Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

When You Can't Attend In-Person, Be There Digitally

2010-03-17T12:26:47Z

With the South by Southwest® Conference (SXSW) underway (and the Interactive portion already complete), a few Organics have been following the happenings on the web. Here are a few that have made an impression:

Agencies
Nora Cocan shares, "Rethink has an omnipresent but not intrusive expandable tab at the top with live coverage by their gang." Yet she's still waiting for something worthwhile to read.

Craig Ritchie is "really liking this simple homepage for Made By Many to introduce you to their people -- certainly the best way to sell any modern agency."

Friends and Colleagues on Twitter
Dan Sicko is following @jm3 as well as @takeitez of @140proofads

SXSW Speakers
We were also listening to the presenters. Host of Wine Library TV, @garyvee, was a keynote.

Brands
And of course there's the return of PepsiCo. They have 12 employees down in Austin dedicated to the social portal they call PepsiCo Zeitgeist.

Who are you tracking?

Thanks to Nora Cocan, Craig Ritchie and Dan Sicko for sharing their sources.
Sarah Jo Sautter

An Idea That Stuck

2010-03-16T12:13:32Z

The Chiquita banana sticker has long been iconic.

Dole and Del Monte always had stickers on their bananas but they didn't have the foresight to use them as form of pop-art expression like Chiquita did. The commemorative stickers Chiquita created for the 1980 Winter Olympics are a great example of this. Tapping into a huge sports event was standard stuff for beer and potato chips thirty years ago, but for a fruit company? It stood out in a big way.

According to Chiquita, the inspiration for all this came from what people did with the stickers after they ate the banana. Some clever mind in marketing decided the brand could travel far beyond the kitchen if they made the stickers fun or even collectibles. Kids would affix them to their school notebooks and toddlers to their foreheads.

Flash forward to 2010. The idea for this latest installment in the Chiquita sticker tradition was simple: give each banana a personality.

And they look great. Created by Art Director DJ Neff, most come in the form of graphic faces that take their design cues from Japanese anime or skateboard culture. Others come in the form of meaningless platitudes like "Be Your Own Banana." And you can also design your own custom stickers, (Mr. Potato Head-style) at EatAChiquita.com.

All in keeping with the tradition.

Dave Sylvestre

The Future of Gaming

2010-03-15T12:06:20Z

I stopped by the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week and saw some interesting things from the expo hall. Here are some of the highlights:

3-D Gaming
This was being demonstrated by numerous companies including Intel, Sony and Nvidia. I tried it out and it definitely seemed interesting, but I wasn't blown away yet. I think they will get better and better at this though and it has a lot of potential. It definitely seems like Avatar has spurred 3-D fever in the industry. The downside is this requires the investment in a 3-D enabled TV or monitor. It will be interesting to see if and when this comes to the web.

Motion-Recognition
With the Wii's success both Microsoft and Sony are releasing their own motion based games. I got to see the Sony motion controllers and camera (the "Sony Move") in action. It looked very similar to the Wii remote, though there were two of them and they were being used in tandem with a camera. There was a casual painting game that I saw in action. However, it looks like there were some other ones that were a bit more fun. I think Sony and Microsoft are going to be facing the same challenge that Nintendo has, which is having games that are more than just novelty casual games. Unfortunately Microsoft didn't have a demo of their project Natal that I was hoping to see.

Brain-Wave Scanning
I tried this out from a company called Neurosky. I saw this one demo where they had someone focusing their mind and it would cause a firework to go up in the air. The more you focused the higher it would go and after you blinked it would pop the firework.

Another game I saw compared two individuals' brainwaves. Each person's brainwave was indicated by a color. So if they thought about similar things, their brainwaves would become more in sync and the colors would match.

They had a bunch of other stuff (Virtual Reality, Eye Tracking, Streaming Console Games through the Internet, etc..) there as well, but this was all I could experience in the short hour I had.

Harpreet Sandhu

Foursquare, You Can Stalk Me If You Buy Me A Drink!

2010-03-12T14:08:31Z

image credit:MariSheibley [Flickr] It's been a great year for Foursquare, the location-based social network / real world game for your mobile. They are celebrating their first birthday this week, a year after they announced their existence at SXSW, with some fairly impressive stats for a start-up: * Over 500,000 users * Over 1,000,000 badges have been awarded * Over 1.4 million venues with 1200 offering specials * Over 15.5 million checkins (shattering a record this week) They have also announced some impressive partnerships, including a Starbucks loyalty program, a charity venture with Paypal and Microsoft, and a long overdue Google Maps mashup. But the biggest news this week is the launch of an analytics dashboard for participating businesses. The tool shows them in real-time who checked in, when they arrived, male-to-female ratio, and what times are peak hours to offer promotions. They are also offering a Staff page that allows employees to interact directly with customers, something that has been surprisingly lacking in the tool...

