Klout is known as a metric for assessing social influence. Like Google Page Rank, few understand what else Klout can do beyond being an iconic metric. One overlooked practical role that Klout faciliates is influencer curation. Through curation, brands garner good will by providing recognition, even rewards, to influencers who have synergetic relationships with that brand. Brands accomplish this on Klout by 1) developing lists of influencers and 2) giving influencers’ Twitter or Facebook feeds the “+K” as a badge or recognition.

For example, The Breaking News Network is a local media network devoted to community service and promoting local businesses, civic groups and nonprofits. As part of the mission to recognize their communities, managers of each city in the Network develop a portfolio of +K’s. First they import their curated Twitter lists based on topics like Events, Sports or Foodie.

Next, individual social media accounts are given +K based on a specific expertise. The more liberally +Ks are given, the more good will the brand collects.

By using Klout, brands like @breakingsfnews position themselves as curators and hubs for social media sourced local news, a role that traditional local media has not yet embraced.

The Revenue Agenda for Klout and other Social Influence Metrics

Klout can also be used to deliver good will in the form of “perks” with their revenue product Klout Perks. Perks reward high Klout score influencers with freebies that hopefully will induce a quid pro quo commentary or endorsement.

Klout Perks currently only delivers offers to a national audience. If Perks could be delivered to local audiences, local merchants would see Perks as an alternative to Daily Deals by delivering value to recipients of influence, rather than the one and done coupon clippers. All in the name of good will. Over at MediaBistro’s Socialize conference, Megan Berry, Klout’s Marketing Manager, says self service perks are on the product roadmap.

Companies measuring social influence like Klout, including Peoplebrowsr with Kred and Roost with Local Scorecard, are developing products that are ostensibly metrics but are really solutions to identify, target and reward consumer influencers as potential marketers. This will lead to wide ranging partnerships between online vendors and companies providing influence metrics data. The new metrics of influence will become more refined and tangible: influencers will be tracked for how many dollars their tweets and updates garner.

Twylah is a service that aggregates a Twitter feed and compiles the articles they link into a Flipboard like display.   Many reviewers have explained the mechanics of Twylah in far more detail than I can:

• Robert Scoble: “Twylah lets media brands and celebrities monetize their Twitter stream”
• Neal Schaffer: “Twitter SEO? Think Twylah“

We’ve been working together with Eric Kim, CEO, and Twylah to create “breaking news” Twylah pages for the Twitter feeds across our 300+ city Breaking News Network. These Twylah rendered pages are subdomains of our Breaking News cities, and can be viewed on many of our Breaking News cities by including the subdomain title “news” preceding the Breaking News URL, such as news.breakingsfnews.com.

The current iteration of Twylah pages sit separately from our Breaking News websites and don’t have a direct link to the website itself, only the Twitter feed. We’ve been waiting for Twylah to unveil their embed system so we can embed the page directly to the site itself. Thus, all of these subdomain pages are completely hidden, findable right now only through search engines.

So our experiment simply measures how Twylah performs to drive search engine traffic based on breaking news to hidden Twylah pages. Here are the results:

Approaching 900 uniques per day

Number of Google indexes over span of 3 months for selected news sites:

CONCLUSIONS:

1. It’s well documented that Twitter has become the leading social media for broadcasting “breaking news” nationally and locally. People constantly search for breaking news about a city. Twylah’s service allows breaking news tweets to be indexed and discoverable persistently, not forgotten as most tweets are (according to bit.ly, the average half life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours). Simply put, Twylah delivers organic traffic from sets of older tweets even when the pages it directs to are hidden (and therefore not discoverable by any other means).
2. Twylah automatically facilitates conversations around brands. Through Twitter, we can curate the key influencers associated with a brand and, through Twylah, deliver their commentary to an audience who wants this information in a coherent published format. For example, a well curated Twylah page can deliver real time information about specific movie openings by aggregating content from the media, arts and events publishers on Twitter whose use Twitter to monitor movies. Moreover, on the Breaking News Network, every city already has a set of curated local influencers across a variety of topics, so it’s possible now to develop hyperlocal Twylah channels devoted to movies, the arts, sports, or any other topic. This approach to hyperlocal branding is still in its infancy, and we’ll be focusing on this subject extensively over the next few articles.
3. Twylah, via Twitter, delivers a broadcast solution to brands that other social networks can’t. Eric Kim states: “We are targeting Twitter publishers (brands and personal brands), who consistently create and curate valuable content on any topic.” This type of “broadcast” branding is where Twitter excels over Facebook, which seems to moving towards developing its news feeds favoring personal transparency over commercial branding. It is especially powerful for delivering ticker tapes of breaking news and media feeds that wouldn’t be as effectively distributed across platforms like Facebook where such news might be perceived as excessive.

