Keep on Truckin'.

Smile for the camera and hold up your purchase, say a few words about how fantastic a product it is and how glad you are, you bought this fantastic product. You've just "Hauled" and become part of the latest retail trend. To "Haul" means to upload video logs onto YouTube about all your purchases, where you bought them, what you thought of the service and the experience of the product itself.

For a boy from the 'Gong, haulage was a thousand coal trucks rumbling up and down the escarpment creating potholes that would make a Volkswagen disappear. Time marches on and the web starts reusing words for its own purpose and to "Haul" now has connotations of a different kind but still involving products, if not on the back of a semi trailer.

To "Haul" is certainly instant feedback for suppliers and some like Sephora in the US have stepped up and installed video cameras at registers so clients can "Haul" their product before leaving the store. This works especially well if the inshore experience has been great and with staff knowing they will get instant feedback the onus on service has increased dramatically.

So the online forum has just turned Hollywood with vignettes of purchases or "unboxing" downloaded to YouTube by the 1000's. How far this will spread is anyone's guess but as everything in social media seems to expand to obscene numbers it's likely a store near you will be asking you to "Haul" your products very soon. For product oriented industries this means another avenue of advertising, albeit one they may not have any control over.

Like everything else in social media it will be interesting if companies try to hijack this process for their own benefit? Like the accommodation places that tried to put their own spin on sites such as Trip Advisor, companies will look to "Haul" their own products via plants, not the green variety but people that look like real consumers, whatever that look is. How will they be found out, via bad acting or the social media grapevine that self polices forums and the like?

I personally look forward to the cameras being installed in my favourite Bunnings hardware store, so that I can look into them and with all sincerity talk about my in store experience and then gush about the new book shelf I'm going to build with my new power tool. "Tim the Toolman" will have nothing on me and it will get me on TV or at least TouTube.

So what will be the real motive to "Haul" your purchase, a great experience or self aggrandisement? Will people take any opportunity to be caught on camera with an opinion or will this be the next level of direct consumer feed back?

"Mr Spielberg I'm ready for my close up".