Mitch Joel's Blog: Six Pixels of Separation, page 345

What Kind Of Marketer Are You?

Are you a marketing professional or an advertising professional?

The majority of marketing professionals that I meet aren't really marketing professionals at all. The majority of them are advertising professionals. While it's easy to confuse the two, the systematic ghettoization of Social Media and how Digital Marketing gets rolled into the more general advertising initiatives are clear indications that we're not taking the opportunity to do something truly unique all that seriously at all. In the end, we're still being asked about the ROI of Digital Media like it's an advertising campaign. And, the only reason we're being asked about it is because there needs to be some sort of CYA (cover your a**) move on the brand side in case someone higher up in the brand food chain wants to know why the television advertising spend was cut on an Excel chart.

This is a dis-service to Digital Marketing.

We're not only doing a dis-service to Digital Marketing at this point, we're lumping it in with the advertising budget. Marketing professionals need to wake up and realize that this is a marketing platform unto itself, and not just another space to toss ads at. Yes, you can do some great kinds of advertising in the digital channels (display advertising, search engine marketing, etc...). No, I'm not diminishing the power, growth and importance of online advertising (it truly is something to behold), but the real opportunity here (and now) is to leverage this amazing platform as an engine of marketing that compliments the advertising campaigns and helps to tell a better brand narrative. 

Don't confuse Marketing and Advertising.

We tend to get lost in the values of yesterday and then measure it against a new channel and platform as if it's the same thing. Yes, a TV show that you can run an ad on is similar to a Facebook page where you can run an ad on. That is advertising and that can be done in the digital marketing channels, but we're hurting our brands if we don't start thinking about new ways to engage and connect.

Brands need to ask themselves these professional questions:

If we're already advertising, what else can we do with digital channels?

How do we build loyalty?

How different is the Web from mobile and tablets? (hint they're all very different!)

How do we get more people talking about what we sell?

How do we connect to the people who may be looking to buy what we're selling?

How do we open up our brand to make the things we sell more shareable and more findable?

How can we make the people from within our organization the true champions of our brand?

Can these digital channels make us smarter internally?

Can we use these channels as a business-to-business function as well?

How do we celebrate the customers who really are our true brand champions?

What would our world look like if we started thinking more about marketing instead of focusing only on advertising solution?

Are there partnerships for our brand to make with other brands?

Social is as social does.

There is a need for a constant reality check. Brands need to take a serious look in the mirror and ask themselves if their digital media efforts are being used as a form of advertising or - worse - marketing that is really just thinly veiled advertising. To this day, we have too many marketing professionals who think that the online channels best serve a younger more connected crowd or that it's a much cheaper way to blast a message anywhere and everywhere. Again, this isn't a marketing professional, this is an advertising professional way of thinking and doing.

Don't diminish what you do not fully understand.

Not only is this diminishing the marketing opportunities that are bountiful, it's actually diminishing the overall credibility of the brand. I like the idea of being a Marketing Reformer or a Marketing Theorist (and, they're fancy titles to boot!), but I'd much prefer to see more brands looking at these digital channels as the new frontier for marketing opportunities, instead of another channel for advertising.

What's your take?

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The Main Lesson That Digital Offers The World

True story...

I was making my way through the airport magazine shop and did my usual pit stop by the business book section. I'm usually not all that surprised by which books I find on the shelves. I'm a little bit of a business book nerd and I'm either eagerly awaiting something that is about to hit the streets, or - because of my newspaper and business columns - many book publishers send me advance copies (prior to publication date). To my surprise, there were three new business books that I was not aware of and that I wanted to grab. Just a few days prior to this, I was in a similar situation but this time it was in Frankfurt, Germany. I prefer business books from Europe because you can get the latest releases in paperback (which is much more convenient for both travel and occupying shelf space). I didn't buy any books. In both scenarios, I was travelling (and when I travel, I travel light). The books were all big, bulky and I found myself questioning the value of the content within the books against the pain and hassle of having to lug them around. At the same time, I have both the Amazon Kindle app and Apple's iBooks app on my iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air - all loaded to the gills with books that I am hoping to read.