This article is posted by Mark Armitage, Director of Marketing Communications for Socialshopping.com. The landscape for local social marketing opportunities is expanding rapidly, and he provides an overview.

For local business owners, whilst daily deals sites like Groupon and LivingSocial can drive large volumes of new customers, the profitability of running an offer through them can be questionable. By the time they’ve offered the original discount to attract customers to their store and given the deals site its cut (typically 40-50% of the coupon’s face value), businesses can find that their profit margin is low or that they’re even looking at a loss leader.

So what are the alternatives? Here are some other solutions which savvy business owners can use to drive customers online without breaking the bank:

Facebook – For consumer-facing companies, generally speaking it makes sense to use Facebook to promote their business (there may be exceptions if the service they provide is of a personal nature like, say, funeral services or financial advice).

It doesn’t cost anything to create a simple fan page and post a message at least every few days, but it’s a great way to interact with existing customers and to spread the word about the business to others. Business owners should be sure to include a link to their Facebook page on their website and any printed marketing collateral which they use.

If the business has a physical location, they should also create an entry for it on Facebook Places. Specifically designed for mobile devices, it gives the option to merge a Facebook Place with a fan page or to offer promotions using the Places service independently.

Twitter - Like Facebook, Twitter’s key benefits are that it’s free and an excellent tool to interact with existing and prospective customers. The company is also beginning to offer trend analysis for certain geographies, and as it ramps up, local targeting will become a more prevalent part of Twitter’s marketing proposition.

YouTube – YouTube and other video sharing sites can be a great way for businesses to convey their company’s personality and stand out from the crowd. It won’t work for every type of business, but again it’s free to create a basic YouTube channel and to upload clips.

You don’t need to try anything too clever or have an advertising degree to make this work. For businesses which involve manufacturing goods or preparing food, they can shoot a video to show customers how the process works, whereas office-based companies can try giving them a tour of their building or a weekly or monthly news bulletin from the staff or CEO. As with Facebook and Twitter, businesses which have a YouTube channel should be sure to tell customers about it both in person and in any other online or offline marketing sources which they use.

Google Maps – Google Maps is a really simple tool for businesses to create a placement on and, unlike the previous examples I’ve mentioned, doesn’t require a lot of maintenance once they’ve set it up. By adding photos and tags to their listing, businesses can ensure that whenever people search for their product or service in their town or local area, their location shows up. Doing so can reap surprising dividends, particularly if what they offer is fairly niche – say, a family guesthouse, or a shoe repair store. Companies can also add items such as coupons for customers to print out and bring to their premises.

Google’s analytics information for Places listings is also easy-to-understand but helpful to business owners, showing them what people are searching for when they find them, where they come from, their interests and so on.

Business directories and review sites – Local business listing sites such as Yell in the UK and Manta in the US are essentially the online equivalent to the thick directories which land on your doorstep in many cities. The key difference, though, is that as well as allowing them to provide and maintain an entry for their business, many sites allow users to post their own reviews of them, which employees should monitor and respond to where necessary.

For businesses such as restaurants or accommodation services, there are many specialist directory services. Sites like Zagat for restaurants or Agoda for travel can be great traffic drivers.

Social shopping sites – Not all sites dedicated to retail have price at the centre of their proposition. As local businesses tighten their belts and realize the limitations of daily deals and voucher code sites, a new generation of sites is beginning to emerge which combine the interactivity of Facebook and Twitter with features specifically geared towards shoppers like personalized offer feeds.

This is what my company is trying to achieve with Socialshopping.com. This is definitely a trend that local business owners in particular should watch out for, as the best of these sites offer a chance to market their business as they wish without the hefty commission charges.

Mark Armitage is Director of Marketing Communications for Socialshopping.com, a new online shopping network and community which brings together thousands of shopping fans looking for the best tips and bargains both online and where they live.

Contact Mark at mark@socialshopping.com.

“Social commerce” became a buzz word in the summer of 2010:

Here are eight new trends in social commerce that will appear in 2011:

1) Demand based shopping applications

Groupon demonstrated how supply in the form of retail inventory can be packaged into deep discount opportunities. Demand is the inverse – how many people in the community want 49ers tickets, a dinner at French Laundry, or the hottest electronic gadget? Applications will develop that meets demands from local shoppers. Requests can be input into an application, and addressed either automatically from an inventory warehousing system like Walmart or manually with a “bid” price and location for pickup.

