Couponing drives mobile applications by delivering tangible consumer financial benefit together with ease of use  (coupons are storable data that reside on the device, no need to have scissors handy).

Here is where mobile couponing is headed:

1. Grey market coupon marketplaces:

A secondary “Stubhub” market for Groupon coupons is developing with DealsGoRound and CoupRecoup. Since coupons are storable data, not eBay products, coupons can conceivably be delivered from seller to buyer instantly with Paypal approval. In a future scenario, consumers will be able to find a destination restaurant and search through the grey markets for a coupon while waiting for the waiter.

2. Real time coupon advertising systems:

Coupon advertising can be developed for real time distribution, similar in concept to the Japanese build to order manufacturing process. Ski resorts facing lean crowds due to poor skiing conditions will be able to instantly distribute 1/2 price ski lift tickets on the evening of a snowfall to entice impulse skiers onto empty chairlifts. Restaurants with few dinner bookings will be able to distribute coupons throughout the afternoon usable instantly.

The best real time coupon advertising engine will be built as a marketplace like eBay with functionality that allows local businesses to post their deals quickly and monitor them in real time.

3. “Minority Report” Ad Billboards

The movie Minority Report demonstrated customized audio ads targeted directly to passing pedestrians, and in the movie, personalized to the identified person. In June, a company erected 27 digital billboards in Tokyo train stations that can digitally identify the sex and age of the onlooker and serve ads based on the profile.

The 2002-released movie made one Slate reviewer cringe at advertisement bombardment and the implied lack of privacy at the time, but shift to 2010, and societal adoption of personal transparency on the social media starts to make Minority Report ads enticing, particularly if consumers can save money. It’s like finding a $20 bill on the sidewalk.

The future delivery method for pedestrians can be txt, alert via a mobile app, as well as audio or personalized billboard presentation. The startup that can aggregate geolocated coupons and develop effective non-intrusive delivery methods (I don’t want to hear 10 beeps per block) will win.

4. Consumer demand systems

The big problem with search engines is simply their inability to efficiently find the product or service one wants to buy at the best price, particularly on a local level. Try googling “tennis racquet sale in San Francisco“; you’ll see that it’s impossible to find a local sports store with a sale going on. The startup that creates a data system that can access and catalog local business inventory from major chains (or even scrape chains’ online circulars) could deliver instant consumer solutions to shopping needs. For example, a query for a “Prince tour diablo tennis racquet” would return sales data (or coupons) from participating sporting goods chains and make it easier to find the best deal.

5. Real time inventory management on time-sensitive goods

This is the enterprise variation of 2.) Real time coupon ad systems. Time-sensitive, or perishable goods include airplane seats, hotel rooms, ski chair lifts, and concert seats that optimally are filled to 100% capacity. Mobile couponing systems can provide real time inventory management that gradually discounts based on time to expiration. For example, concert tickets would be discounted after the concert starts for impulse buyers. These systems would essentially reward last minute buyers with discounted rates, instead of socking them with highest possible fees. It allows consumers to drive into a city at 10:00pm and find the best hotel room deal.

Why might this work? People now schedule in real time and time flexibility is valuable. If the business systems can cater to consumer real time needs, it will not only foster good will, but it will also efficiently increase occupancy rates. Think about this… wouldn’t you love an application that really offered great last minute deals?

Related articles:

The New DIY Advertising

How Groupon forces Mainstream Media to Adopt the Couponing Ad Model

Local Coupon Aggregation

Brand Advertising doesn’t Fulfill Real Time Consumer Needs

Google is talking about interactive video ads at this weekend’s Allen & Co. conference. Today, Twitvid is launching its video advertising platform over Twitter (press release). What’s important to know about video is that there is already an institutional history of the video format in the form of the :30 television spot.

Like television, the social media will act as broadcast media that will distribute the “video spot” over the channels – Facebook, Twitter – that are replacing television eyeballs. Even more promising are the upcoming geolocational marketing opportunities for local merchants who will be able to upload video, coupon deals and other content like menus on mobile applications like Yelp and Foursquare. Those first mover merchants who develop compelling media content will be rewarded with Facebook “likes”, the new currency for customer attraction and search results.

