Groupon Now – an interesting evolution of social purchasing

Over the last couple of years I have been following the “social purchasing” space and have written a number of posts on this topic. Most of them have been about Groupon and have been pessimistic about their long-term leadership position. While Groupon has grown tremendously fast and have gotten astronomical valuations, they were the innovator that defined the space. Today they officially launched a...

3 Reasons Hootsuite Is A Must For Corporate Social Media Teams

When evaluating social media engagement and analytics tools, Hootsuite needs to be in the conversation for 3 main reasons: 1. Secure Social Profiles Hootsuite’s recent launched of Secure Social Profiles is a fantastic new capability that can help prevent “brainless engagement”. Here is how they describe the update: “HootSuite’s new Secure Profiles feature prevents accidental updates by team...

Big 4 Social Media networks suck the oxygen from all the others

When discussing social media marketing $$$ with clients, I am finding that increasingly the Big 4 Social Media Networks (ie. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn) are the ones clients are choosing to focus on. Their rational is simple: Invest in the channels that have the critical mass and get the highest ROI possible. The Big 4 have the critical mass.  While this is probably not the most incredibly insight you...

3 Reasons Groupon turning down $6B was a bad move

Recently the Groupon team turned down a $6b acquisition offer from Google. Waaaay bad move. The Groupon team should have taken the $$$ and jetted to Tahiti for some R&R. A quick background: Groupon is a couponing or target direct marketing  / advertising program and so far they have done a good job. So such a good job, that there are a lot of copycats popping up all over the place….some new companies...

The digital marketing awards are really nice…..though it’s the results that drive business!

Over the last year the (add)ventures Interactive / Technology team has won a variety interactive web awards. Most recently, we won two different Interactive Media Awards (IMA), one for an eCommerce site and the other for a sports event site.  While winning these awards is incredibly rewarding for the information architects, project managers, designers, copywriters and engineers that contributed to these projects,...