The implications? By fulfilling demand direct from consumers in aggregate, both large chains and SMBs can fulfill orders far more efficiently and reduce sales and marketing overhead.

2) Identity brokering and qualification

The transparency of the social graph will facilitate transparent match making systems that expose all parties to a transaction. One example of an old marketing paradigm where identity data was hidden is the mailing list – tradeable, sellable, undifferentiated and an acknowledged source of spam. There’s always been a seamy side to traditional lead generation and affiliate marketing systems because one doesn’t get to “opt-in” before receiving spam or a phone call to your request for more information about, say, a home listed for sale.

With the detailed social graph, every match can be qualified. Supply/demand applications will evolve to create matches where both parties to a transaction can easily vet the other party before a dialogue takes place. The “Groupon” concept of offering a kind of reward to attract local business will extend to SMBs like accountants, lawyers and real estate brokers who haven’t yet participated in offering an online “daily deal”. Moreover, advertisers can qualify leads by researching them on social networks like Linkedin or Facebook. In fact, leads will presented not just as a simple name and email address, but as a profile based on their social graph so it’s easy to see whether that lead might be your best friend’s cousin.

3) The reduction of the sales force.

Why? Just as anybody can create a social media presence, anybody can now become a marketer and create a social commercial presence.

Online commerce distribution – getting the exact product to the consumer purchaser as efficiently as possible – disintermediates sales forces, which function as middlemen to provide conversion value. Now social/mobile commerce is set to do for local SMBs what Amazon did for national brand products – create the variegated distribution channels that make it easier for consumers to find and purchase what they want from SMBs.

Take group buying as an example. Hundreds of competing “Groupons” (including all the local media/news who advertise with Daily Deals) can’t all be knocking on every cafe in every city to source a deal. Deal aggregation engines such as Wantsa, TheDealMap and Yipit are/can create deal syndicates that present publishable deal inventory. Now publishers can trade off sales staff and marketing overhead for affiliate income from deals sourced by others.

Social commerce facilitates this trend because literally any business or media outlet can be an ad publisher. For starters, they can publish a free deal on Facebook Deals or Groupon Stores, and then escalate their marketing presence by adding their deals into syndication.

4) Social Commerce conversion – the call to action returns

Marketers have always tiptoed around social media marketing. They need to message their product, but not bluntly pitch it. Group buying succeeds at creating a call to action in the form of a time sensitive deal, but the most efficient social media marketing strategy is to engage the customer into discussing your product. Here are the methods for social commerce conversion:

The simple one-click Facebook “Like” (and corresponding “share” buttons on social media) is the quickest way to market deals across the Social Graph.

For consumers, checking reviews is the due diligence step. They already want what the business offers, and the 4-5 star reviews just converts them.

Conversion can be triggered by influencers, just ask any teenage girl. Marketers will court influencers with perks. New analytical applications will ascribe dollar value to the referral or “like” of individuals and groups.

Customer service becomes a marketing channel. Consumers respond to Zappos – inspired great service. Every business/brand should have a customer service landing page, whether it’s on-site or on GetSatisfaction.com

5) The emergence of the pure social commerce campaign – game changing brand marketing

Have a new product? Can’t get it into traditional distribution channels? And even if you can get it into Target, how do you market it to get consumers to notice it? This was the challenge facing entrepreneur Dr. Robert Wagstaff with his simple tongue scraping invention to counter bad breath. Expect more products to template the Orabrush marketing approach in the same way Zappos has become a beacon for great customer service. Here’s the ABC/Nightline video:

If you don’t watch the full video, here is the takeaway:

• YouTube = TV commercial
• Facebook = National media buy
• College business class = Business incubator

6) Facebook is a defacto platform for social commerce, but it may be too massive for local socialization

Facebook is just too big for most users. A Facebook page for a city or neighborhood can’t be customized to the individuals of the community. Granted, every business may eventually have a Facebook page for their customers because Facebook has become a defacto platform, almost like the archaic World Wide Web, or more loosely AOL in the 90′s. But social commerce will become relevant at a local level when online meets offline, creating virtual town squares where communities of local folk congregate. But they need on-the-ground participation and management to flourish as social vehicles, otherwise the sites are ghost towns.