The physical-ness was holding me back.

Almost 50 books that weigh nothing versus one or two that will suddenly fill my bag... was the purchase of those books necessary? Solution? I fired open my Kindle app and bought each and every book right there. Problem solved. No need to worry about carrying the books around, claiming them at customs, leaving them on a plane, forgetting them in my hotel room, leaving it in the office when I want to read it at home and more. Did I mention that the digital books are often significantly cheaper? Yes, this makes buying books that I used to be "on the fence" about a complete no-brainer.

Digital makes it simple.

You may be grumbling that it's not the same to read a book on an iPhone or iPad. You like the feel, heft and smell of a printed book. You think that I'm lamenting the death of print in favor of digital. This is not the point. Put all of that aside and think about the simplicity that digital brings (it can be books, movies, music, news, connectivity to friends, information at your fingertips and beyond). As I read more and more books - almost exclusively on digital devices - I've learned one major lesson: while I too prefer curling up with a good, physical book, I'll suffer some for the simplicity and ease that digital reading offers me. I like being able to have my books with me anywhere and everywhere. I love highlighting segments and being able to find them all in a simple way. I love reading a page or two of a book during a quick break, whereas before I would not have bothered to lug a book around with me everywhere. I love the fact that all of this literature is right here in my pocket. In fact, I like it so much that it outweighs the emotional struggle that I grapple with when it comes to letting go of print, or the fact that I can't let someone share the book.

It turns out that I am not alone.

The general complaint I hear is that people think it's much harder to read on an iPhone, Kindle or iPad than book ("it's just not the same!"). MediaPost published a very interesting article titled, E-Readers Read More, on September 30th, 2011. Here's the most telling part of the article: "While some lament the introduction of the e-Reader as a death knell for books, the opposite is true, says the report. First, those who have e-Readers do, in fact, read more. Overall, 16% of Americans read between 11 and 20 books a year with one in five reading 21 or more books in a year. But, among those who have an eReader, 32% read 11-20 books a year and over one-quarter read 21 or more books in an average year."

Digital readers buy more books. Digital readers read more books.

It's not a perfect world. For everything that digital brings, comes with it a level of change and discomfort (it happened to the music and news industry, it's happening to the film and TV industry and it's happening to just about every industry in between). While we can always be a market of one, it's important to think beyond our own values. Digital may not be panacea, but there are big lessons that businesses can learn by watching the adoption of e-readers and digital books instead of lamenting the days of yesterday.

It's important to know where we came from, but it's even more important to know where we are... and where we're going.

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The "I Like You" Myth

What does Social Media really mean to brands?

Brands will talk about listening. Brands will talk about using Social Media as an additional channel for their customer service. Brands will tell you that Social Media is all about a conversation. Let's put aside the brands that are outright lying about it all - the ones that are simply attempting to leverage Social Media as a free media channel to blast consumers with their messages. We can put those brands aside and look at the ones that are actually trying to do something different and engaging in Social Media. The question is this: are those brands really all that "social"?

The argument for brands and Social Media.

Personally, I'm less excited about the idea that brands can engage in a "conversation." The more sniffing around I do, the less I see conversations and the more I see moments of engagement. For the most part, they're not all that consistent and it's hard to tell how the story comes together as an observer (what was the beginning, middle and the end?). What seems obvious between the brand and a consumer (a disgruntled or happy one) is somewhat hard to follow if all you're doing is watching the back and forth take place. The brands that want to win in the Social Media space can start with a very simple tactic: make all of the interesting things that they do as shareable and as findable as possible. The brands that make their content as shareable and as findable as possible are the brands who will find and connect with the people who are actually interested in them. If the brand does a lot of things right, they can expect the outcome to be some nice engagement. If they really connect with consumers - and the consumers connect back to the brand and to one another - they may... just may... find a semblance of a conversation.

Most brands still do a lot of naval gazing.

Even the brands that we hold up as best case examples for engaging in Social Media still tend to have a massive case of narcissism going on. How often do you run into a Facebook page for a brand that you like and the main call to action is "like us on Facebook!" The lack of subtlety is painfully obvious. They want you (the consumer) to like them. If you (the consumer) would like to connect, share and exchange... you have to like them. Here's a novel idea: it's called, Social Media... Instead of consumers liking brands, why don't brands start liking consumers? I'm not just talking about an autofollow command. I'm talking about genuinely and authentically taking the time to not only follow them back, but to add value to their community... in their spaces.

For example... 

Wouldn't it be interesting to see how many brands have a Blog and then be able to see how often they respond to comments on their own Blog versus how often they engage in the comments section of the Blogs of their consumers and the industry that they serve? How active are they really in the community that they serve? We tend to applaud brands for having a Twitter account or a Facebook page as if the very act of being present should be enough for consumers. We give standing ovations to those who resolve customer service issues on Twitter and Facebook, but - in the end - isn't all of that really one-sided in favor of the brand?

True Social Media Marketing.

The future of brands won't be about ads on Facebook or responding to a crisis on Twitter. The true future of brands will be about how truly social they are. Being social isn't a one-way street (that is broadcasting and that is traditional media). The new, integrated brands that win will be the ones who are more active within the community than they are in their own spaces. If they're not, then they're just broadcasting and creating some engagement as a well-intentioned form of pandering to the new channels (and, it way more like advertising than marketing). It's important for brands to live what they truly stand for. Brands that are currently spending their days chasings, fans, friends, likes, follows and ratings are completely missing the point.

What do you think? Are brands active enough in their communities?

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On Weirdoes, The Long Tail, Seth Godin And You

Here Comes The Weirdoes

On Page 16 of the business book, We Are All Weird, by one of the world's foremost authorities on business, marketing and leadership, Seth Godin (best-selling author of Purple Cow, Linchpin, The Dip and countless others), it becomes abundantly clear that the business world as we know it is gone. This manifesto about the end of the mass market illustrates a fundamental and massive change in business that we have yet to begin to truly understand. "In the lifetime of a typical thirty-year-old American," writes Godin in We Are All Weird, "she has seen the market share (the number of eyeballs watching) of the big three TV networks go from 90 percent to less than 30 percent. In one generation. Pop record sales have gone from a million copies a week to just 43,000 in twenty years. More choice, less mass. Combine the impact of infinite information creation combined with the dissolution of truly mass media. The overlapping influence of these two trends makes it easy to see that a foundational principle at the core of our culture has just disappeared. Boom, it's gone."

Did that get your attention?

It may seem trite or easy for someone like Seth Godin to say these things. Along with being one of the biggest business Bloggers in the world, most people know him as an author and a thinker (and people like that tend to speak their minds having never really done the physical labor of growing a company). When you scratch beneath that surface, what you uncover is a passionate entrepreneur who is walking the talk. Along with selling one of his first companies, Yoyodyne, to Yahoo! In 1998, he has since gone on to launch Squidoo (which is ranked among the top 125 sites in the US by Quantcast) to his latest venture, The Domino Project, a new type of book publishing company that is powered by Amazon. The Domino Project has released nearly ten books in its first year (all of them best-sellers) and, We Are All Weird (which came out a couple of weeks ago) is Seth Godin's second for his own imprint (the first was called, Poke The Box, and it came out this past March). The message? Business isn't just moving fast, it is completely re-defining itself. When we once counted on the masses to buy our products, the future is about the many unique individuals that we all are.

In short, we live in a world where white bread just doesn't cut it anymore.

"Most companies are organized for the wrong battle," said Godin via Skype last week when asked how the mass market can possibly fail when mass media is still both pervasive and consumed by such a large segment of our population? (you can head the full audio conversation between Godin and me right here: SPOS #273 - Seth Godin Is Weird). "The argument I'm making is that Procter & Gamble and other mass marketers that need masses of people to buy their stuff are going to feel more pain and more pain because they're organized for the wrong battle in today's world. They're organized for 1975, which was their last best hope of reaching everyone with average products. Whether it's McDonald's, Starbucks, the public school system or the symphony orchestra, what we're seeing is that all of them are wrestling with this notion that human beings are tired of having to fit in a box and - when given the choice - they take that choice. That key sentence is completely overlooked by the people who are making money by marketing to the masses. What I'm trying to make clear to them is that everyday, it's going to get harder and harder."

Weirdoes... meet The Long Tail .

The premise of We Are All Weird dovetails beautifully with what Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine's editor-in-chief) dubbed, The Long Tail, in his seminal book of the same name in 2006. The idea here is that the many choices we now have in market, and the ability for an online retailer to offer a unlimited array of choices (because they're no longer limited by the shelf-space in a physical store), we're able to uncover that one hundred smaller products may cumulatively sell more than a top ten product on its own.

You are weird.

"The 100,000 people who buy books from The Domino Project are weird edge cases," continues Godin from his office just outside of New York City. "They are people who spend money to think about culture in a different way. They tend to be those who then lead culture and they are predominantly unreachable by an ad in Time Magazine or an ad on American Idol. These edge cases are the ones who define our culture going forward and advertisers are now in this position of playing catch-up, because they're not reachable with mass media. Businesses now have to figure out ways to work with these individuals and create things that these individuals want if they're going to get any of this newly-scarce commodity known as attention."

These weirdoes are becoming more and more immune to traditional mass media advertising...

...and they're no longer interested in mediocre products made for mediocre thinkers. The true challenge of We Are All Weird lies in understanding the paradigm shift that every person working on a business must begin to think about. It's nearly impossible for a business not to think about how to reach the masses and this, according to Godin, is exactly what needs to happen. It's time for businesses to figure out how weird their customers truly are and how weird they are willing to be to not only reach this new consumer with their messages, but to help them connect and to become that much more loyal.

Who knew that weird was so wonderful?

The above post is my twice-monthly column for the Montreal Gazette and Vancouver Sun newspapers called, New Business - Six Pixels of Separation . I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original versions online here:

Montreal Gazette - Consumers can't fit into a box.

Vancouver Sun - not yet published.

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Brand Like A Rock Star

Episode #274 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

Think about some of the most iconic bands in the history of rock n' roll. It can be anybody and everybody from U2 and the Grateful Dead to KISS and AC/DC. While the guitar riffs stick in our brains like gum on hot cement, there's something more powerful happening beneath the surface: these rock bands are all amazing brands. The true embodiment of a great brand can be defined by seeing the cult-like affection that raving fans have for their favorite bands. This concept pushed music industry veteran, Steve Jones, to write the book, Brand Like A Rock Star. The truth is that most brands probably don't emote the same kind of feelings that some of our most favorite rock bands give us, but there are some key lessons that every brand can learn from our favorite brands. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #274.

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Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #68

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another:

Textbooks of Tomorrow - Online Education. "Tablets are consumption devices that favor the content publisher. With the Kindle Fire , it became obvious to everyone that to make a viable tablet, you need to run a cloud and deliver content. Does that mean News Corp will buy RIM and Yahoo and launch the Fox tablet? Stranger things have happened. Here's an infographic from Online Education that looks at the trends in textbook publishing." (Alistair for Hugh).

Ricky Gervais: My First Week In Hollywood - The Wall Street Journal . " Ricky Gervais chimes in on why game shows are boring, and the culture shock of moving from the BBC and the UK to the West Coast. 'I got the limo to stop at a garage on the way and I got a family pack of some sort of Cheesy Wotsits. I ate these in time to get out to the red carpet. Jane pointed out that I now had orange hands and lips.' Inimitable." (Alistair for Mitch).

The reinvention of the night - The Times Literary Supplement . "Think Apple has changed society? (Or Google / Amazon / Facebook ?)... They've got nothing on... 'light'." (Hugh for Alistair).

Fire - Chris Espinosa . "Remember 'vertical integration'? When our cable companies were going to become content producers, and telephone/Internet companies started buying television stations and newspapers? Well vertical didn't (Mark I) work out all that well for the cable companies, but Apple figured out that owning the device ( iPod , then iPhone , then iPad ) and the store ( iTunes ), meant that you could take a slice out of every transaction. That's a much nicer business than sweating over guessing what people want to buy/watch/listen to, and then spending lots of money producing it. Amazon, though, just threw the gauntlet down, with the Kindle Fire - a cheap, lightweight tablet that is device + store as well. But Amazon is taking on more than Apple: they are taking on Google. The Silk browser built into the Fire actually washes all your web interactions through Amazon's servers, and caches everything. The benefit to the consumer is faster browsing. The benefit to Amazon is that they will know everything that you do on the Web. So, the Fire tablet ($200! - I'm tempted!) means Amazon controls: a) the device b) the store and c) your brain. We, truly, live in interesting times, watching the three web giants battling out our future." (Hugh for Mitch).

Steve Jobs And Bill Gates Together At D5 . "I'm still sad about the news that Steve Jobs died. I know he's been sick for a while, but there was something in my brain that thought, 'he'll make it through!' One of the best tweets I saw moments after his death came from Joshua Schachter (the founder of Delicious ). He tweeted: iSad. This video is from All Things Digital and it's a ninety-minute conversation between Job and Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates (one of the rare times they've shared a stage). People are trying to understand the impact that Jobs had on technology and business, but they're missing the big picture: Steve Jobs had a profound impact on our world. This conversation is one for the ages..." (Mitch for Alistair).

Innovation Starvation - World Policy Institute . "I'm not a huge fan of fiction, but Neal Stephenson 's Snow Crash remains one of my favorite books. Imagine my thrill and delight to find out that Stephenson recently published his thoughts on innovation and (maybe) where we've got it all wrong. You may think that a science fiction writer can't possibly have a true grasp on innovation in our society... you would be sorely wrong. Whether you agree with his thoughts or not, this is one piece with tons of provocations. The exact kind of provocations we need right now." (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it's your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

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alistair croll

all things digital

amazon

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bbc

bill gates

bitcurrent

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chris espinosa

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fox

gigaom

google

hugh mcguire

human 20

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youtube

The Integrity Of The System Is Up You

Write it only if you mean it.

On Twitter, Sally Hogshead (one of my most favorite people!) asked, "How well do you need to know someone before endorsing them on LinkedIn?" My tweet back was: "I'd say well enough to give an authentic endorsement. I was asked to give one by someone I never worked with. Huh?!?" What's the big deal? Why not just write a testimonial or endorsement for anyone who asks? It's simple, fast and easy to do it and nobody gets hurt.

Maybe...

If you don't have to look someone in the eyes or disrupt their day and you can simply whip off an email to your entire address asking for a testimonial or a recommendation, it removes a lot of courage. An email request simply isn't the same as doing it in person or calling to ask for something. Email has de-personalized a lot of our communication, and - in many instances - this is a very good thing, but not when it comes to recommendations and testimonials.

Why saying "no" is often the right thing to do.

I have think skin and I have a hard time saying "no" to anything, but I often ignore, delete or refuse to write a testimonial or recommendation unless I can be both sincere and authentic about it. Pushing this beyond recommendations and testimonials, I feel the same way about writing a review for a product and/or service. The thing is that the Internet has completely democratized publishing. It's free. Anybody can do it. Anybody can do it very fast. If we don't put any integrity into the words we write and simply toss recommendations and testimonials around like they're meaningless, guess what?

They become meaningless.

Much in the same way that I don't like Blog posts for the sake of Blog posts, any publishing of content that the person who is creating it wouldn't stand behind with full - one hundred percent - integrity diminishes the value of the entire Internet. There's also something about holding yourself up to that kind of higher standard that elevates both the quality of things you can find online while at the same giving you a personal "out" when someone you haven't spoken to in over a decade asks for a LinkedIn recommendation, even if you have never worked with them and the last time you saw them was your final year in High School.

