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Media Transparent

Media is the New Marketing

The New Hyperlocal Business Opportunities that Groupon spawnsAugust 26

Business Insider’s Evan Britton’s article How Entrepreneurs Can Cash-In On The Groupon Fad provides a glimpse of the future of hyperlocal marketing by listing five new opportunities inspired by Groupon. I’ll list these methods and expand on Mr. Britton’s list with concrete examples:

1. Create a blog.

The blog platform, particularly Wordpress, is ideal for creating a customized website that can be leveraged as a community media resource to display and distribute daily deals. Only two industries create “hyperlocal” blogs – new journalism and real estate. New media companies like Patch.com and Examiner.com recruit locals to report on their community. Real estate professionals are beginning to understand that it’s more important to engage their community by providing community media and commentary instead of pushing real estate talk to an audience who is not listening to, or even cringing at their message.

2. Build a deals directory

Any web service that curates and organizes information can be called a directory. The pr

Social media is evolving into a soundbite streamAugust 21

Twitter started it…tweets replaced long form commentary. Messaging efficiency trumped the blog discourse. Now with Facebook Places charging out of the gate, we’ll soon see that the simple 10-second “check-in” process now becomes a value statement. In aggregate, 100 check-ins at a venue becomes “buzz” currency. It will impact restaurants, conferences, ski resorts, hotels, retailers… and make them compelling and attractive to the public. Beyond the act of the check-in, a series of simple Tweet-length “tips” may be as credible as a NY Times restaurant review.

That’s because crowdsourcing always requires critical mass adoption to be perceived as statistically relevant. A 4-star restaurant with 100 Yelp reviews is deemed far more credible than a 5-star restaurant with 3 reviews. The inevitable massive adoption of Facebook Places / Foursquare and soundbite “tips” will turn paragraph length Yelp and Trip Advisor reviews into heavy reading. Soundbites are as credible as lengthy reviews simply because there are more of them and they are up-to-date.

All local

Groupon + Gap = tipping point for coupon adoption in AmericaAugust 20

Groupon’s nationwide rollout of $25 for $50 worth of Gap merchandise got a lot of mainstream media airplay and sold 441,000 Groupons, netting $11 million. The net effect is the mainstream buzz that introduces Groupon to America. The “daily deal” is becoming institutionalized as the advertising medium most compatible with the Great Recession.

Here is what the Groupon + Gap deal will spark:

• More national deals. Think Office Depot, Best Buy, Home Depot, or Apple Stores where the sale of higher ticket items over $100 can justify a $25 for $50 deal. Groupon and other coupon players can layer on national deals on a limited basis so they don’t alienate their local business client base.
• National and regional retail chains now have a medium for brand revival. Can a loss leader Groupon strategy create enough traffic to generate supplementary sales, or even stave off seasonal financial problems from the one time coupon receipts?
• Shopping malls and local business associations can now systematically round robin “daily deals” among their stores in order to deliver foot traffic.
• The sp

Facebook Places – the ocean where all tributaries flowAugust 19

The long awaited announcement of Facebook Places this afternoon sure was anticlimactic. The “Check-in” is now institutionalized, and the masses of 500,000,000+ Facebook members can now enjoy what 2 million Foursquare members have been doing. But that was what was expected; the gorilla just tossed its hat into the ring.

The main function Facebook brings to the party is ubiquity:

Ever gone to a show, only to find out afterward that your friends were there too? With Places, you can discover moments when you and your friends are at the same place at the same time. (from Facebook blog)

“Checking in” has essentially been a kind of mindless activity, but its social context makes it meaningful within a massive network, like college students.

The locational media – Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla, perhaps even Twitter – now become relegated to being the worker bees developing new applications

Location + Discount Coupon = Party AppAugust 14

Mashable unveils startup GroupTabs, which leverages group check-ins to “tip” a deal like half price drinks inside a business. The application is what was once called a “mashup” by using Foursquare and Twitter APIs to check-in and adding the tipping coupon feature of Groupon.

The business concept works because it feeds into the social need for the meetup and the financial incentive of a discount. Merchants win by activating viral marketing campaigns that brings customers who know each other into their business (and come back because they had a good time). It’s a fun app.

GroupTabs can monetize each merchant campaign conceivably with a set fee per checkin. Each single campaign won’t cost the merchant very much so the service will be easy to sell, and the business model seems like it will scale across bars and nightclubs across America. The aggregate revenue model is powerful because campaigns are repeatable, just like a subscription if you can imagine bars running a Tuesday Tipping night special.  I think it works.

GroupTabs portends three trends: