Connected Advertising Blog

This week, Groupon promoted a Gap coupon – $50 of merchandize for $25. This sounds great, but this takes users away from the real beauty of Groupon. If you are unfamiliar with the service, every day members receive an email with a coupon for a local business, and usually something you may not do otherwise. For instance a local Indian restaurant, or hot air a balloon ride, even a helicopter ride early last week in Chicago. The attraction to Groupon is the newness of the experience, every day. You don’t see offers from the same business each day. It always new, and interesting.

You see, Groupon is not just about the savings. It is about the Local, unique opportunities that people would otherwise never see. So, when a Gap coupon came out (BTW – I like Gap), it was out of touch with the reason for Groupon in the first place. As one person interviewed on NPR said, we can “get a Gap coupon anywhere.”

I hope that Groupon doesn’t allow itself to be drawn away from its core by investors seeking a new revenue stream. If it is, it will become just another coupon site, and we don’t need another one of those.

Tom Hoehn, director of interactive marketing and convergence media at Kodak

Mostly, it’s just done through good old word-of-mouth. Our customers are talking about, tweeting about and blogging about how great these apps are.

We, of course, talk about them on our own social media properties, but we’re finding our customers are doing most of the work for us because they are excited about the news and ways to share from Kodak.

Dan Butcher, MobileMarketer.com interview at CES

Social  media is about sharing life in snippets. On the way down to a football tournament with my son, I was taking video and pictures to send back to my wife. While I could not share a great deal of detail, I was able to piece together enough snippets to give her a sense of the place and what is going on there. She could then imagine the rest.

When I read status on facebook or follow a string of tweets, I get snippets of my friends’ lives. I realized with this experience, that for most, I know little about the rest of their lives. For a few, I know enough to fill in the blanks.

Is that good enough? Are we comfortable diluting our relationships down to those snippets that can fit into a 30 sec video, or 140 character tweet, of a facebook update?

This is at once a personal question and a broader social question. I enjoy seeing what old high school classmates are up to. But sometimes, they post things that clearly show that they are simultaneously connected with me ( a long time unseen person), and (I hope) close knit friends. I have little to no context for the status, while others can fill in the blanks.

I believe snippets are a great way to reconnect across the distances of time and geography. But, we need to take care not to allow them to increase the distances between us. Status updates are not the same as conversations. Video and pictures are not the same as shared experiences. Social networks are not the same as social life. When your friends send you a snippet of their life, do you have the context to fill in the blanks?