It turns out that the integrity and quality of everything that you see online won't be the responsibility of traditional editors and the local intelligentsia.

It's going to be up to you, me and everybody we know. Yes, we have a fairly good infrastructure that - to date - has been fairly good at self-policing itself. But, it's a fragile relationship that can crack at any moment. You may think that a recommendation for someone on LinkedIn that you don't really know won't make all that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but if everybody thinks like that, how valuable/credible will those recommendations be? If you're writing them without thought or care, how much do you value the other ones that you come across? If you're constantly publishing content that you don't believe in or wouldn't stand behind, what does that say about the credibility of everything that everyone else is publishing online?

The integrity of the system is up to you. Are you ready (really ready) for that responsibility?

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sally hogshead

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Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011

Here's to the crazy ones...

Thanks for being one of craziest of the crazy ones...

#iSad.

(my thoughts on Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs, from August: Steve).

Tags:

apple

heres to the crazy ones

rip

steve jobs

The End Of Change. The End Of Unusual.

What if everything we see in our New Media world is not one of change? What if there is nothing unusual at all about what's going on in business today?

Think about it this way: many Digital Marketing agencies are proposing that the world has changed and that it's no longer business as usual (my hand is raised as I bow my head with guilt). We're often guilty of scaring clients into working with us because the Marketing of today is not the marketing they're "used" to doing (the world of yesterday). This inter-connected consumer is untethered by technology and has access to information and people like never before and this changes the fundamentals of marketing. It's only compounded by the fact that each and every one of us has a publishing/media platform that allows for us to express how we feel (about anything and everything) in text, images, audio and/or video to the world... for free. Brands used to pay a heavy fee for this type of access and now it has been completely democratized and intermediated because of technology.

Has Marketing changed forever?

What does a brand want? What does a brand really, really want? (had to throw a Spice Girls line in there). Yes, this will be over-simplistic, but let's bring it down to three main points:

Love. A brand wants to be loved by their consumers. When people love something, they buy more of it and they tell everyone they know about it. They become loyal and they become brand champions.

Greatness. A brand wants to create and sell a great experience that they can proud of. This is not just about the customers. This is about the real human beings who work, partner and connect with the brand. A brand may be an emotional connection but a brand is made up from the people who create it, sell it and market it.

Money. A great brand is a business. For some reason, people think it's heresy to make money. Brands are a function of business and business is about money. Making money... and lots of money. If you look at the best global brands, you will note that all of them are big money-makers too. A great brand is about money.

Nothing has changed.

The basic business fundamentals remain the same... or maybe not? Have you ever found yourself using the phrase, "kids today..."? Dissect that line: kids today are nothing like the way I was when I was growing up. But, when I was growing up was I anything like the generation of kids who walked before me? Are we - as Marketing Professionals - foolish enough to think that things were always the same way in the past half-century and that computers, connectivity and Social Media have suddenly changed everything? My guess is that if you talked to a Marketing professional from the eighties they would have told you that everything changed from the way things were done back in the seventies. My guess is that in five years marketing will look very different from marketing today.

That is not unusual.

We perceive things to be new, different and unusual. Maybe we are looking at things in a much too linear fashion? You know the saying, "the only constant is change"? If that's true, is it not safe say that there is nothing unusual about today? That nothing was ever one way and now it's another (new and/or different) way entirely? Instead of saying how the world has changed or how it's not longer business as usual, maybe we need to cowboy up a little bit here and simply say that everything is always changing and that everyday is actually business as usual? This isn't an esoteric debate about semantics... it's a new positioning. We didn't have World A and now World B... it is evolution and it doesn't stop. Perhaps some of the chasms are wider than others as things evolve, but saying that everything has changed and it's no longer business as usual seems a little... fake... and alarmist.

Constant iteration is the way it was... and the way it will always be. Change and the end of business as usual is a myth.

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Don't Blame Groupon

No loyalty? Don't like these bargain-hunting customers? Don't blame Groupon .

