Phoenix Local News: The Future of the Daily Deal Industry

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The Future of the Daily Deal Industry

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Daily Deal News for September 28th, 2011

The Future of the Daily Deal Industry

Enabling Real Time Social Commerce Through Twitter

The Social+Capital Partnership Connects with Yammer

Dealfind Launches in St. Louis – Continues Expansion Across U.S. and Canada

Groupon to Offer Rewards Program Providing Solution to Customer Retention

Bronto Software Offers Best Practices Guidelines for Daily Deal Providers

Deal$boy Provides New Online Shopping Experience

Groupon: Webvan, Enron, or Something Else: Too Big to Fail

The Rise of the Commerce Network

The Future of the Daily Deal Industry

Against the backdrop of Facebook exiting the daily deal space, Groupon being heavily criticized during their on-again, off-again, on-again IPO, Yelp cutting staff in half and drops in traffic on key sites, Dean DeBiase, named just this summer as Chairman and CEO of Entertainment.com, took the stage at our recent Daily Deal Media Forum as our kick-off keynote speaker.

And his message was exactly what all attendees and the daily deal industry at large needed to hear – that despite what pundits have been saying, the Golden Age of the daily deal is not over, in fact, it has not even begun.

For example, he pointed out that local merchants have ample money to spend for marketing. While most of this is in the small budgets of individual merchants – mostly in the $2,500 to $5,000 range – this is not a problem for the industry and in fact is a benefit. That’s because daily deals are one of the few promotion spaces where such small budgets could be used effectively.

Enabling Real Time Social Commerce Through Twitter

An exciting partnership between OneBigPlanet and their intelligent offer platform and Needium’s real time social media lead generation service has been announced. They have entered into a partnership to start recommending daily deals directly to social media users based on the needs that these users are expressing. These deals will be highly relevant and offered in real time. This is an innovative approach at leveraging social media platforms such as Twitter and enabling social commerce through the millions of conversations that are occurring online every day.

Needium’s platform monitors social media messages and identifies relevant needs that consumers have; perhaps they are looking for a sushi restaurant, perhaps tickets to an event or perhaps talking about how great it would be to go on vacation this weekend. Needium monitors these conversations and using the OneBigPlanet platform suggests highly relevant deals for consumers to enjoy; thus transforming a regular conversation into a relevant social commerce transaction. The combination of Needium’s social monitoring and lead generation service along with OneBigPlanet’s deals aggregation platform delivers a scenario where consumers, deal publishers and merchants are all excited about the relevancy of it all.

Groupon: Webvan, Enron, or Something Else: Too Big to Fail

In just two years, Groupon’s fresh approach to a failed web strategy (group buying) has become a full fledged, global industry of thousands of copycat sites that include Web 1.0 titans Google and Amazon. In the process, the Groupon name itself became a meme and a one word description for a new type of economy of collective bargaining and local commerce, also known as Grouponomics.

So pervasive now are daily deals that a recent Harris Interactive Survey found that 30% of all workers bought a daily discount offer from Groupon or another provider in the past year. But beneath the hyper growth and the hype, clouds have gathered around Groupon and the industry. Merchants have complained about overselling and predatory discounting. Consumers complaints have solidified into numerous class actions, centered on gift card regulation.