"Right now, there is not a lot of active interaction between people on Foursquare, let alone between businesses and people. It will be interesting to see if Foursquare starts to offer a deeper social CRM solution in the future. The next logical step after allowing business to see the data is to assist them in acting on it." - Russ Hopkinson

While businesses are sure to benefit, it leaves me wondering: will the "techno-stalking" create the usual privacy issues with Foursquare's user base? Will they rally for privacy over happy hour specials?

"Too often we look at things from the what's-been-taken-away-from-me angle and forget what-I-got-out-of-it. Tax is one and user data collection is another. We've been benefited from data collection and analysis in many applications that are not apparent." - Fang-Yu Lin

Fang points out an article put out by the Economist that describes how Google accomplished perhaps the world's best spellchecker for free, while Microsoft spent millions of dollars. If consumers were just aware of HOW these companies were using their data, they might be less reluctant to relinquish it. For Foursquare, who's audience is still skewed towards early adopters and big city gourmands, I don't see a huge backlash eminent. When the rewards are drink and food specials, badges and recognition, special events... it's a lot easier a sell than seemingly more accurate delivery of online ads. Thanks to Craig Ritchie for the link. Marta Strickland

Tight Deadline + Optimism = Noteworthy Ideas

2010-03-11T14:00:07Z

Here's proof that sometimes the best ideas come under pressure. We're not in the habit of tooting our own horn, but when The FWA took notice...well, read on.

Back in December, we were given the assignment to build four new "sitelets" that would reposition Ram Trucks, Dodge, Jeep® and Chrysler brands in time for the North American International Auto Show (less than a month away).

Lots of intense brainstorming, then partnering with small web and asset production partners and pulling some long hours to boot, it was an opportunity to do some good work. On a cold winter day in January, we launched four really sharp sites, which were featured in kiosks and digital displays at the Chrysler/Jeep/Dodge/RAM display at NAIAS.

And now, The FWA, known for their good taste in Internet, have taken notice of the RAM sitelet and awarded it with Site of the Day honors for March 11. Check it out.

Special thanks goes out to RED Interactive.

The two new entrants: the iPad and WP7S

2010-03-10T14:40:04Z

At the end of January, Apple announced another highly anticipated new device, while its rival in Redmond, Microsoft, has come out with a new version of its mobile UI. Named Windows Phone 7 Series, it's an interesting new take on a mobile UI, and while it's officially planned for release only at the end of this year, it's spurring a lot of conversation already.

Apple iPad 
Things were different ahead of the iPad's launch than they were back in 2007, prior to the launch of the first version of the iPhone. While many had thought that Apple may enter the mobile phone market even years before it actually happened, no one managed to quite predict what the device would be like. But with the iPad, predicting what the Apple tablet would look like before the company officially announced it was easier. The surprise element of the iPad was smaller than the wow effect that the iPhone caused.

The feeling after the launch was that the iPad didn't live up to the dreams and hopes of many. People who were waiting for something revolutionary woke up to see the new device as "just a big iPhone". However, the tablet also had its instant supporters: some claim it's the perfect computer for their mom, while others simply say that whatever the iPad lacks in its first incarnation (camera, for example) will make it to the next version.

I question the utility of the iPad, even for my mom, as one of her favorite things to do on a computer is to make Skype video calls. I also think she wouldn't respond too well to the on-screen keyboard. But let's keep in mind that the device hasn't started shipping yet, and very few people have handled it, let alone used it in any real-life scenario. The future of it will lie in the hands of app developers - maybe even more than it lies in the hands of the company's own designers.

For interaction designers, the iPad is an exciting new opportunity. Luke Wroblewski has written a number of terrific articles about the iPad, including a list of new multi-touch interactions and iPad design tools and resources. And Matt Gommel, a renowned iPhone developer, challenges a number of preconceptions about the tablet, including the "just a big iPhone" claim, in his blog. While we're waiting for the actual device (and an iPad version of OmniGraffle), let's get our tools and templates ready. Even if the iPad doesn't instantly appear as big of a game changer as the iPhone, it, together with the HP Slate and other, upcoming tablets, is still the beginning of a new kind of personal computing experience.