We’re now reaching the stage where the instant video upload for business starts to make sense. Remember the old Seesmic video conversation platform that Loic LeMeur took down last summer 2009 because he concluded video conversation adoption by the public was limited? I agree carrying on a video conversations may still attract a limited audience, but the ease of uploading video from iPhones etc. now makes it much more easier to develop video messages on the fly. For example, it would be easy for a chef to iPhone video the day’s dinner offerings and broadcast/post it via a social media distribution system like Posterous across the restaurant’s Twitter and Facebook feeds each afternoon:

It takes time for consumers to understand and adopt new media. The concept of Twitter was alien to most, until Oprah made Twitter accessible in April, 2009. The use of adhoc video for business messaging is still alien to those who believe video production quality standards are high hurdles, but pioneering businesses will soon figure out that audiences are more interested in the real time message being delivered in “living color”.

TheDealMap not only aggregates the coupons from the Groupon-type Daily Deal promoters, but allows local retailers to add their own deals. Greg Sterling provides a comprehensive description of TheDealMap’s features.

What’s next for local couponing?

Truly mobile coupon redemption

The new online coupon processing models still use a form of “clipping” that forces purchasers to print out their coupons for redemption. Services must do away with the print model so coupons can be purchased on the spot and redeemed via screen bar code. Groupon and others have been restricting use to start one day after purchase so that their clients don’t receive deep discounts that cannibalize profits. Expect less discounted on-the-spot couponing to emerge that will still get customers in the door.

Multimedia / video couponing

Replicate the infomercial. Anybody that will sit through an infomercial and purchase a product (and many do) will potentially do the same on an online video presentation. Expect local retailers to repurpose marketing campaigns that would have used TV media by applying their TV ad budget to a deep discount online video offer. Media campaigns would be easy to embed in the current couponing systems.

Value-add local advertising models trump banner ads

Local advertising now works in real time too. We’ve discussed the problem with traditional brand banner-style advertising that provide little immediate incentive to a consumer who wants either a direct monetary benefit (discounts are “instant money”) or a quick solution to locating the neighborhood stores where they can buy a product most cheaply.

Pre-internet, local newspapers made the bulk of their revenue advertising sales and classifieds. The demand for local transactional data is no different than 20 years ago. Today, there is immediate value in getting your deal across to a local buying pool in real time because transaction engines like TheDealMap are positioned to become local trading networks. It worked with Craigslist, arguably Local Transaction Engine 1.0.

All the major (and minor) mobile players – Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter and Facebook – are targeting local couponing strategies. Expect the transaction model based on couponing to morph into new local trading systems for classifieds, delivery services and other daily life necessities.

The spawning of a commercial business model for local media

Local journalistic ventures seeking funding sources can develop affiliate relationships with the coupon aggregators and services themselves. Couponing can provide an immediate quantifiable ROI attractive to local merchants that traditional CPM-based banner advertising misses, particularly when a local venture is just starting up. In fact, any local portal network can add couponing systems to attract consumer audiences monitoring such deals, and to develop affiliate revenue sources.

Get ready for the commercial social media...

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The latest Facebook metrics are powerful: 400 million active users (7% of the world), 50% of them logging on each day and spending more than 55 minutes daily on Facebook.

The sudden concentration of traffic on the social media led by Facebook has caught business by surprise. In particular, small and local businesses don’t quite realize their consumer is now spending a majority of their time on the social media, but they continue to rely on the old online standard: their website. Websites and blogs are critical as marketing collateral, but local businesses need to develop an online marketing presence that spans across the social media ubiquitously.

With all the buzz around Foursquare and Gowalla, why is hyperlocal media suddenly hot? Geolocation is changing the social media by providing nothing more than the tagging mechanism to define social networks by localities. Geolocation facilitates the development of a new, more practical, more intimate Twitter/Foursquare network of friends who just happen to be living down the street. It’s far more compelling to build a social network of folks you can have coffee with than the national networks than generally evolve in Twitter and Linkedin. I myself see this… I am starting to socialize with San Franciscans…

The Hyperlocal Marketing Opportunity

So we’re seeing social apps like Twitter and Yelp quickly adopting location “check-in” functionality, with Facebook in the wings. And this presents a huge opportunity. It’s a no-brainer for local retailers and businesses to see that they need to provide the most effective online venue for their local customers to “check-in” to. The new local “websites” are the Facebook business page, the new local advertising vehicle is the Twitter coupon, and the new reviews column is Yelp.

You haven’t seen them yet, but Facebook is primed to evolve into a massive Sunday advertising circular for local businesses:

And why not? It’s free. Enterprising local media publishers (for example, Breaking News sites) will curate and compile these merchants into local online directories.

