“The most effective coupons aren’t the ones that save you money on things you’d buy anyway; they’re the ones that come from out of nowhere, giving you license to buy something you otherwise wouldn’t.”

–Matt Schwartz, writer for Wired, paraphrasing Groupon founder Andrew Mason’s view of coupons

Okay, okay, you’ve heard the news.  Google offered $6 billion to Groupon, which is something like 12 days old but has 5 billion customers.

Point of advice #1: if someone offers you $6B, take it (I’m kidding, of course—always double down and hold out for more)

Point of advice #2:  If you’re a marketer at a mass brand—and no one is offering you $6B so you can call in rich tomorrow— it’s worth your while to understand why Google is offering $6B for Groupon. Read More »

If Black Friday is any indication, consumers are feeling less Scrooge-y this holiday season than in recent years.  According to the National Retail Federation, 212 million American shoppers pointed their cars or their web browsers to stores over the long weekend following Thanksgiving – a 9% bump over 2009’s 195 million shoppers.  And most people were in a spending mood, opening their wallets to the tune of $365 per person as compared to last year’s $343 for an estimated total of $45 billion between Thursday and Sunday.  comScore reports another $1 billion was spent online on Cyber Monday – 16% more than on the same day in 2009.

In addition to crazy discounts and shopper stampedes, Black Friday also provided an array of creative promotional activity by top retailers.  While television and print circulars factored big in advertisers’ budgets, social media shouldered a growing responsibility in encouraging shoppers to spend spend spend. Read More »

As a blogger, former PR professional and (college) journalist, I spend a fair amount of time following arguments over the future of journalism, and, more broadly, of “professional content”. With the internet opening the floodgates of competition, how can competent journalism survive? If an amateur blogger is willing to do your job for free, who’s to stop them? Who’s going to cover boring (but important) subjects like city council meetings? Who’s going to keep people honest with long-form investigative journalism?

All decent questions, and ones we don’t have answers to yet. But lost in the endless back and forth debate over the topic is the evidence that a few web media outlets have figured out pieces of this puzzle, and some are even profiting.

This is a little off MLC’s beaten path, but with more and more media consumption moving to the web, marketers have as much skin in this debate as anyone else. So here are five web properties that are thriving in today’s media environment, and delivering some value to marketers, as well: Read More »

MLC’s research has established that one way B2B companies differentiate themselves in areas other than price is by insight marketing: creating content that conveys credible and provocative insight into the customers’ world, and demonstrates how the your unique differentiators ultimately solve a customer’s business objectives.

If content is king, how do you get your customers to stay tuned in? After all, this is an era of fragmented attention: we have thousands of media outlets and advertisers vying for our eyes, especially on the web. Every week, dozens of interesting business books are published, and for busy executives, to-read stacks get higher and higher. For years, content producers have been told to go with the flow: assume your audience’s attention span is close to zero, and make your content snappy enough to be read quickly. Read More »

Last month, the Altimeter Group, a social media consultancy, released a report titled “The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing” – a set of common behaviors and attributes of corporate Facebook pages that they correlated with a high degree of social media success. Here are the eight criteria: Read More »

Marketing is about creativity, punchy language, and ad campaigns, right?  Not in social media. This post summarizes 5 outdated marketing beliefs and offers quick tips for adapting to the new world of ‘unmarketing.’ Read More »

Surely you’ve seen the TV ads. Ex-football player Isaiah Mustafa, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” taking his audience from a bathroom, to a sailboat, to a beach scene on horseback, all the while spouting an absurd, deadpan hyper-masculine monologue. It’s great advertising, a campaign that I think has helped shift Old Spice’s image away from “little white bottle in my grandfather’s medicine cabinet” to “cool, masculine scent that [young] women love.”

Now they’ve gone and outdone themselves, with a social media campaign that might be better than the TV spots. Last week, our Old Spice hero began making personalized videos for bloggers, Web celebrities, and a few average web users. Notable examples include a get-well message to Digg founder Kevin Rose, political punditry in response to George Stephanopolous, and a hilarious response to the Yahoo! Answers question “How many teeth do sharks have?”. Read More »

One of my favorite reads in the social marketing blogosphere is John Mack’s Pharma Marketing Blog. While John covers pharmaceutical marketing across all channels, his posts on social media present a nuanced look at the unique challenges pharma and other regulated industries face when trying to make headway in the space. Particularly interesting are the surveys he occasionally does of pharma marketers. Add him to your RSS reader, if you haven’t already; he’s also on Twitter here. 

John posted a thought-provoking interesting survey a few weeks back, asking pharma marketers what they thought the most important elements of a social media implementation plan were, particularly in the event of a crisis.  Read More »

Best Buy’s Twitter-based customer service tool has created a lot of buzz over the last year. We asked John Bernier, Best Buy’s Social Media Steward, what makes it work behind the scenes. John is the Digital Product Line Manager and Social Media Steward at Best Buy. He develops digital products and tools for Best Buy employees and customers, while shepherding social media initiatives, such as Twelpforce.  He has worked at Best Buy since 2004, playing a variety of roles in marketing communications and marketing strategy. We spoke to him early last month. Read More »

As marketers try to get their companies back on a path to growth, bets on innovation—be it product, service, or other—are top of mind for most of us.  Unfortunately, when we ask how approaches to innovation are changing in 2010, most marketers default to a “more” strategy—more spending, more experiments, or more time and attention.

As we begin to dig around for some new ideas, Council members have pointed us to an emerging trend: their best ideas are coming from outside the walls of their companies, or at least outside of traditional marketing and R&D functions.  “Outside-the-walls innovation” generally shows up in one of three flavors: Read More »