Nokia Maps Update Brings Groupon Deals, Advanced Route Planning

By Bonnie Cha at AllThingsD:
Nokia Maps is giving wheelin’ and dealin’ a new meaning.
Today, the cellphone manufacturer released an update to its mapping application for Windows Phone devices that adds daily Groupon deals and advanced route planning to the mix.

Now, whenever you perform a search within Nokia Maps, the app will display relevant Groupon Now! deals in your area along with your search results.

All deals are identified with a green G next to them and include a full description of the bargain. To purchase, simply tap on the item and you’ll be taken to the Groupon mobile site to complete the transaction. The feature will only be available in the U.S.

In addition to Groupon deals, Nokia Maps now allows you to plan your trip in advance. Before hitting the road, you can input your start and end points into the app and select your mode of transportation (car, public transportation or walking) to receive directions.

Nokia Maps works with the Nokia Lumia 610, Lumia 710, Lumia 800 and Lumia 900. Current users will receive an alert when the update is ready, or you can download it for free from the Windows Marketplace. But Nokia warns that it might take a day or two to show up in the app store depending on where you live.

Daily Deal Site Alternatives for Your Business

By Ekaterina Walter at Mashable: 
Daily deal sites have become incredibly popular, at least with consumers. But many businesses are pulling back from Groupon, LivingSocial, and other similar companies.

That’s because, as early as 2010, researcher Utpal Dholakia found that about a third of Groupon promotions lost money for the companies that participated. There have also been numerous cases where a daily deal has actually driven a company out of business. Rachel Brown, a bakery owner, lost an entire year’s profit as a result of a Groupon that sold too well. For a business, losing money on any marketing campaign is rough. The whole point of such campaigns, after all, is to lure more paying customers.

It’s not impossible to improve the chances of success for a daily deal, but for business owners who don’t have the resources to sit and tweak a daily deal campaign, there are better options available.

Focus on Loyalty

One of the biggest concerns with daily deals is that many buyers watch carefully for good deals, but have little interest in paying full price for a service or a product. These buyers don’t come back after they score that one great deal. But loyal customers are the most valuable for most businesses.

Depending on your demographics, check-in programs can prove to be more effective at creating a customer base that keeps coming back. While Foursquare is one of the better known options, there are several different check-in tools that will let you reward frequent visitors, as well as draw in new customers who are more likely to return. For example, Angelo and Maxie’s Steakhouse saw an ROI of approximately $18,000. Industry and demographics both matter in how effective this sort of campaign can be, but there are a variety of ways to create loyalty programs that appeal to different audiences. There have been a number of studies into how to create the most effective loyalty program, given different factors.

Offer Targeted Deals

One of the biggest factors that can drag down the success of a daily deal is that many of the purchasers will be deal hunters who scour the web looking for coupons and other opportunities. This is not really the ideal demographic for your business. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t use a similar structure to reach out to the buyers who really are the best fit.

If you’re offering targeted deals on your own or through a more specialized company, you’ll have more control over the terms. An example is AppSumo, which deals primarily in software and informational products. Many of AppSumo’s partners actually create small products (like e-books or videos) specifically for AppSumo in order to introduce buyers to their more expensive product lines. That’s not always an option, of course. A clothing line doesn’t have the same sales options as an e-book seller.

But there’s also the option of creating your own deal, such as offering a special gift certificate for purchase through a local organization. An accountant could offer initial consultations through the local chamber of commerce or a clothing retailer could sell discounted gift cards through a local social organization.

There are plenty of opportunities out there to offer deals that don’t rely on using daily deal sites that may not be able to offer you an equitable deal themselves.

 

The 7 Growth Hacks That Led Groupon to a $12.7 Billion IPO

By Zach Bulygo at KISSmetrics: 
228% – that’s how much Groupon grew their revenue in one year. As one of the fastest growing companies around, Groupon employed many growth hacks that helped lead to massive growth. In this article we’ll examine some of them and how you can apply them to your own online business.
As you’ll see later in this post, Groupon is based of turning subscribers into marketers by giving them control to spread the Groupon product.

1. Sharing is in Groupon’s DNA

You just found a great deal on Groupon. It’s one that you can’t pass up. The only problem that jumps in your way is that not enough people have signed up for the deal – and the deal expires in 2 hours.