Twitter will develop hyperlocal couponing systems that will be online equivalents of PennySaver coupons and Valpak:

And why not? It’s free. Couponing is effective because it is perceived by consumers as “found money” while straight advertising may now be considered “spammy”. You’ll see the advent of new local social media based advertising agencies that will create turnkey Twitter / Facebook / Foursquare couponing campaigns for merchants. And these campaigns will be accepted because online data is more efficient for tracking and analysis than traditional advertising channels like radio / TV or inefficient direct mail offerings like PennySaver. There is a defined ROI.

Conclusion

2009 was the year when the masses found Twitter and Facebook. 2010 will be the year when local business begins to recognize the power of leveraging Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and Foursquare et al to achieve a level of community engagement that standard “one-way message” advertising can’t achieve. It’s about being ubiquitous across the social media so your community of customers can find your services via their preferred channels – Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Related slideshow: Ubiquity marketing (Jan. 2010)

Related webinar: I’ll be discussing “The Impact of Geolocational Media” on the Virtual Bar Camp April 6 at 2:15pm, Room #4. Register and join our discussion.

The real time web implies that online news will flow more and more through applications, not websites. The problem facing mainstream media is their dependence on traffic through their websites for advertising revenue.

The journalistic media on the other hand continue to try to erect walls that halt traffic flow through their websites, either by charging subscriptions (New York Newsday gets 35 subscribers after three months), by limiting access to their content by aggregators (Murdoch’s gambit with blocking Google from indexing Sky News content), or simply by not providing an RSS feed for syndication (Santa Barbara News Press and many other local publications).

Social media thrives on RSS to find, deliver and syndicate news from journalistic media, and it directs traffic back to the news source.  If the traditional news media continues to ignore social media sourced breaking news, they risk becoming irrelevant to their communities who demand this real time news. People will eventually find that real time news directly from their community via one of their social networks and news aggregation applications.

Simply put, the social media rewards value and service, and devalues self promotion and advertising. Up to now, most social media marketing methods simply wrap traditional push marketing methods into a new package. Facebook fan pages and Twitter broadcasting deals replicate websites and coupon advertising. In this new age of social media, push marketing appears obvious and may detract from the marketing intent. We’ve been advocating that entrepreneurial business people focus more on delivering valuable services to their community to attract business opportunities. One way to do this is to create local media resources.

The following slideshow describes how to create a new local media brand that leverages the many channels of the social media. The concept is simple: online media brands no longer reside solely on TV, on a website or as a Facebook page. Media brands now span all the channels of traditional and social media. Any local media property that delivers content across a panoply of channels becomes “ubiquitous” to the community. You’re always found. And if you or your company are behind the media brand, you benefit from association.

Social media reinforces the concept of branding because your brand is judged by what you do and who you are online. This couldn’t happen ten years ago, you would have needed to advertise who you were and what you did.

Local news used to be the province of the local newspapers, radio stations and TV. It’s become clear consumers will digest local news online as newspapers shut down, and on the Internet, all media are equal – TV, radio and print websites compete for the same eyeballs. A swelter of recent big media portal deals – for example, MSN/NBCU/Hearst,  to cover local news threatens local media institutions through sheer size and scale. Curatorial portals – Huffington Post’s local editions and Outside.in (with investment from CNN among others to support content development for CNN Local editions) will aggregate the news, and local reporter infrastructure will be nurtured at citizen journalist engines like Examiner.com or AOL’s Seed.

Here’s the problem: local is local. Media portals need to figure out how to engage the community at a grass roots level so they have drivers and participants pushing the conversations and attracting their peers.  Portals believe they can scale and develop the website traffic required to support a local advertisement model. However, communities may develop their own home grown commercial systems for the same reasons why “buy local” is becoming a mantra; and the portals aren’t entitling ownership of their local media systems to the community. For that reason, a community may rather spend its local advertising dollars with an on-the-ground local publisher like Minnpost or OaklandLocal, or even a Chamber of Commerce sponsored local media resource than CNN Local.

2) Mobile + Local advertising = Penny Saver 2.0

The first local advertising and search media are starting to emerge: Postabon facilitates the broadcast of local discounts and coupon offers and Milo searches for specific products at the large chains like the neighborhood Best Buy by accessing the store’s inventory database. Expect popular geotagging applications like FourSquare and Gowalla to integrate local coupons and product search. These coupons are not perceived as advertisements. If they save you money, they are called “unexpected cash”.

These systems help solve the consumer impulse buy decision (”I’m shopping at the mall tomorrow, what stores are having sales?”). Traditional search engines haven’t been able to answer these temporal questions down to the local level (try querying Google to find a snowboard sale in your town this weekend).

