by MarkArmitage on February 1, 2011 in Social Commerce
This article is posted by Mark Armitage, Director of Marketing Communications for Socialshopping.com. You’ll find his contact details at the bottom of the post. Following their much-publicized (and ultimately unsuccessful) $6 billion bid to buy Groupon in November of last year, keen observers of the social commerce space anticipated that it was only a matter [...]
by Pat Kitano on December 29, 2010 in Advertising, Hyperlocal, Local advertising, Social Commerce, Social Media, Trends
Yesterday’s news of Groupon’s massive $950 million financing round wasn’t unexpected, and just confirms their intent to build a sales army to dominate SMB business in the same way Yellow Pages held sway over local advertisers in the 20th Century. Morgan Brown explains the new Groupon strategy well: Groupon knows that in order to grow [...]
by Pat Kitano on September 14, 2009 in Mass Media, Newspapers, Publishing, Trends, Web tools
Google Fast Flip launched today to uniformly good reviews because this is an application that should have existed even ten years ago. It’s like a magazine rack display of major press that uses the “like” feature to push the more popular articles up. So why didn’t the packaging of news into a virtual rackspace take [...]
by Pat Kitano on August 25, 2009 in Transparency, Web tools
Google Maps now displays traffic on city arterials: More amazing is the crowdsourcing technique Google is using to capture congestion data: When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of [...]
by Pat Kitano on June 9, 2009 in Twitter, Web tools
At the Twitter Conference #140tc 14 days ago, I asked people in the audience to tweet me in lieu of business cards so I can follow up. So today, I search.twitter my name @pkitano and noted that only the last 12 days are indexed, and the new contacts I made at the conference are now [...]
by Pat Kitano on February 27, 2009 in New business models, Social Media, Social networking, Twitter, Web tools
Techcrunch spotlighted Buzzable and got me an invitation code (“Techcrunch”). Buzzable monitors terms like your company name in real time across Twitter, Google, Digg, etc. using RSS feeds and publishes them in chronological order a la Twitter. The simplicity of its mission is it virtue. First input the search terms to be monitored across various [...]
by Pat Kitano on February 17, 2009 in Advertising, Enterprise, Marketing, New business models, Social Media, Social networking, Trends, Twitter
At this point in the evolution of the social media, pay-to-play runs counter to any social network business model. The wildly popular Twitter will eventually have to break the barrier and declare a revenue model. In December, AdAge offered up a list of 9 ways Twitter can make money: Charge for it Advertising Create a [...]
by Pat Kitano on November 11, 2008 in Advertising, Mass Media, Television, YouTube
Three snippets of recent buzz about Hulu: Hulu has attracted advertisers used to the TV advertising model (Alley Insider 11/10/08) Hulu is easier to use when searching for TV and movies. YouTube is a mess (NYT 11/10/08) YouTube is playing catchup to Hulu by offering brand name content – announces MGM film distribution deal (Wired [...]
by Pat Kitano on October 15, 2008 in Advertising, Facebook, Marketing, Twitter
The social media has opened up the alternative channel for consumer product marketing based on user-generated testimonials. Product review sites like epinions, service review sites like Yelp, and shopping sites like Amazon all qualify consumer purchase decisions. Just like polling data, these review sites have reached critical mass of users to make their wisdom of [...]