You may see something like this:


Your motive is to spread the word, not just about the deal, but also about Groupon. Telling your friends, family, followers and whoever else you can about the deal and encourage them to buy. Those uninitiated with Groupon will become introduced to it through the deal.

Takeaway:
Have you built your own Groupon style promotion? If not, try running a sale on a certain item. Or try offering big discounts to your current customers only if they sign up X amount of people within Y amount of time.

2. Tell Your Friends After You Bought a Groupon

After the user makes a purchase for a Groupon, they can share it on social media. This spreads the offer and the Groupon product to their friends and/or followers.



Takeaway:
The option to share a purchase on social media is nothing new, but it can be quite popular. Leave the option open for a customer to share their recent purchase with the people they know. Chances are if they see the Tweet or Like buttons there they will click it. They probably won’t think about going to Twitter or Facebook to post about their purchase if no buttons are there.

3. Groupon’s for Multiple People

A movie ticket for one may be a nice deal, but what about for 2-3 people? These Groupon’s for multiple people help spread the advertising of Groupon.

Takeaway:
Whatever your business does, it may be beneficial to add a package deal. If you run a SaaS company that sells project management software, you should try a ‘Buy one, get one for a friend deal’. Similar to referrals, this would have a customer buy your software, getting a discount for them, and then giving the software to another person who has never used your product before. The individual that got the referral then gets a month or two free trials. This spreads your product and increases your viral coefficient.

4. Daily Emails

It may be overlooked, but the fact that Groupon sends daily emails can be attributed to their surge in growth. Less frequent, more frequent, or no emails at all (requiring users to go to the Groupon page themselves), would negatively impact their growth. Emailing too often will lead users to unsubscribe. These daily emails get subscribers to keep coming back to the Groupon product a few times a week if not every day.

Takeaway:
Email is a great way to get users to keep coming back to your product. It can also be a great way to lose a customer. Value and respect the fact that someone gave you their email address. It may be best to tell them up front how often they can expect to receive mail from you.
So how do you know what frequency you should send email out to hit that optimal point of return? Answer: Test. Test your email campaign frequency and determine which rate works best for your business.

5. Share with a Friend, Get $10 in Groupon Bucks

Groupon turns their customers into marketers by encouraging them to refer friends. Under the Featured Deal page, Groupon subscribers see this:



If they click:



The person can only get the $10 when their friend buys a deal. They don’t get $10 just for signing up a person.
The cost for Groupon to run this is $10 per person. According to Quora, the lifetime value of a Groupon customer is around $25-$35. Groupon profit with this referral would be around $20.
Facebook is (as of January 2010) easily the biggest referrer for Groupon. This tells of the powerful synergy of combining referrals and social media.

Takeaway:
What’s the lifetime value of one of your customers? Once you know it, try a referral system similar to Groupon’s. Don’t just have an option for emailing, make it possible for them to get referrals via social media.
Watch out for fraud, some customers may refer a friend, have the friend signup, and later the friend will cancel their account. Consider building a system that can reverse the transaction if fraudulent activities occur.

6. Buy for a Friend

In yet another way Groupon turns customers into marketers, they allow subscribers to buy for a friend. If the friend is not a subscriber to Groupon, they get a nice introduction to it by receiving a free deal & see what process is like with Groupon.

Takeaway:
Your customers certainly know someone who could use your software. It may not work great, but try having a ‘Buy for a Friend’ or ‘Give [enter product name] to a friend’. For most businesses, customers would rather refer, but some unique businesses may be better served by a ‘Buy for a Friend’ function.

7. Their Brilliant Copy

You’ve likely noticed that outside of the daily deals, Groupon posts a “Groupon Guide to [enter something weird here]” or something similar. These short, humorous “guides” are quite popular. Each one gets at least around 90-120 Likes, all of which drive traffic to the Groupon website and offer page.

Takeaway:
It’s not about adding a bunch of different components to your website and attaching the Like and Tweet button to it. If you have something valuable that you think people will want to share, whether it’s a product page, funny video you made, or great copy.


Author: Zach Bulygo is a blogger for KISSmetrics, you can find him on Twitter here.