Windows Phone 7 Series
 Microsoft seems to have done what it hadn't really done before: taken a totally new, fresh approach to something it had already built. The new Phone 7 Series looks and acts totally different than previous versions of Windows Mobile, incl. version 6.5, which will now continue to live on as Windows Phone Classic. The 7 Series promises to be, finally, finger-friendly, complete with multitouch, and it looks significantly different than any of the competing touch-based mobile UIs.

The initial response to 7 Series seems to have been positive, though some point out that the bold new design may not work so well in practice. Luke Wroblewski has been exploring Microsoft's new UI as well, and written an excellent post about its information resolution vs. the iPhone. Edward Tufte responds to it here. While at first I find it quite easy to agree with Tufte's comment that "the WP7S layout and typography have a looseness found in commercial art and marketing, an inappropriate metaphor for a handheld information and communication device", I think it may be premature to call Microsoft's idea "inappropriate", when they're trying to redefine the mobile UI so drastically. Let's see how users react to it.

Karri Ojanen

Don't Be Afraid to Go Outside the Norm if You Know Your Audience

2010-03-09T13:00:29Z

I happened upon this site and at first glance thought it was a designer's portfolio site. Only after looking at the navigation was I aware that it was a in fact a hotel (and a hip one at that).

So a few reasons as to why I think it's an Exceptional Experience. For one the site is definitely out of the norm and well executed when it comes to visuals, audio, and the little nuances. Two (and here is where it gets debatable) is that its navigation is right for its clientele. I'm figuring the people who would want to stay here are going to be digitally savvy and not get lost without the traditional hotel navigation approach that is the norm for a majority of hotel sites. My parents would NOT stay here... But I sure would (not that I'm hip). The site feels more like an experience and less like a reservation tool. So that leads to the third reason. The site made me start questioning exactly "what is the right navigation" for a site and "what factors determine success and failure?" Well of course that leads down a path built on a ton of facts, logic, goals, objectives, and the such. I break it down to knowing your audience in the end.

I guess what I'm getting at is that the site successfully takes the approach -- and is not afraid to -- that its tangible existence is carried over to its digital form successfully. Now I just have to find a reason to get to Germany!

Casey Riggleman

Is Listening Enough?

2010-03-08T13:00:41Z

Since the recall of 12 vehicles beginning January 26, the volume of discussion in social media around Toyota has grown significantly and sentiment is trending extremely negative. This drop in sentiment was a leading indicator of sales which fell 8.7% YOY in February.

So far they have taken the appropriate steps with traditional PR and have web page addressing the recall, but I have not seen as much engagement in social media as I would have expected. There have been few tweets or facebook posts in response to the numerous comments. Toyota shut down their corporate blog "Open Road" several months ago. Although it was not getting much traffic, it would have been a great forum for discussion with customers right now.

AdAge recently reported that Toyota has established a social media response team consisting of "six to eight people monitoring the online conversation and responding at all times." Toyota is reaching out to advocates by retweeting and reposting their positive content.

In addition Toyota is partnering with Federated Media to host a branded channel called "Toyota Conversations" on TweetMeme. As TechCrunch noted, the feed looks mostly positive signaling that they might be pulling in the more "friendlier ones."

But is that enough to help flip the negative sentiment? Turning that negativity isn't something Toyota can do overnight. It's going to take time to regain that trust and loyalty. They are headed in the right direction by dedicating a full-time staff to respond. And Doug Frisbie, Toyota Motor Sales USA's national social media and marketing integration manager, seems to be the right guy heading it all up. He understands that listening to customers is key. In time, however, you need to take your engagement beyond listening. Here are some more ideas that could help regain that trust and bring back loyalty:

1. Take Customer Service to Twitter. Set up a Twitter customer service channel specifically to answer customer's questions about their vehicles

2. Utilize Your Dealers. Set up a Twitter channel where dealers can also join in and help promote the company's good faith in trying to repair the problems. Best Buy has done something similar with their Geek Squad Twelpforce.

3. Open the Dialogue. Allow customers to post feedback, questions or concerns on Toyota's Recall site. Toyota could engage in meaningful dialogue right on its own site.

We can see how all three could be seemingly scary for the brand. But engaging -- carefully and honestly -- is the only way to help shift that negative sentiment. How do you think Toyota should be engaging with customers right now?

