO is Not Dead
Some columnists say that SEO is dead. I don’t think so. I see SEO benefiting companies all the time.
In one particular case, I saw a travel company employ SEO — for a $900,000 investment, they experienced a 142% increase in traffic, which resulted in their going from $200 million in revenue when they started their SEO campaign to $500 million over a three-year period. In terms of profit, the client indicated that some months the generated as much $27 million in profit.
To borrow the Huey Lewis song line, “SEO is the heart of rock and roll, and the heart of rock and roll is still beating.” There is still good money to be made with good SEO fundamentals.
Offline Advertising and SEO
In Norway, a chain of car repair shops put out a massive TV ad campaign. Their competitor noticed that even though the TV ads weren’t for their company, they were still experiencing an increased number of visits to their site. The TV ads were driving people to search for car repair.
They decided to purchase 50 car repair-related keywords on Google so that when people searched for car repair, they’d show up in the pay per click section of the Google results page. The end result was that someone else’s TV ads were driving them straight to their online ads.
In the end, the competitor had to stop the Google AdWords campaign — not because of a cease-and-desist, but because they were overbooked for car repairs. Their Google AdWords campaign was a smashing success!
As for the company who ran the TV ads in the first place? They couldn’t be found on Google.
The question you should be asking yourself is: are your competitors using your offline ads to drive their online conversions? Research shows that 40% of people are driven online from offline sources when making a purchase. You need to connect offline ads to search!
Take Your Pay Per Click Campaigns Global Now
We had a client who’d maxed out their number of conversions available in the U.S., and they had anywhere from 3 to 20 competitors per keyword and a $632 cost-per-acquisition.
We did some research and found that in international markets, there were fewer competitors for the same keywords and lower costs per acquisition:
South Africa: $428
South America: $372
Europe: $222
Australia: $176
The take-away: Take pay per click campaigns global — that where you’re competitors aren’t!
Winning results with Google AdWords – Andrew Goodman
These days, “all search is meta-search” — that is, searches of searches. Those different types of search at the top of the Google results page: images, maps, local, news, video — they’re like tabs leading you to specialized searches. Thinking about search results in terms of text only is no longer enough.
Google has recently introduced Universal Search, featuring results blended from all these tabs. This opens up opportunities to occupy the entire first results page, with “web” links, as well as image, video and news links!
Case study: We had a client whom I’ll call “Skeptical Bob” who worked for a shampoo company who thought he’d maxed out the potential of the keywords he’d bought. He didn’t think that a new SEO team could “move the bar higher”.
We did some thinking. Nobody says “nice shampoo”; they say “nice hair”. We improved his results by doing two things:
Buying keywords related to hairstyles
They had all sorts of video (including one with Winona Ryder) — we put them on YouTube
The end result: more and higher-ranked search results for his keywords!
Search-Leveraged Public Relations
The Wall Street Journal has a daily circulation of 1 million [According to the Wall Street Journal fact sheet, that figure is 2 million — Joey]. The New York Times also has a daily circulation of 1 million [Wikipedia reports the same figure — Joey].
While Google’s News search gets 10.3 million views a month, and Yahoo! News get 33.7 million views per month [which puts it on par with the daily circulation of the New York Times — Joey].
Online news has changed journalism. Reporters have changed their behavior and follow online sources.
Google News presents a good PR opportunity since there are fewer competing items in its results. Unlike regular search results pages, results in Google News are listed in reverse chronological order — that is, newest items first. The entire opportunity in the News tab is 30 days, after which news results eventually migrate into the regular search results.
I had a client in the laptop repair business who was wondering if he should go with PPC or natural SEO. I told him he couldn’t afford either, but suggested that he use a news release focusing on the keyword phrase “laptop repair”. The resulting news release had an activated link and got viewed 250,000 times in the first few weeks and got conversions. Even though not a single reporter wrote an article based on that news release, the exercise was not a failure, because he got search engine results and customers!
The take-away: news release outcomes are now expressed in terms of search engine results. Optimize your news releases for search!
On the left side of the Long Tail, you have the hits. As you go farther right, you get more niche-y. What nobody thinks about is that hits today become part of the long tail tomorrow, and that time multiplies the impact of the Long Tail.
[Shows a picture of the band Maroon 5 in concert] I was at this band’s concert. Looking around, I thought “I’m the oldest guy here!”
How did I get here? I don’t listen to radio, and I haven’t been to a record store in years. I’d never even heard the name of the band. In spite of all that, I bought 15 of their songs and bought two tickets to their show. I’d become a customer of a brand I’d never even heard of!
How’d that happen? Thanks to collaborative filtering. If you’ve ever looked through Amazon’s site, you’ve seen collaborative filtering. It’s the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section in every product listing on their site.
Vertical search is one possible answer. While Google will return a wide array of results for the search term “seal”, iTunes search will return results about Seal the musician, and an Animal Planet search will return results about seals, as in the animals.
Many things we don’t think of as search engine actually are search engines. Amazon is a search engine for books. iTunes Store is a search engine for music. Flickr is a search engine for pictures. Where people search is going to be as important as how.
Will social search matter? Social software applications such as Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Last.fm, Digg, etc. all feature social search. Many blog entries have “Add us to your social bookmarks, please” links.
Yahoo! Answers is also a search engine of sorts. It features 90 million unique users who ask questions or post answers, and its answers are showing up in MSN search results and Google.
People are using search to inform their purchases. Shopping is a “visceral driver of commercial reccomndation systems”. Why do people use search for shopping?
Compressed time. There are so many demands on our times today.
We crave safety and security. People are “building cocoons and borders around their lives”.
The “tyranny of overwhelming choice”: there’s so much to choose from.
This presents a natural opportunity for social media and a challenge for brands. Brands will have to participate in their community and “give back” to receive attention. In the past, the brands who won told the best stories about themselves. In the future, the brands who win will be the ones whose customers tell the best stories about them.
People are already doing this: on Flickr, people post photos of their stuff, and of things they’ve bought. There’s a phenomenon called “unboxing” in which people show, either with photos or video, them opening the packaging of their new “toys”. And unboxings get viewed: one guy [shown below] posted an unboxing video of his brand new Playstation 3, and it got over half a million views!
The phenomenon of customers posting fan pictures and video isn’t limited only to the U.S.. Fans are also taking video ads and remixing them with their own soundtracks.
One way to turn your customers into evangelists is to invite customers to photograph and video your products, and give them a place to share them. Sheraton has done this: they’ve invited people to post videos of their stays, and the result was that they exceeded their sales targets.
PVRs, once only for “early adopters”, hit a tipping point when PVR capabilities became a cable box feature. PVRs are also search engines in disguise: they’re search engines for broadcast TV. They’re an example of search behaviour being adopted to the offline world.
Another trend: the decoupling of content from place. Consider the iPod: it’s not a cellphone, it’s nothing short of a revolution. When the iPhone hit the market, Google saw a surge in search traffic originating from iPhones — queries from iPhones exceeded queries from all other smartphones combined. “Not bad for 2% of the market!” As more cellphones get iPhone-like browser capabilities, watch for them to become mobile search engines.
There’s an increasing decoupling of content from platform. You’re no longer tethered to TV set if you want to watch TV. The Slingbox is an internet streaming device that lets you view your cable, satellite or PVR programs from any computer hooked up to broadband internet.
I predict:
In the next 3 to 5 years, fetaure films will be simulatenously released in theatres, on DVD and online.
80% of content digital by 2010.
“If it’s digital, then it’s searchable. Everyone will be a searcher from every device. That is your future”
The AEP model of engagement: Awareness leads to Engagement leads to Purchase. “The future of marketing is search-centric.”
Welcome to the fourth installment in Joey’s Unofficial RubyFringe Guide to Toronto, a series of offbeat articles to acquaint attendees of the upcoming 
![\"Family Tree of Beer\" slide](https://www.joeydevilla.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/family_tree_of_beer_slide.jpg "\\"Family Tree of Beer\\" slide")
![\"How to serve draught beer\" slide](https://www.joeydevilla.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/draught_beer_points_slide.jpg "\\"How to serve draught beer\\" slide")
![Copper kettle for \"Rickards Lauter Tun\" at the Air Canada Centre brewery](https://www.joeydevilla.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/rickards_lauter_tun_kettle.jpg "Copper kettle for \\"Rickards Lauter Tun\\" at the Air Canada Centre brewery")