 

VIDEO: Top 5 Television Ads for Social Media Sites

By Devon Glenn at Social Times:   
On Sunday, Twitter aired its first-ever television commercial during the 2012 Pocono 400 NASCAR race. It was a first for Twitter, but not a first for social media. Other sites, including Groupon, LivingSocial, and Google+ have also put their money on big-ticket ads during major television events.


5. Twitter’s commercial features professional racer Brad Keselowski, who first went viral on the micro-blogging site after tweeting a picture of a fiery car crash at the Daytona 500 in February. The ad shows Twitter’s power as both a news source and as a second screen for behind-the-scenes extras.




4. The daily deals sites were among the first to test the waters with television’s biggest commercial event of the year: the Superbowl. Groupon’s 2011 Superbowl ad juxtaposed social causes with social savings in a manner that rubbed many viewers the wrong way.




3. Groupon competitor LivingSocial also aired a Superbowl ad that sparked controversy. This commercial features a cross-dressing discount shopper who says daily deals changed his life, as well as his footwear.




2. The company’s next ad was much friendlier, not to mention gorgeous.




1. In December 2011, Google+ released a trio of television commercials featuring their new video chat tool, Hangouts. The company managed to pack in a lot of celebrities while assuring the rest of us that we can enjoy the tool, too. This one shows the Muppets rocking out to Queen and David Bowie:

3 Deadly Sins of Social Media Marketing: Facebook, Groupon, and Pinterest

By Augustine Fou  at ClickZ: 
Social media marketing is what most CMOs have at the top of their list for spending increases this year and next. Indeed, social media holds the promise of wild viral effects, socially infused search results, and virtually infinite possibilities for targeting. But as many marketers dive into using social media, some are learning lessons the hard way; some lessons are costly and others may cause irreversible and permanent damage.
Facebook - Perpetuating the Myth of Reach and Frequency
Doing social media shouldn't mean sticking ads on Facebook. Unfortunately, most of the early adopters ended up doing just that. They are still asking for "reach and frequency" - how many people did we potentially show our ads to - because of their TV advertising mindset. And Facebook is more than happy to take their money, by throwing off several hundred billion impressions per month by displaying up to nine ads per page and charging on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis (see: The Facebook Ad Scam). But as budgets shift from TV advertising to digital and social, the metrics of success must also be updated.
After several quarters of experimenting, advertisers are left scratching their heads and wondering about return on investment (ROI) and business impact. Some big advertisers are realizing that the banner ads simply don't work - General Motors, for example, publicly stated that it is cutting its $10 million of Facebook ad spend and the associated $30 million of agency, content, and creative costs. The "soft metric" called "branding" is just not good enough anymore, especially in light of click-through rates being a "rounding error to zero." Awareness alone is no longer enough to get modern consumers to take action.
Fortunately, there are better ways of "doing" social media marketing that are not only more valuable but also longer lasting. Users are on Facebook to socialize. Most people don't "friend" Lipitor or boring brands on Facebook; they friend their friends. Their conversations aren't media that can be bought or sold. In fact, this kind of media doesn't exist ahead of time like television airtime per a schedule of TV shows. People's conversations happen when they happen. And most advertisers don't have a right to speak to them, yet. It's like a thief breaking into your house at dinnertime and shouting at you to buy their products; or getting so-called influencers to do the shouting for them. Instead, advertisers need to earn the right to speak and be in the conversation with knowledgeable consumers. This takes time and persistent work - like providing something of value, insights, something sharable, etc. Truly understanding your community of fans takes time; but once the relationship is built up it can yield continuous payoff; and these conversations are free.
Groupon - A Quick Fix Leads to a Lifetime of Regret
The exact opposite of persistence and patience is a quick fix called Groupon. Thousands of local businesses rushed headlong into doing Groupons to drive traffic to their restaurants, retail stores, etc., with the promise of repeat business to make up for the "loss leader." As it turns out, actual experience has shown that those repeat visits and purchases never materialized - why would they, when the user just got your product or services for 80 percent off. Some businesses didn't even live to tell about their horror stories - remember the little cupcake store that had to make 20,000 cupcakes at a tremendous loss to fulfill the Groupon campaign. Not many would live to tell their story after something like that.
Instead, how about a free solution? If every restaurant would politely ask their patrons after their meal to write them a Yelp review - good or bad - they would start to accumulate reviews that would be useful in helping the next potential customer make their purchase decision. Modern users are so savvy they will look at the number of reviews, the recency of the review, and whether anyone else thought it was valuable. Or how about having patrons "check in" on Foursquare with pictures of the food they are enjoying (of course, all of this depends on the food and service being solid or stellar). While these approaches won't drive the hordes of people beating down your door (after all, it isn't as sexy as 80 percent off), they will yield the long-lasting benefit of real advocacy by fellow restaurant-goers, not the advertiser.
Pinterest - Just Because Everyone Else Is Doing It Doesn't Mean You Should Too
The latest shiny object that all advertising "moths" are chasing is Pinterest. It has been widely cited in the media as the "fastest growing social network in history" and tagged with irresponsible claims like "the top social referrer." While accurate, the key term is "social referrer" - it is comparing Pinterest with Facebook and Twitter. And in certain instances like magazines it is the top traffic driver among social networks. But when compared with all referrers actually driving traffic, including Google search, it is a mere 1/50th - not terribly large (see: The Myth of Pinterest). There are certain instances where Pinterest is brilliant - visually driven sites and products like home decor, design, furnishings, etc.; food and beverage; and fashion. Pinterest was also great when a handful of curators carefully selected a small number of beautiful items - thus simplifying the decision-making process for other users. Now with practically every image from the Pottery Barn catalog posted to Pinterest, the value of curation is lost and the user must choose from 15 sofas just like they would in the catalog.
Instead, how about a free solution? If images on a website are properly named and even tagged with proper "alt text" then search engines can find them. Google images can bring them up in search results and even comingle them with results on the first page. This not only provides a shortcut to page one of Google results; it also provides a longer lasting search engine optimization (SEO) value. Note that Pinterest images are served from Pinterest and the linkbacks are "nofollow"-ed, thus giving no SEO power. So Google image search optimization would yield more direct and longer term benefits than chasing the latest shiny object.
Social media is about attracting actions and conversations, not shouting at people.
The moral of this story is that social media is about slow and consistent relationship building, where trust is earned over time and dialog is cultivated through an exchange of real value.