Russ Hopinkson
Sarah Jo Sautter

What #hitsunami Taught Me About Twitter

2010-03-05T13:00:01Z

When I decided to bite the bullet and jump into the Twitter fray in earnest, I must admit it was for very self-centered reasons. It started out as an effort to gain knowledge. Frankly, I wanted to look learn more about this social media phenomenon that was exciting my coworkers and clients. With some time and experience, I got very excited about building my personal brand, gaining followers, being interesting to others. What I never really expected was the vast amount of information that is available to me in the home of little blue bird.

I only started to realize the true power (and probably the future) of twitter on Saturday during the surreal anticipation of a tsunami hitting the shores of Hawaii. Like many other folks on Saturday, I interrupted my day to check in on Hawaii. I did a quick check with CNN, MSNBC, and FOX NEWS to see how those folks in Waikiki were doing in anticipation of the 4:05pm (Eastern) arrival of a tsunami triggered by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Chile earlier in the day. I found myself sickly fascinated with the whole affair. Waiting, watching, hoping that it would come and hoping that it would not. The voyeur in me became very frustrated with the television news coverage and like any good attention deficit multitasking gal, I picked up my laptop and found myself on Twitter. In other words, I struck tsunami gold.

One glance at trending topics showed me that #hitsunami was the place to be. A quick search later and I was off to the races. There were 1000's of tweets per minute with real people sharing real stories about what they were experiencing in that moment. I found accurate and up to the minute reports of what was really happening, pictures of a nearly empty Hilo Bay, links to local news, and people in Hawaii connecting with each other. I also discovered Hawaiians sharing news of how to navigate a city whose main highways were closed, information on evacuation routes, and tweets from loved ones on the mainland. My favorite moment was when the entire #hitsunami twitter community realized that their tweets were powering CNN's television coverage. The validation that real people were not only reporting but also living and creating the news, in a whole new way energized everyone participating.

I have daily arguments with myself and others about the long-term value and future of Twitter. Why bother? It's a great resource! Do I care what this random selection of 'friends' say? What I've now realized is that my relationship with Twitter is a lot like the Hawaiian tsunami of 2010. Sometimes my enthusiasm is as empty as Hilo Bay was on Saturday, and sometimes it pours back in a slight three-foot wave. Twitter has not met my expectations. There, I said it.

However, I'm finding value that I personally never considered. Frankly, I never even imagined that a real time search engine powered by millions of real live people could even be possible, and now it is a reality. I am sure that reality will continue to shape us in ways that we cannot even imagine. Before Saturday, I couldn't imagine tuning into television news to watch a natural disaster in real time. But I did, just like millions of others, and was horrified by my disappointment that the tsunami of 2010 was a non-event.

In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter: @teenord.

Teresa Nord

FCUK Brings Something to the Party

2010-03-04T13:00:45Z

UK-based clothing brand FCUK is offering $250 worth of clothing to anyone who can successfully seduce a woman on ChatRoulette.

While many will look at this and see a distasteful stunt, the brand is doing a good job of connecting with its hard to influence target demographic. It's difficult to overstate the importance of a brand being social in an unobtrusive, relevant way. People are talking about the contest online and offline and that's precisely the type of conversation that moves merchandise.

There's a tendency today to simply push out a Facebook fan page and call it a day. This approach can be harmful for brands that don't have the content or creative tactics to support their presence. It may also be harmful for Facebook as it moves from a closed money losing startup to an open money making advertising platform.

If you want people to use their personal networks to promote your brand, you need to find a way to be relevant to the conversation. Social media strategy is not a formulae -- two parts Facebook one part Twitter -- it needs to be different for every brand.

Whether ChatRoulette will grow into something more than a meme is beside the point. It's hot now and FCUK is bringing something to the party.

Dan Neumann

Mourning a Friend Virtually and Truly

2010-03-03T19:00:08Z

Just 18 months ago, I celebrated my 20th high school reunion. It was very well attended relative to past classes. I attributed the good attendance to Facebook, which I argued made it easier for everyone one to, a priori, know what fellow classmates were doing and what they looked like.

Subsequently, I have maintained contact, through Facebook, a number of classmates. One whom I was friendly if not 'friends' with in high school, Michael Miller, began chronicling his bout with a brain tumor on Facebook. I must admit that I was swept up in his status updates and felt that I had grown closer to him over the past year by writing a wall posting and personal note or two. It particularly hit home with me for two reasons - one, that a person my age whom I knew was ill; second, because my stepmother, Judy Palnick, had suffered from a brain tumor and had undergone a similar treatment. Judy recovered and is doing well.

