If you are a small business, what do you do after you run the daily deal? Or how do you run a daily deal-like promotion “safely,” without hurting your brand? These are the questions a number of start-ups have posed…
Yipit's presentation on Group Buying analytics this morning highlighted a high-performing daily deal from a Canadian butcher. Quite accidentally, I stumbled on some customers who didn't like how the business had treated them and started slamming The Butchers on Yonge…
In two short years, LivingSocial has blossomed from a Facebook application development shop into a leading group buying platform in 230 markets and 12 countries. But the question du jour in deal a day isn't "what have you done?" but…
Events and “recreational discovery” are being transformed by social media, as evidenced by the development of Eventbrite, a new ticketing platform, and Goby, which helps consumers find things to do, including travel. Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz noted that his company,…
Liveblogging the social events panel at ILM East. Kevin Hartz, the CEO and founder of Eventbrite, is speaking on how the ticket-selling service is riding social media to about $500,000,000 in ticket sales this year. Hartz starts with a slide…
Facebook is less about business development or forming partnerships than establishing itself as an identity platform, notes Maz Shirafi, Sr. Manager of Monetization, who was speaking at BIA/Kelsey’s ILM East conference this week in Boston. Sharafi also noted that Facebook’s…
Eventbrite Director of Marketing Tamara Mendelsohn told us at SxSW Interactive that because "events are inherently social," the online events organizer and ticketing exchange in uniquely positioned to leverage social media to allow literally anyone to post and share events. But Mendelsohn's…
Jordan Muela pointed out a new Google Social Search feature showing up in the SERPs. As you can see from the screenshot Google appears to be asking searchers to link their Twitter profile to their Google profile by encouraging discovery…
It's hard work distilling 20,000 people, hundreds of sessions, droves of start-ups, seemingly endless parties and even a Mike Tyson cameo into a cliffs notes recap of SxSW Interactive. Not that anyone is shedding any tears for me. America loves lists…
Around here, we're all busy gearing up for our big ILM East next week in Boston. There's a great lineup of speakers including lots of mobile, socia, and group buying action. In the spirit of Google's famous "dogfooding," we're trying to…
James Moran of the daily deal aggregator Yipit presented this slide at SXSW on Monday and I thought it would be of interest to post it here:
SCVNGR “chief ninja” Seth Priebatsch and Gowalla CEO Josh Williams both employ game mechanics to elevate their location-based services, and both believe that gaming’s inherent fun factor can motivate more important behaviors, including social good. But that’s where the similarities…
Facebook just took the next step in its Facebook Deals service by announcing that it plans to test Groupon-like offers. The service will get started in San Francisco, San Diego, Dallas, Atlanta, and Austin, Texas, the company said last week in a statement. It…
Last year, a deal-a-day panel at SxSW Interactive might have been relegated to a satellite campus (read: off-the-beaten-path Austin hotel). Two years ago, it may not have existed at all. But in 2011, group buying is a $1.2 billion market…
In the "Field of Dreams" “if you build it, they will come" spirit, when Marissa Mayer takes the stage, thousands are sure to follow. Google's VP devoted much of her keynote at SxSW Interactive to evolutions in Google’s mobile mapping…
I first came across DemandForce because it was popping up in Google Maps a couple of years ago. DemandForce was started in 2003 by Rick Berry and Sam Osman to help dentists and auto shops market themselves online. Today, with more than 7,000 clients across a variety of local service verticals, it is a fast-growing local SMB software service company located in the Bay Area. I caught up with Bonnie Wang, DF’s manager of professional services, at SMX West today to get an idea of DemandForce Connect For Facebook, its recently launched social media service.
DF has three apps that help customers generate more demand from Facebook. People can request an appointment via the SMB’s Facebook page with DF’s Easy Scheduler app. Once a customer makes an appointment, it shows up in the SMB’s DemandForce dashboard and will show the source of the lead. Currently more than 1,000 DF clients are using this app. According to Wang, those businesses that are active on Facebook are seeing the greatest use of the app by customers.
Last week, the latest spree of entrants forayed into the deal-a-day arena, with AT&T and The New York Times announcing group buying platforms that appear to be almost identical to those popularized by Groupon and LivingSocial. The most interesting of the…
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that AT&T Interactive will join the growing list of directory companies to launch a daily deal site. AT&T Interactive CEO David Krantz told The Journal that he believes AT&T could be "fast followers"…
Questions and comments poured into our Social Local Media webinar last week, and true to our word, we're addressing every last one of them. This time around, let's crunch some numbers. What key data points are we using to frame our…
On the blog this week, Mike B. noted that Google Hotpot had added new social features to Google Maps for Android, other platform to follow. Hotpot users can now tweet their GOOG Places ratings and reviews on Twitter, or ping…