Are You Going SoLoMo? – The Combined Power of Social, Local and Mobile Commerce

By Sherice Jacob at KISSmetrics:
Do you speak SoLoMo? Despite sounding like something you’d order at a Starbucks, it stands for: Social, Local and Mobile, as they apply to media, applications and technology. SoLoMo combines the best of all worlds to deliver an experience that’s as natural to do on a mobile device as it is in real life; bridging the gap between user and website.
Some of the best examples of SoLoMo in action include GoWalla, Foursquare and Groupon – service startups that use social marketing and mobile check-ins as a way to drive business to local merchants.  But even these cutting-edge services are only scratching the surface of what’s possible.  The good news is, you don’t have to have a retail storefront to take advantage of this growing trend.

What Exactly is Mobile Commerce?

Contrary to popular belief, mobile commerce is not simply buying something with your smartphone.  Most of the time, the website you bought from happened to use a mobile-friendly interface that made the exchange easier, but at its core (and at the risk of splitting hairs here), that’s not true mobile commerce.
Mobile commerce, and its SoLoMo cousin, include features that let you purchase goods by way of an app that acts as a go-between from your smartphone to the store, cutting the website completely out of the picture.  And, interestingly enough, people seem to prefer it this way – with 60% of mobile users making a purchase through their phone from their home.

Order burritos and tacos from the comfort of home with Chipotle’s smartphone app

Adding the Social and Local to the Mobile Commerce Picture

The real advantage to SoLoMo is being able to customize deals, coupons and offers for individual customers, either based on their prior shopping history with the store, or by way of their likes and shares on social networks.  Considering that 80% of mobile users prefer local-based ads and 75% are more likely to take action after seeing a relevant local ad – this presents a huge opportunity for retailers to segment their offers and reach customers with personalized recommendations.
Neiman Marcus is already developing such an app – a product which seamlessly connects shopper and sales associate.  The customer highlights their favorite items and preferred associate, and the associate is alerted in-store when the shopper enters.  With this connection, the sales associate will instantly see the customers favorite items along with a Facebook photo for easier recognizability.  Other retailers and standalone services are also testing the waters with personalized recommendation apps:
Walgreens has already blurred the line between mobile shopping and check-ins.  By partnering with Foursquare, they’ve been able to develop an app which will give customers a coupon when they check-in. But the app itself does more than just deliver discounts.  It can also be used to refill prescriptions (yours or a family member’s), make a shopping list, or remind you when to take your medicine.