Though as I checked my Facebook account last evening, I found out that Michael had passed away through another classmate's status update. This, less than a week after his last status update. I went to Michael's profile and read the wall of condolence notes -- addressed as much to Mike as to his family and other mourners. It was as if he still lived on through his account; at least, that's what I and other well wishers had seemingly dreamt and hoped. If only it were true.

It makes me wonder: is social media making it easier for friends and family to grieve, pay their respect and keep the memory of a loved one alive?

Jonathan Cohen

Their So-Called Life

2010-03-03T13:36:29Z

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joewilcox

Fact and Fiction Behind the Fickle Teen Girl Demographic
When it comes to reaching teen girls online, traditional marketing efforts are as relevant as MySpace. They're not only a bundle of contradictions, they're still building their identities and moving among these different identities every day.

This target audience -- let's call her Caitlyn -- changes identities as often as she changes ringtones on her phone. At 13-years-old, Caitlyn has several different online identities: a scholastic identity, a church identity and others for volunteering, family time and, of course, her BFFs. So who's Caitlyn? She's all of these and more. How can you possibly craft long-term marketing campaigns around that? The situation gets more complicated: Three years from now, just when you thought you had her figured out, she turns 16 and the process starts all over again.

Our research into this fickle communications target has uncovered many insights.

For one, many marketers believe a teen girl is hyper-connected, that she's always online sharing everything -- including the good, bad and ugly about your company. But brands rarely enter teen girls' minds unless they are top fashion brands. Truth be told, they're much more preoccupied with their own social activities than marketing messages.

Teens are also believed to be early adopters of the latest technology tools. While this is true to a degree, teen girls are also insecure, so purchasing decisions don't always come down to the latest, greatest products. Caitlyn, for example, spent an hour in the Verizon store before deciding on a pink Razr instead of the Sony Ericsson W580i. Why? She trusts the Razr and she doesn't want people to think she's trying too hard to look cool.

Another fallacy is that teen girls need constant stimulation due to attention deficiencies. The assumption is they're almost all doing something else while they browse and that they leave sites they find too difficult to figure out. Yes, they multitask, but it's because they're so busy balancing homework and social lives; doing five things at once makes them feel they have a semblance of control.

And while many believe this generation is more socially concerned than any other generation, some teens are not ardent social activists. Many are not quite ready to abandon their fast-food lifestyle, so social posturing plays a small part in some teens' altruistic tendencies.

Lastly, it's widely believed that teen girls can filter information they find online, but this isn't always the case -- especially when it comes to information regarding mental, sexual and general health issues. She might end up on Yahoo Answers or WebMD, but Caitlyn is also guilty of Googling her health questions, which leaves her susceptible to misinformation.

Given the realities, here are some best practices for marketers:

1. See teen girls as social entrepreneurs and create a cause. While parents may no longer be the targets of teen rebellion, harmfully perceived ideas/organizations/ brands are. Teens want to make a difference and are susceptible to cause marketing because of their generation's innate altruistic sensibilities. The key is to incorporate charitable campaigns within the context of their day-to-day lives, so marketers can capitalize on teens that are genuinely interested in social issues and those posturing with personal gains in mind.

2. Unless you're Coach, Apple or Juicy, understand that as a brand, you're mostly irrelevant. When it comes to fashion, they're conscious of wanting to associate themselves with leading brands, but have little time for anyone else. If you don't help with teen girls' personal image, then they want to know, "What can you do for me?"

3. Plan to lose them and have a strategy to reclaim them. Rarely will you find loyalty with this target. You will lose them -- probably more than once. The trick is to find new strategies to bring them back.

4. Enable digital schizophrenia. We call this the "thousand points of light" approach to marketing. Choice leads to fragmentation and teen girls love to try new things, though not necessarily purchase them. The best marketers help facilitate this rapid form of marketing prototyping by offering teen girls free samples and online demonstrations to help them envision how the product fits into their busy lives. Just remember it's not about you, but what you're enabling the teens to do.

5. Don't forget mom and dad: Sometimes they're your real target audience. Sixty-three percent of teens say they go to parents/guardians for information on health and nutrition, according to the Scarborough Kids Internet Panel's Teen Health Perceptions Study.

Marita Scarfi

Editor's Note: This piece also appeared in Adweek.

Have You Met Tweetin' Timmy?

