Free social-media advice for Taco Bell

After spending all day talking social media at the wOOt conference, it struck me to pass along this bit of advice to Taco Bell. it's my 2 cents, so take it or leave it.

Great concept but tired messagingIf you’ve been to Taco Bell, you know they have these short sayings on their hot sauce packets. Examples include “Will you scratch my back?”, “Ahhh ... we meet again” and “Help! I can’t tell where I am. It’s dark and I can hear laughing.”

They’re a great idea, in concept, because they're a mix of silly and stoopid, and leave a playful branding message that has a lasting impressions. But here’s the deal: These quotes haven’t changed much since launching five years ago. And it seems like the last 10 times my family has had Taco Bell, we’ve received the same three or four messages. We’re bored.

So, here’s my idea for Taco Bell to revive a tired concept: Ask customers to submit their ideas for new quotes to TacoBell.com and give the populace a vote in the winners. Everyone submitting a valid quote could get a something like a free taco (which they're giving away anyway) and winners could get something like free tacos for a year.

Taco Bell would need to screen the submissions to avoid crude (but funny) stuff like this
but too many submissions seems like a good problem for a business to have.

All they’d need to do to kickstart this thing would be to create the web presence, then toss out the challenge to the 16,000+ followers of @TacoBell. Zero marketing cost.

Just a thought.

Digging the Toyota mess through crowdsourcing

Digg will host a crowdsourced interview today with Jim Lentz, president and CEO of Toyota Motor Sales USA.

Toyota bigwig Jim Lentz will answer questions from the Digg community at 2 p.m. Pacific time todayThis is part of a regular Digg Dialogg series so the concept isn't new. But it's been awhile since the interviewee has been someone currently sitting in a boiling pot of water (I think you have to go back to this Timothy Geithner interview).

What's great about the Dialogg concept isn't just that the crowd is asking the questions but that the questions are 1) made public beforehand and 2) the Digg community votes on which ones get asked. Some of the questions are better than others, but there's some detail to some that wouldn't normally surface in a typical media interview.

I can't tell whether a professional/traditional journalist will be asking the questions, as is sometimes the case, but in these types of hot-button interviews on extremely important issues, I think it's an advantage. It's one thing to have the crowd submit questions, which builds depth and diversity, but a professional interviewer will be more skilled at calling B.S. on some answers and also asked pointed questions of his/her own.

Either way, it's an example of the continued evolution in media where the crowd gets more control for the benefit of all.

Pearltrees visualization tools add power to search and discovery

Nearly four years ago, I spent a week at a multimedia bootcamp at UC Berkeley put on by the Knight Digital Media Center. It was a wonderful experience, not only because of the practical skills I picked up but also because my team was assigned to interview Jeff Heer, then a graduate student studying data visualization. Our finished multimedia package was rough around the edges, but had some great visuals and detail on Heer's quest to help people understand the power of social relationships on the distribution of information.

I immediately thought of Heer when I started poking around with a new social-visualization tool called Pearltrees that's currently in beta. It's a completely different way of organizing content, a mix of old-school bookmarking and drag-and-drop organizing to fit the new, flexible world of Web 2.0 and 3.0. Here's a snapshot of content dealing with Android software.

As we create more and more data, search becomes more and more important. Textual search is only the beginning -- visualizing online searches are becoming more important because social connections behind the data can add new layers of trust and relevance. That's because you might be more likely to trust information created or vetted by people you know rather than the masses. Google gets this, and is just starting to introduce social search at the bottom of its results pages. As time goes on and the quality of searches is refined, we'll see that presentation gain more prominence, and perhaps offered as an alternative UI. 

In the meantime, it's fun to tinker around with tools like Pearltrees that place a sense of "discovery" front and center. It's hard to describe the concept with words, so I've attached a lengthy but detailed video to guide you through the possibilities. But, knowing 30-minute videos are too long for most people, I'd encourage you to just jump in and start playing.