Walgreens SoLoMo app lets smartphone users shop, refill prescriptions, and get local coupons

What SoLoMo Means for Design and Conversions

Although SoLoMo-enabled commerce is still in its infancy, there’s already some preliminary data out from retailers – and the results look promising.  Home furnishings store Touch of Class recently ported its products to an m-commerce platform, and found that, in just one month, mobile sales jumped 81% and mobile revenue as a percentage of overall online sales went from 0.74% to 1.2%.
Touch of Class is currently comparing the shopping habits of its mobile versus desktop customer base to learn their shopping habits and possibly create an app that recommends products accordingly.
As for the design of mobile apps – simpler is better.  This basic lesson is all-too-familiar to ToolFetch, which recently redesigned its mobile interface to include helpful items like Live Chat and a slimmed-down selection of only its most popular items for mobile shoppers.

ToolFetch’s mobile site might not be pretty – but it gets the job done.

The end result?  The site’s performance tanked.  ToolFetch went back to the drawing board, and did a little more renovation, taking out the live chat option and other scripts and images that were bogging down its load time.

Action Steps for Getting the Most Out of SoLoMo Commerce

So you’ve decided that SoLoMo is the way to go and you want to put your best foot forward when it comes to profiting from mobile commerce.  Here’s what to keep in mind before you launch your new app to the masses:

• Find Out if Your App Idea Already Exists on the Market.  A great design is only half the battle.  You’ll also want to do your homework and determine if your app idea already exists on the Android or Apple marketplace.  If your competitors are not yet in the SoLoMo market, they will be soon enough.  The time to grab your share the bustling customer base is now.
• Be Sure You’re Prepared for Fixes, Patches and Updates.  Not to dissuade you, but for every Angry Birds success story, there are hundreds of apps withering away in the digital graveyard.  Be ready for bug fixes, updates, patches and new version roll-outs, and make sure you have both the personnel and time/budget commitment to see your app through to completion and beyond.
• Give Your App a Feature that will Engage People  Look for ways that your SoLoMo app can better enrich someone’s life or give them an experience that they’ll want to tell their friends about.  For more details on going beyond the sleek user interface, check out this set of mobile design guidelines from Smashing Magazine.

Whether SoLoMo is right for your business or not is a decision you’ll have to make on your own.  But you can’t discount the ripple effect that it’s having on smartphone users.  By simplifying and shortening the gap between customer and product, SoLoMo has the potential to completely change the way we do business online.
What are your thoughts?  Is SoLoMo more of a passing fad, or will it be as rooted in our vocabulary as “dot com” is now?  Share your comments below!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps website owners improve design and increase conversions with SEO copywriting and consulting.  Download your free conversion checklist and web copywriting tune-up at iElectrify.com or follow @sherice on Twitter or Google+.

Groupon Acquires Campfire Labs to Light Up Social Products

By Liz Gannes at AllThingsD:
Groupon has acquired the pre-launch social communication start-up Campfire Labs, the companies confirmed today. Word of the deal had first been reported on TechCrunch.
Campfire CEO and co-founder Naveen Koorakula said his company’s full team — which I believe is seven people — would be joining Groupon to head up its social efforts. He did not disclose a price.
Groupon had been actively trying to buy other social start-ups such as Gowalla, sources had said in recent weeks. That particular deal went to Facebook. Another would-be Groupon acquisition target, Clever Sense, went to Google instead.
I’d met with Koorakula and his co-founder Sakina Arsiwala earlier this year, and they explained their still-in-progress ideas for a social messaging and collaboration platform that adapted to understand which people were relevant to a group of three to 15 people. They called it a “few-to-few” social network.
Campfire, which had named its early product Slice, was kind of like a dynamic version of Beluga — the group messaging start-up Facebook acquired in March — but Campfire was Web-based, with chat, calendar and media-sharing tools.
The company was still a ways away from launching, and working on testing the product on university campuses like Kenyon College first.
Both the Campfire and Slice sites are currently offline.
Koorakula and Arsiwala, who are a husband-and-wife team, have impressive backgrounds. Koorakula worked on search at Inktomi, Yahoo and Powerset, while Arsiwala helped internationalize YouTube and also did stints at Google proper, Yahoo and Altavista. Campfire Labs investors included SV Angel and Felicis Ventures.
Groupon spokesperson Julie Mossler said, “Campfire Labs was recently acquired to lead the social arm of Groupon. They’re great product technologists who have developed really cool stuff and technology. The Campfire team have already [proven] to be great assets at Groupon and we’ve got a few exciting projects in the works for early 2012.”