2010-03-02T18:50:55Z

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dollobserver

Meet Tweetin' Timmy. He's Chatty Kathy's oddball cousin. Kathy spends hours on the phone talking to her friends about the best way to shed the weight she's gained attending too many dinner parties. Timmy, on the other hand, simply gives you hourly Twitter updates about his mood and wants you all to know that he just hates the buildup on the lid of his bottle of dish soap. After all, he spent the day doing chores and recovering from the party you took him to last night where he didn't look any of your friends in the eye.

It has been said a million times before, so it only deserves one sentence: As digital communication becomes pervasive, people are cultivating their personalities online. What's worth asking, though, is what good is that when your online and IRL (that's "in real life" for the noobs) selves are total opposites?

Most of us who use Twitter have a person or three in our list of followers who loves to share the most mundane and obscure details of life. It's easy to draw assumptions about their personalities, but sometimes the peeps don't sync up with their Tweets. People who seem cold in daily interactions might surprise you by sharing it all on the Internet.

This new personality, Tweetin' Timmy, reflects the fact that social media are creating the newly attention-hungry in addition to serving the gossip-prone. A new generation of the digitally sociable are more comfortable online than IRL.

As we spend more time in the digital dimension, our online personas become more valid -- if you're a person who spends a lot of time on the internet, there's no discounting how you act on the internet. The catch-22 of this is that now, online personas can be less of a glimpse into who you might meet on that job interview or first date.

Perhaps a new part of personality has emerged. Is how well digital- and carbon-based activities match up an important new criterion for how people will be judged?

Nate Rogers

Read This and Get 50 Points

2010-03-01T13:45:11Z

Life Beyond Facebook
Carnegie-Mellon professor and game developer, Jesse Schell, offers an extremely insightful and thoughtful perspective on how Facebook and "reality-based" social platforms are going to affect our lives as consumers and marketers.

His conclusion, everything we do will be part of a game wherein we earn points toward rewards (social, virtual and real). Brush your teeth? +10 points! Walk to work? +100! Someone link syncs with your Tattoogle AdSense tattoo? +500!

He believes "...It's possible that they'll inspire us to be better people -- if the game systems are designed right."

Do you find yourself --- consciously or unconsciously -- altering your behavior based on virtual rewards?

Thanks to James Vreeland for the link.

Sam Cannon

Texting: The Exurbs Death Knell?

2010-02-26T13:07:15Z

Source: Ohio State University

A piece in the March issue of Wired took on the issue of 'texting-while-driving', turning the issue on its head by suggesting that instead of banning texting, we should simply drive less.

Now, we're talking. I'm of the opinion that the Internet has done less to change the world than we give it credit for (See "The Internet: More or Less Revolutionary than a TV Dinner" here). To reach revolutionary status, the Web and/or mobile must fundamentally change the way we live. Will the basic inability to text our thumbs off push commute times down? If it does, then we're really seeing where the mobile/web era is taking our lives.

Do We Love Commuting?
Is it really possible? Americans and their cultural hangers-on love to drive. Our culture (and tax code) is heavily stacked toward home ownership. Big houses and plots of land are considered birth rights of the middle class here. And to meet that, we would have to keep building outward from the urban cores for decades to come.

Won't those 30-, 45-, 6-, 90-minute commutes keep things under control? Not hardly. Commuting times have soared consistently since the 1950s and show no signs of stopping soon. And considering even the most entry level cars in 2010 are mobile palaces of HVAC, auto everything, entertainment and comfort -- commuting has become more of a positive respite from the outside world than a negative waste of time.

But people in 2010 also love to text. There's no question. And texting while driving is ridiculously dangerous. Most people I know have a "eureka" story with the phenomenon...a time when they were so lost in texting they nearly killed themselves in traffic, leading to a personal ban on such behavior in the car. Yet at stop lights, they text. In bumper-to-bumper, they text. And if it's really, really important...they text no matter what (despite nearly dying previously -- now that's love).

"I Don't Want a License, Dad"?
Perhaps it won't be my generation that starts seeing driving as a net negative to life...we're probably already too far in the "loving to drive" corner to give it up. But for the text crazy teens coming up now, I'd bet many would actually choose texting over driving if put to the choice. So perhaps after college, they will be drawn toward a lifestyle with less miles on the road all so they can keep avoiding actual conversation via awkward tiny keyboards.

Hard to tell. Maybe texting will simply vanish in the near future, replaced by something new. But love makes people nuts, and the text craze really doesn't make much "logical" sense to begin with. One thing is for sure, texting and driving cannot coexist happily. And that will lead to some kind of cultural shift.

Mike Hudson