IP Carrier

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Will Groupon Really Boost Your Local Business?

Groupon, the group shopping or social coupon business, might or might not increase near term profits for a business that uses it. Offers are designed to get people "in the door" who might not have shopped at a particular establishment before.

Groupon gets people into your shop, but it doesn’t keep them there, necessarily. Also, a retailer has to weigh the higher traffic with the reduced gross margins a discount implies. All of that means a Groupon campaign will boost revenue, but not profit, in the near term.

The best feature of a Groupon experience is the exposure. It will boost your website, blog and social media traffic, which will lead to more signups, likes and follows. This is what you’re paying for when you’re running a Groupon.

Will Groupon Really Boost Your Local Business? | Social Media Examiner

People Would Give Up Their TVs Before Their Mobile Phones

The Social Habit 2011 by Edison Research

View more presentations from webby2001

Twitter is a Mobile App

Though only 13 percent of online adults use Twitter, more than half of Twitter users access the service on a mobile phone, researchers at the Pew Internet & American Life Project report.

As of May 2011, 13 percent of online adults use the status update service Twitter. That represents a significant increase from the eight percent of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users in November 2010.1

The study also found that 54 percent of Twitter users access the service from their mobiles.

Main Report | Pew Internet & American Life Project

Tech Bubble?

Some continue to insist there is no tech bubble. But some who used to think there was no bubble are starting to worry. Though most companies on public markets remain fairly valued, there is pent up demand for growth stories. Oddly enough, the sluggishness of the rest of the economy, and the lack of growth, is going to heighten interest in the coming wave of application-driven initial public offerings. See Let’s Not Get Too Cocky About The Blubble.

Still, it is worth noting that even bubbles are spurred by genuine change in the computing business. Bill Gates famuosly acknowledged that he "didn't get the Internet." Now former Google CEO Eric Schmidt candidly says he missed the social revolution, aside from writing memos that were not followed by vigorous action. See http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/01/eric-schmidt-is-a-surprisingly-worried-man/.

That's the sort of big miss by an industry leader that fuels a new wave of computing innovation, and typically is lead by new firms. But we tend to overshoot. Always. So expectations for most of the coming application IPOs will be excessive.