PayPal to Challenge Groupon in Daily Deals

By Todd Wasserman at Mashable:
EBay’s PayPal unit plans to take on Groupon in early 2012 with a new service that will offer coupons based on users’ buying habits and mobile phone locations.
PayPal has partnered with 200 U.S. merchants for the offering, says Anuj Nayar, a PayPal rep. The service first reported in Bloomberg, will launch in the first quarter of next year. Nayar declined to say who the merchants are.
Though others, such as Facebook and Yelp, have attempted and failed to compete in the daily deals segment, Nayar says PayPal will use the knowledge of its 103 million customers’ preferences and mobile technology from the recently acquired Where to make the offers more relevant than what Groupon, LivingSocial and Amazon (which is also a LivingSocial investor), currently offer.
“As a 40 year-old male, I don’t think I’ll ever use a coupon for 50% off bikini wax,” Nayar says, referring to irrelevant deals from competitors. Nayar says the goal is to use laser beam-like targeting to make sure the offers are germane.
PayPal’s entry could shake up the daily deals category, which is estimated to more than double to $4.17 billion in 2015, according to researcher BIA/Kelsey.
The report comes after other recent attempts to grow PayPal’s estimated $4.7 billion total payment volume, including a Facebook app designed to send money to friends unveiled in November and a mobile payment system that made its debut that month.
Meanwhile, PayPal’s parent company, eBay, has been offering online daily deals for years, Nayar says.

Groupon Releases Online Appointment Scheduling Feature For Merchants & Customers

By Alicia Eler at ReadWriteWeb:
Yesterday Groupon announced its new online appointment service, Groupon Scheduler, a tool that seeks to make online appointment booking easier. It was developed by OpenCal, a Vancouver-based start-up that Groupon acquired back in September. Groupon Scheduler removes the extra step of calling the merchant to book an actual appointment. Groupon users will receive a reminder email 24 hours before the appointment.

 

Groupon merchants can take this concept one step further by placing the "Book Now" button on their website so that people visiting the website (non-Groupon users) can book appointments with the GrouponScheduler tool. This means that merchants could use Groupon Scheduler in lieu of their own calendar software, which could be a perk for merchants that are already offering many Groupon deals. If they're not, however, the "Book Now" button could become an annoyance.
Despite the acquisition, OpenCal will continue to operate for current users until further notice.

Is The Daily Deals War Coming To An End?

The daily deals war is far from over. Yesterday LivingSocial announced that it received $176 million in its latest round of funding according to documents from the SEC.
One year ago, LivingSocial received a $175 million investment from Amazon. LivingSocial does not have plans to go public anytime soon; it seeks to raise up to $400 million in an additional round of funding first.
On the first day of trading, Groupon's shares started off at $20, closing out at $26.11. Its shares dropped off significantly to $13 only a few weeks after the IPO. According to Yahoo! Finance, Groupon's most recent trade today went for $21.92.

Study: 56% of People Still Dig Daily Deals

Even though earlier this week Groupon's stock dropped 35% below its original IPO price, a new survey from LinkShare says that more than half of people would still go for daily deals. The online marketing solutions site surveyed 1,000 people and found that 56% of people would still buy from a brand they didn't recognize if the deal arrived at the right time. Forty-one percent of people said they had purchased something through a voucher or offer that they had never thought to buy previously.