I have no desire for another daily deal on a pedicure, manicure, hair removal or a Lebanese Asian meal, but I am still interested in seeing what new businesses in my area are open and what they're offering. And, if the experience is great, I'm happy to continually be a loyal customer and tell everyone I know about it. Sadly, it appears that the merchants are beginning to revolt against Groupon and other daily deal sites. On October 1st, The New York Times published the article, Coupon Sites Are a Great Deal, but Not Always to Merchants, which further pushed the grumblings of merchants and the outcomes of taking part in a Groupon (or Groupon-like) experience, and what it has done to grow their business. If you believe The New York Times (and the countless other newspaper, magazine, TV reports and Blog posts lambasting of these services), you would think that Groupon is solely in the business of taking fifty-percent of the offer and running on to the next daily deal.

Newsflash: that is exactly what Groupon is doing... and it's not supposed to do much more.

Groupon has a database of customers that have proactively signed up to receive a daily deal in their local marketplace. Think about that: 365 offers a year. While that may seem staggering, take a look at your weekly flyers in the newspaper. How many coupons do you see there? How many people have proactively requested those? It's impossible to say that the public is experiencing coupon fatigue, because the public is blasted with coupons left, right and center and they have been for decades. 365 more coupons a year is not the tipping point towards fatigue, and all of the marketing research in the world will tell you that couponing works. If it didn't, Marketers would be changing their tactics. If customers were tired of Groupon-type offers, it's all a simple "unsubscribe" button to have oneself removed from receiving them.

A coupon is an introduction. A Groupon is an introduction.

Don't blame Groupon for the results, blame the local retailers. No one is putting a gun to any local merchant's head to make these deals. Merchants can choose when to do these deals, how much to offer and more. It's up to the merchants to build that relationship, and then the loyalty once a customer walks into the door. It's amazing to me that merchants actually complain about this. On the other side, I've heard countless stories from customers who go to these local merchants only to have a sub-par experience because the merchant is too busy grumbling about having to fulfill all of these rebates or is not happy with how few people have redeemed them. While I'm sure that Groupon and other daily deal sites make a lot of promises in selling these opportunities to retailers, it's still - one hundred percent - the retailers opportunity to win over some new customers and build loyalty. A coupon can't (and never will be able to) do that.

No one customer is alike?

While there are countless customers just looking for a quick bargain (and nothing more), retailers need to smarten up and wake-up to this reality (think of it as shrinkage). Wal-mart is well aware that those coming in to capitalize on a ridiculous offer for diapers may only be there for that one coupon and will never come back again. It's Wal-Mart's challenge and opportunity to "up the basket" not the coupon's. There are also people who will use a coupon, enjoy the experience and come back. So, while no two customers are alike, both of them are offering the retailer an opportunity to do more... to actually get them to come back and (if all goes well) to add another loyal customer to their business. Discounts don't lead to life-long customers who are now willing to pay full price... a great experience will do this.

People aren't that hard to please.

The New York Times' piece goes on to quote a new study by researchers at Boston University and Harvard that has explored thousands of daily deals (Daily Deals: Prediction, Social Diffusion, and Reputational Ramifications). "The researchers found that fans of daily deals were on average hard to please. After they ate at the restaurant or visited the spa, they went on Yelp and grumbled about it. This pulled down the average Yelp rating by as much as half a point." Is this Groupon or LivingSocial's fault or was this a failure of the retail experience? Push this notion even further: if a business were performing at its best, would it even need a Groupon service to spread the word? If a business were performing at it's best, wouldn't a Groupon experience only build on their reputation and quality? In the vast world of new media marketing experiences, maybe the focus needs to be more on delivering a great experience at the retail level instead of complaining about people redeeming coupons (or not) when the retailer was the one who chose to take part in the marketing initiative.

Groupon is simply a promotional tool. It's the actual experience of the customer that will build repeat visits and true loyalty, not a coupon or an offer.

The above posting is my twice-monthly column for The Huffington Post called, Media Hacker . I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original version online here:

The Huffington Post - Don't Blame Groupon .

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