How does social commerce become social at the local level? To get the consumers to aggregate around local commerce offline, there needs to be a relevant community overlay on top of the deals. For example, Japan has a social network of housewives who input the best shopping deals that day manually for the benefit of others in the community. Unlike a one-off Groupon deal where buyers are unrelated, the housewives form a local social network tied together initially in their pursuit of a deal.

2011 will see further development of these niche networks based on geographies, culture and industry. You can see this development happening with the launch of more exclusive social networks like Namesake, Quora and Path.

7) Globalization of social commerce

More than half of the Asian-Americans living in the US today were born in their native country. Melting pot Americans use applications like Skype to maintain their connection, but getting products they grew up with is still done by overseas shipment from relatives (personal note: we get CARE packages from Japan all the time). The next frontier for social commerce could be descriptively coined Cost Plus World Market 2.0. Overseas trading firms / commerce entrepreneurs can source timely products at lower prices mirroring native country labor costs, utilize just in time shipping and warehousing systems, and market via their global cultural social network systems. This is not an iterative variant of global, undifferentiated trading marketplaces like eBay or Alibaba, it’s a new window of opportunity for building the next set of global commerce properties that focus on very specific sets of customers. Here’s a good example of a social commerce site for Indian women – Exclusively.in

8 ) And obviously, location based apps will drive social commerce

I saved mobile commerce for last just because it’s the most obvious, and the trends have been well documented and recognized. Here are some of the things that consumers can already do on a location based app:

Check-ins are being monetized with deals and other perks on every LBS. But we all know that.                                                                                       .

The Christmas 2010 shopping season goes down as the year of the in-store price check. The store is now the showroom, and the phone app the cash register.

Here’s what’s coming in the future:

Mobile device as credit card. Obvious to anybody who knows mobile services in Europe and Asia.                                                                             .

Local shopping search in real time. Couldn’t find that sold out product at Best Buy? Apps will provide real time inventory to find what you need.

Extend real time demand based applications across other industries beyond retail – hotels, airlines, concerts. Looking for a hotel room at 10pm? The new apps will find you a good deal, mainly because any hotel inventory at 10pm is open for negotiation.

Related articles:

10 Media Predictions for 2010 – 12/17/09

How did I do? Reviewing 2010 – based on 2009 Media Predictions

10 Trends in Social Media 2009 – 1/1/09

The dark side of the Daily Deals phenomenon manifests in three main problems vendors have with Groupon:

• Groupon can overwhelm small merchants when it sells too many coupons. How can a Chicago nail salon accommodate 5,100 new coupon holders?
• Groupon depresses profit margins. Obviously deep discount coupons are marketing loss leaders for local retailers. On a corporate scale, it’s quite possible that the big Groupon deals like the nationwide $25 for $50 worth of Gap gear might significantly hit Gap’s earnings. Never mind that the loss might be a wash with lower marketing costs, in the end the consumer perception of retail prices dropped 50%.
• Retailers bemoan the rise of Groupon and the deal sites because they inculcate a culture of “don’t buy retail”. Everything can be negotiated. Brands become diluted as they become perceived as deep discounters and new customers tend to be non-loyal price shoppers.

Here are ten more Groupon problems by Kevin Eklund.

Solution

Retailers have no solution to the new “don’t buy retail” culture because the cat is out of the bag. Although certain types of business can maintain a service proposition – medical, legal, professional – that can’t be commoditized, retailers are now in face to face conflict with their most cherished mantra- ” never compete on price”.

The combination of the recession’s low consumer demand and depressed retail margins will force retailers to change the coupon game in the following ways:

• The budget for couponing will grow at the expense of other marketing and advertising channels. Coupons are performance based and their instant campaign feedback is easier to assess and more accountable than figuring out the ROI and CPM for a banner ad campaign.
• Many local retailers will stop going with massive Groupon campaigns in favor of more controlled couponing campaigns by local coupon systems. This will allow the retailer to test various campaign ideas without the risk of oversell. The key factor for the retailer is in assessing how a service performs in delivering coupons to their target local audience, and a local service may be more efficient and less costly.
• Coupon campaigns will look to scale. The big national campaigns, and even regional campaigns are far more profitable and easier to manage for Groupon. Brand retailers like the Gap will be able to negotiate these attractive deals and play Groupon, LivingSocial and other systems off each other.
• Retailers will demand lower pricing than the standard 40-50% of coupon face value that Groupon charges. From a retailer point of view, a coupon delivered to the same local customer with a couponing service that charges a 30% fee is better than one that charges 50%. Although the service may have smaller coupon distribution, they can run deals more often.
• Discounted offers must be validated with good crowdsourced reputation, or they will be perceived suspiciously as a cry for new business. Retailers will understand that maintaining coupon campaigns will require consistently good Yelp reviews because buying coupons is a site unseen decision.