Related: Examples of Twitter hyperlocal advertising models

3) Mobile + Advertising + Pubsubhubbub = Alert systems

The real time web is pushing business society into a new value paradigm that rewards those who can react instantly and systematically to opportunities. A concept not unlike Wall Street program trading, these new systems work on alerts that ping users for decisions. Mobile devices eventually won’t need “refreshes” to alert; they are always on and by extension, almost coerce its owner to be “always on”.

For consumers, marketing companies like Local Thunder will connect merchants with their community through rich media content development and RSS feeds for alerts. Google’s Pubsubhubbub essentially deploys RSS feed data in real time so alerts can be time and location targeted.

We start getting into Augmented Reality / Minority Report territory when coupon alerts popup as one walks by a store, but some company will make this real time location based alert system a reality, if not a hit, by the end of 2010.

4) Advertising as Content

Infomercials got it right; advertising as content engages customers at the story telling level. And the content may be ridiculous:

new ad from the California Milk Board

Today’s business can no longer resort to trite marketing, and say “buy from me because I’m honest… high touch… lower priced… give great service” with a straight face any more. It now comes off as, well, an advertisement.

Advertisements used to be crafted to lead into the “call to action”. In 1960’s Madison Avenue’s ideal world, consumers would make the purchase decision based on the facts presented in the ad or by the incessant aggregate impressions made in what has always been called “branding”.  In the fuzzy world of social media marketing, where is the call to action?

5) Everybody becomes a marketer, and some will become sales closers

The call to action still originates from consumer need. A call to action may simply be an attractive price, but in many circumstances, the transaction close is facilitated by a personal sales pitch or a referral. As advertising becomes content driven, the combined testimonials for a product or service become far more persuasive to support the call to purchase. Testimonials and ratings of local services (like the current standards  Yelp.com and Citysearch) will be built into every local media resource (see Postabon’s rating system). In fact, Yelp has elevated the standard so that the 5-star review is becoming the minimum parsing criteria for real estate agents because so many have this grade.

Bad, or even 4 star reviews are now potential disqualifiers

So how can somebody profit from providing testimonials and otherwise supporting the marketing efforts of others around them? Locals will do the same things they did pre-Internet with their Chambers, Lion’s Clubs and networking groups – support each other. New social media – enabled referral systems will be built out locally through Facebook and LinkedIn groups, and through the new local ad applications.

The bigger trend will be the development of local affiliate marketing systems that compensate referrals. Think of websites that have an Amazon affiliate widget or link that compensate owners if their users go through the widget to buy Amazon stuff. Companies will provide applications to build local merchant guides for use by other local business websites to create networks of affiliated services. And local affiliate marketing systems is only a start; affiliate marketing programs extend sales forces without adding overhead, and we’ll start seeing mainstream adoption by enterprises developing strategic partnership programs.

Related: The essence of affiliate marketing

5)a) Everybody can become a traveling sales person

Anybody can become a virtual mobile storefront using the upcoming Square, a secure, simple to use iPhone application with a credit card reader that allows anybody to become a street merchant. Point-of-sale becomes redefined when anybody can potentially sell anything anywhere.

6) Virtual socializing and Webinar ubiquity

Webinars are social media too. They are already changing the landscape on how people meet for business on the cheap, and worry the airlines.

2009 British Airways face-to-face campaign

Current webinar systems like Webex are still too difficult to use. Within 2010, some company will develop a simple to launch, one-click web meeting system that can broadcast live discussions across ad hoc participant groups. Call the concept adhoc webinars. Why will this work? Webinars can become venues like happy hours where groups can meet and share. The key is ease of use, anybody should be able to participate so weekly scheduled meetings can expand as more people know about them. Imagine Robert Scoble producing a one-click webinar party every Friday afternoon to discuss ideas – he would essentially have an interactive TV program that can be produced on the fly without studios and cameras.

Virtual socializing is the natural evolution to social networking because it’s location independent. One example in the real estate world are the virtual REBarCamps that aggregate speakers and audience together in a virtual national conference.

7) The grass roots Web

Website and application development should be simple enough for normal folks who know nada about code, but still want to custom develop a clean, workable application by themselves without hiring tech talent. The ascendance of plug/play blogs and Wordpress themes and plug-ins, and Ning based social network applications facilitate the quick building of applications by non-techies. Add in automated features like Facebook Connect, Twitter Lists, Posterous posting, and the latest mini-applications that provide snippets of value to the website, and website development is becoming accessible and experimental to the masses. However, I’m frankly surprised there isn’t more activity to provide simple plug/play applications to individuals and SMEs… will 2010 be the year?