These results run contrary to the idea that personalization is the key to gaining and retaining daily deals customers.
What if daily deals sites operated more like discovery engine StumbleUpon and less like increasingly personalized marketplaces? The study suggests that random offerings are actually one reason users stay on daily deal e-mail lists.
With stock shares sagging, however, leader of the pack Groupon still has a ways to go in firmly establishing the longevity - not the short, bubble-like burst - of the daily deals model.

Presentify.me Turns Unused Groupons Into Gifts

Looking for a last-minute holiday gift? How about that Groupon you never used? Daily deal vouchers wouldn’t actually make bad presents if there was a way to gift them that didn’t involve an email printout tucked into a card. That’s where Presentify.me, which turns deal vouchers into attractive gift certificates, can help.
The new startup was created by the London-based team behind the deal aggregation service Dealzinga.com, Alex Vander Hoeven, Bob Pluss and Chan Yin. During a 24-hour hackathon earlier this month, the group came up with the idea after having a discussion about whether or not daily deals were acceptable gifts. Says Vander Hoeven, “there are so many good deals out there that I’m sure people would love to give as gifts, but no one wants to get a standard voucher as a present.”
Presentify.me aims to the solve the aesthetics problem by turning vouchers into pretty gift certificates. It currently works with vouchers from Groupon, Dealfind, Tippr or GiltCity, with more on the way. To use the site, you’re walked through a quick wizard where you input the pertinent info (the link to the deal, voucher number and your name) and choose a design. For now, there are only three holiday-themed designs to choose from, but Vander Hoeven says they’re preparing themes for other occasions, like birthdays, Valentine’s Day and Easter. Further down the road, user-generated designs will also be featured.
It’s a simple idea and a handy tool…at least until the big guys figure out that this is the kind of thing they should be offering deal-buying customers themselves.
Presentify.me has $400,000 in angel funding from Andrew Bachman, Tim Skyes, and Jamie and David Dingman.

Facebook, Twitter, Groupon And The History Of Social Commerce [INFOGRAPHIC]

Social commerce is a big deal that’s going to get bigger and bigger, becoming something truly monstrous, so it’s easy to forget that this is all still very new, and all still very shiny.
It does depend on how and when you define ‘social’, but inasmuch as we’ve come to use that word to reference platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, the history of social commerce traces back less than a half-decade. But does that mean it’s overhyped?
Far from it.
Digital marketing is predicted to hit $300 billion by 2020, and, amazingly, half of that growth is expected to come from social commerce. Pick your jaw up from the floor and read on.
Mark Zuckerberg has said, “If I had to guess, social commerce is the next area to really blow up.” Here’s the thing – it’s already happening.
This infographic from Useful Social Media looks at the history of social commerce.

Click here to see the original size

(Source: Useful Social Media. Top image credit: keellla via Shutterstock.)

Facebook Deals Being Shut Down, 4 Months After Launch

Facebook has announced it is shutting down Facebook Deals, 4 months after launching the feature in select U.S. cities. The announcement comes just 3 days after we reported that Facebook Places, which was closely linked to Deals, is being shut down.
“After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks,” a company spokesperson told Reuters. “We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses. We’ve learned a lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses.”

DealBurner Notifies You Of Groupon, LivingSocial, Scoutmob Daily Deal Info When You Check-in With Foursquare

With a vast number of daily deals companies vying for your attention, it is often easy to miss out on deals that you are interested in for places that you visit regularly. To try and solve that problem, a service called DealBurner has been launched that lets you know if there are any daily deals at a venue you have checked-in to using Foursquare or Facebook Places.
DealBurner is a relatively straightforward service that sends you a text message when you check-in at a location that is currently offering a daily deal.

Foursquare's Daily Deals Partnerships Going Live This Weekend, Including Groupon

According to reports, the partnership between the daily deals service and location check-in platform Foursquare is launching today in select locations. As reported in late May, the two companies have been in talks and it looks like an accord has finally been reached that will integrate the deals service into the "Explore" tab in the Foursquare app.
It is a big push in Groupon's push for customer acquisition, which the company spends a lot of money on, according to its S-1 it filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. Foursquare has upwards of 10 million registered users and has been aggressively pursuing daily deals a monetization efforts over the past month. The two companies will split revenue from deals acquired through the partnership.