UPDATE: 9/16/10: This article is intended to address some of the criticism that accompanies the Daily Deals movement that Groupon sparked. Readers of this blog would know that I support this movement. It is revolutionizing local marketing by creating a performance based metric for advertisers. I believe Groupon is the front runner in developing a real time localized transactional system that will eventually cover hotel rooms, concert tickets and airplane seats by addressing the need for selling off perishable goods and services at the last minute.

That said, based on comment on my Facebook page, I do think the Groupon / Gap deal was a huge success because it put Groupon on the map, and tipped consumer sentiment to the obvious value proposition of online coupon advertising. Yes, the Daily Deals movement does depress retail margins, but it’s inevitable. Intermediation is what the Internet does best.

Groupon‘s nationwide rollout of $25 for $50 worth of Gap merchandise got a lot of mainstream media airplay and sold 441,000 Groupons, netting $11 million. The net effect is the mainstream buzz that introduces Groupon to America. The “daily deal” is becoming institutionalized as the advertising medium most compatible with the Great Recession.

Here is what the Groupon + Gap deal will spark:

• More national deals. Think Office Depot, Best Buy, Home Depot, or Apple Stores where the sale of higher ticket items over $100 can justify a $25 for $50 deal. Groupon and other coupon players can layer on national deals on a limited basis so they don’t alienate their local business client base.
• National and regional retail chains now have a medium for brand revival. Can a loss leader Groupon strategy create enough traffic to generate supplementary sales, or even stave off seasonal financial problems from the one time coupon receipts?
• Shopping malls and local business associations can now systematically round robin “daily deals” among their stores in order to deliver foot traffic.
• The spawning of national deals that don’t require redemption at the physical retail level. Think infomercial products, Dell PCs and other electronics, and odd lot inventory.

Groupon has shown they are more than just a local restaurant play, and it’s frankly more market efficient to produce one national Gap campaign to complement the hundreds/thousands of local campaigns they do daily as their bread and butter.

One fallout about the Gap campaign is the prospect that everybody will be wearing the same Gap clothes this fall!

Techcrunch posted this video interview in which Twitter product manager Shiva Rajaraman discusses how Twitter using its @earlybird couponing channel can work with brands to offer perishable deals on the fly (something we discussed last week):

At first blush, Twitter faces three hurdles:

1. @earlybird is positioned as another Groupon/LivingSocial/BuywithMe/etc., and couponing is becoming commoditized. So far, @earlybird hasn’t differentiated itself to be anything other than a Groupon clone.
2. Brands can leverage Twitter (the platform) itself to develop perishable deal opportunities; companies or ad agencies don’t need to contract with Twitter for additional advertising leverage, they can contract more efficiently with the appropriate media channel. Twitter remains the platform but isn’t necessarily the ad distribution media. For example, real time perishable deals, like same day hotel rooms or air travel, or concert tickets, are generally localized opportunities. It makes more sense to work with hyperlocal media channels and their Twitter feeds to offer these kinds of deals to a market.
3. Following up on 2), Twitter and @earlybird are essentially national channels. @earlybird will be best positioned to offer deals for global, not local coverage. Although Rajaraman offers examples on how brands can potentially create on the fly campaigns, it’s hard to imagine any ad agency or corporation being able to sign off quickly on an instant national deals. Again, on the fly deals work best on a local level.

Couponing exploded the first half of 2010, driven in part by Groupon’s big VC investment. Coupons.com reported almost double the revenues from the first half of 2010 over previous year. PromotionalCodes.org.uk published a forecast on mobile applications and couponing (click twice on graphic to enlarge) that predicts consumer spending on mobile coupon will grow from $90 million in 2009 to $6.5 billion in 2014.

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”.

Thanks to the growing buzz of local couponers Groupon and its cohorts, consumers are being exposed to and adopting the deep discount coupon opportunities in their neighborhoods. The next step in the evolution of local coupon advertising is aggregating all the coupons and displaying them in lists and on maps. The one stop shop approach compiles daily deals so consumers don’t need to subscribe to each individually via email, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The newest and best example of local coupon aggregation launched last week in TheDealMap, a  service by the Center’d group:

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.