Speaking of websites, the next great media company won’t have a website (h/t Steve Rubel).

Related: How to build a community media resource

8 ) The stream is more important than website

Anybody immersed in the social media already knows this. The content stream constitutes a conversation, and can be perceived as far more “real” than a calculated marketing-focused website presentation. The same new paradigm that makes an advertisement seem  promotional applies to websites. Yes, conversations can happen on websites but there are likely many more occurring on Twitter, Yelp, Facebook and other blogs that are deemed more credible because they are third party commentary.

fr. Fast Company http://bit.ly/5bRTxL

AshtonKutcher.com the website does not exist. He is a Twitter celebrity whose breakthrough social media credential was challenging @CNNBRK to a 1,000,000 follower contest. Media presence isn’t just website traffic, it’s providing value to the readership through new media channels… which leads us to the reason why anybody can now become a media resource, if not a media star:

9) Curation is the new syndication

Mass media used to rule syndication, now anybody can curate and present content across a panoply of social media platforms. Curating breaking news is key to readership – it’s the reason why people follow CNN, Marketwatch or engadget. Twitter has distinguished itself as the forefront application for breaking news, and anybody can use Twitter Lists to curate Twitter feeds by topic, geography and industry. Curation tools, like Outside.in Publisher for hyperlocal news, are being developed for local content publishers.

Curators are the new news editors, and the window is open to create new media properties. Curated local media will be a focus because there’s a media void that both national media and independent journalistic efforts are now trying to fill (see #1 above).

Related:

Hyperlocal curation of real time news

Build a dynamic community media resource on Twitter in one hour

10) A new era of open social media (the adjective “social” will soon be redundant)

Facebook and LinkedIn are closed networks simply because they require confirmation of “friend” status. Frankly, it’s just too much manual clicking to accept a lot of friends. Twitter has distinguished itself as an open network that can amass networks of millions of followers, and is the application closest to a personal broadcast media. Facebook certainly sees the power of massive networks (being the biggest one itself), and in order to compete with Twitter’s broadcast power, will unveil similar broadcast functionality. Simply put, in 2010 Facebook will create an opt-in setting that allows users to open their status updates to anybody who wants to follow them. Becoming a Facebook Fan today is similar but statuses can’t be filtered within the main feed. Once 350+ million Facebook broadcast systems are potentially unleashed, they can be curated categorically like Twitter Lists and conversations more conveniently filtered. Yes, Facebook already has Friendfeed as the model, but it needs to be simpler to use, and will likely cede to a new Facebook open network product.

LinkedIn can open itself up the same way. Since LinkedIn is a more industrial network, value would be derived from curated lists developed by users based on industry or discipline. Although LinkedIn Groups encourages industry conversations, they are generally sparse and hard to follow if one has joined many Groups.

Once networks open up, conversations become even more multi-channel than they are today. A Tweet that gets syndicated across Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networks will provoke dialogues characteristic of each network. Clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic see this coming and have integrated multi-channel monitoring systems. In the latter part of 2010, evolved versions of Google Wave and the Google OS, and possibly Facebook, will provide the same multi-channel operability integrated into their offering.

Related: Check my 2009 predictions for social media last year.

from: http://bit.ly/4Bv7NE

The chronicles of Tiger continue daily with the Mistress countdowns and porn star exposés that are contributing to the collapsing public opinion of a global sports icon. The financial impact hits whole industries – the PGA, Tiger’s sponsors, and the TV networks all relied on Tiger as the drawing card.

This is a case of tipping point media. Mass media will only jump on sensational stories when they’re credible. Once that happens, the social media takes over with the notorious confessionals by otherwise un-famous people. That’s probably one reason why Tiger practiced tight media control… it’s easy to quash one-off rumors when there isn’t a bandwagon of story pursuers. Tiger’s surprise announcement of “transgressions” after the car crash positioned him as fair game for all media.

Tiger is a defining moment in celebrity reputation management. Celebrities will now have to think very carefully about doing questionable things with other people because they have a media mouthpiece – themselves, and a reason to use it for attracting attention.

We’re developing social media training systems together with association / corporate marketing groups and consultants who add their training content to the platform. For example, we’re working with a wine consultancy developing a national social media marketing business using the platform for “basic training” and reference for their client base.

Register for a peek at http://domusu.com/admin/first-time-users. We welcome discussion on this unique idea.

If you build a local breaking news Twitter site from this slideshow tutorial, let us know @pkitano and we’ll LIST it!