Dissecting Thanksgiving

Hopefully everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend. So, what did you feast upon?

Thanks to the ability to monitor online trends, we can pick apart not only what we cooked (minute by minute, it turns out) but how the digital revolution we’re all experiencing gets played out on the most American of holidays. A look at the top 50 search terms on “how to make” for Thanksgiving food items and their patterns, state-by-state, is a blast. Take a look!

California appears to be one of the few places where folks need help mashing potatoes. “Deviled Eggs” in the top 10 search terms? Not in Illinois, where it scored “below average”, but it seems that right across the border in Indiana, folks are crazy for them. Most people must know what to do with their turkey, since it ranked 14th … unless you’re in Idaho, New Mexico or Nevada where it trended much higher. The South loves Sweet Potato Pie and Mac-n-Cheese; Westerners prefer Yams and Stuffing; Northerners searched for all things Cranberry; and the East Coasters were split between Apple Pie (Northeast) and Broccoli Casserole (Southeast).

Thanks to web analytics, we also know that cooks looked for pie recipes early Wednesday; followed by casserole and stuffing in the afternoon. Turns out people waited until about 3 p.m. on Thanksgiving day to figure out the gravy thing.

To accommodate a nation of procrastinators, sites like Allrecipes.com and epicurious.com build server capacity for the day before Thanksgiving. On Wednesday, Allrecipes.com handled about 1 million searches per hour. Recipe searches on Google doubled from 2007 – 2008. YouTube also saw a huge boost, where their “How To” section offers 3,800 videos on “how to roast a turkey” and another 3,700 on “how to cook a turkey” … which also has its regional divides amongst the fryers, the roasters, and the grillers.

For the first time, Butterball’s operators were answering questions on Twitter, as calls to their hotline are trending steadily downward.

Marketers love this kind of information. When nearly everything is searched for and researched online, there’s little guessing to be done in terms of consumer behavior. So, if you’re not engaging online, time to get more serious! Especially for those of you with weight management products … ‘tis the season!