Coupons used to be boring, and a lot of work. Think of all those hours spent at the kitchen table searching for the perfect coupon, then searching for the scissors, and then cutting it out. After all that effort you had to stuff it into your already overstuffed wallet only to have a clerk shoot you a dirty look when you handed it over. Luckily we now have sites like Groupon injecting a little fun into the mix. They have taken something old and tired and turned it into a social force, they’ve actually made couponing fun.

Groupon has spread across the US, Canada and Europe. Marketers both big and small are experimenting with the site, trying to learn what catches the crowds’ attention. Global retailers like Gap are featured one day, and then Bob’s Local Deli the next. It’s clear that there is value in Groupon’s proposition, although not for everyone. But how much do we know about what works on Groupon? We looked a little closer at the results for Vancouver and Toronto to see if there was a pattern worth exploring. While not a statistically significant investigation, we did see some interesting results.

There does appear to be a sweet spot when it comes to the Groupon deal. Those promotions that fell between 50-70% off and were up to $25 had the best sign up rates.

Of course not all offers are the same. The GAP offer back in August was hugely successful, it received 8,964 purchases in Toronto alone, but it is a national retailer with lots of pull. How do other categories besides fashion fare? Most offers fall into one of three categories: activity, food/drink or health/beauty. It appears that local activities are on average more popular than deals in the other main categories of food/drink and health/beauty. Groupon could be viewed as a quasi city guide, encouraging people to get out and explore where they live. Or it could be argued that activities tend to have a wider appeal than a particular restaurant or spa. Whatever the reason, marketers can on average expect between 1,115 and 2,324 purchases in their respective categories.

Groupon is still growing and its users are constantly evolving. The patterns we see today will change rapidly, but for now it appears there are some rough parameters for success. If you keep your price below $25 at the 50-70% off mark, you may come out alright.

Gowalla has announced a new feature that will allows users to find places to try based on popular experience rather than where people check in most. Users will be able to share their best place to go for coffee, the best date night locale and more. Essentially, Highlights offers a way for people to find the best places based on experience rather than attendance.

Although the experience categories are not fully flushed out right now, it’s a good step forward. Gowalla is adding another level of engagement to their platform, and it’s one that makes the service a little more human.

It’s great to know where you’re friends are and where they’ve been, but as humans we need more filters than that. In real life, I wouldn’t call up my friends and ask them to list the places they’ve been in the past week. I want to know where they’ve been that they liked, or would recommend. Highlights isn’t perfect, but it’s a tiny step towards making interactions more rooted to our values and needs.

Via Mashable

It turns out having a large network may not be as good for you as you think. The quality of the network can greatly influence your happiness.

Recent research from the Proceedings of the Royal Society showed that happiness and sadness spread in patterns similar to disease. Contact with someone who is either happy or sad can mean you are more likely to exhibit the same emotion. The not-so-good news is that discontent is much more contagious. Misery loves company. More info on the study via Wired

What about our online contacts? Do our online networks follow the same contagious patterns as our offline? If so, all it takes is a few unhappy people to steer others in the same direction. The study looked at the spread of emotions over years, we still don’t know the effects of short term contact or immediate shared events.

Sentiment for Old Spice

The recent Old Spice campaign is a great example of what we don’t know about the short term effects. The campaign is brilliant, but we don’t know how much of the positive sentiment around the campaign is based on pure brilliance, and how much is affected by the positive sentiment of others. If only we could track so easily.

How many windows are open on your screen right now? Do you have TweetDeck or HootSuite, or some other Twitter tool? How many times a day do you check your email/Facebook/text/etc? Can you even guess? I know I can’t.

Lately there has been a lot of attention given to our ever increasing divided attention. Can we actually multitask effectively? How is social media affecting our writing skills? Mr. Shirky and Mr. Carr recently threw into the ring their very different opinions about the internet and intelligence. This is clearly a subject that deserves much discussion and investigation, but I’m not even going to try and venture into that sort of topic right now. Today is about self tests that we attention-scarce multitaskers can actually devote a few minutes too. (more…)

Well I know we told you we would follow up with you shortly on the PS3 error8001050F incident that happened at the end of February but a day after the Playstation Network (PSN) went down…it went back up.

Overnight we saw thousands of Tweets & #hashtags dedicated to the issue.  Facebook status updates in newsfeeds were blazing and Youtube video’s were created, uploaded and hitting a few hundred thousand views within hours.  Most of the chatter was complaint or commentary on the issue.  Then suddenly, the next day as quickly as it began, all the chatter and complaints almost stopped.  There were very few follow up’s on blogs, forum posts dropped like stock on Black Monday and the volume of vicious attacks against PS3 suddenly subsided (except from XBOX’ers).  The reason for the decline was not that everyone forgave PS…but simply “we” went back to playing. (We were also guilty).

SONY stayed pretty quite throughout the whole “down period”.  They rode out the storm for the most part.  SONY Europe did try several times and ways to communicate with customers. The rest of the Playstation world was less proactive in explaining and calming the masses down.  But maybe that was a good thing.  Playstation North America had only minor communications…Twitter being one of the main outlets for information (also two blog posts thrown in as well…see here http://bit.ly/dsKFx5) .  For most users the info was recap’s of what users were getting from other sources.  Many consumers felt that SONY was not being very informative and promised to make them pay for it.

Well pay they did…but it was consumers shelling out gobs of money on new releases and DLC (downloadable content) like CODWW2 map packs.  In fact the PSN network has already sold 1 million map pack extensions, which at $14.99 each is about $15 million dollars worth of punishment.  The release for PS3 of these map-packs is less then a month old.

The moral of the story for Playstation and other video game companies…stay quite, limit the information flow, fix fast, and get people back to playing and the issue will go away.  I personally think they missed a real opportunity to manage the situation a little better, but least they did respond.  A big lesson for SONY was that being present and responding/posting on Social Media platforms did help and that it is pretty important to monitor these spaces.  SONY’s presence did not stop a lot of negative commentary but it did help SONY inform, guide and better understand consumers and the problem.

Bonus Content:

Some classic YOUTUBE video’s that shot up like weeds and then disappeared as quickly as they came up (mostly for copyright issues others just were pulled down).  Interesting if PS paid these guys off to take them down with a few credits at the Sony Store or a promise to give them free CODWW2 map packs

Fat Man Rage:  Pushing 900,000 views when it disappeared.  You can still see a copy of it here: http://bit.ly/bAMaA6

The obligatory Youtube Hitler rant!  had 680,000+ views, but has since been removed for copyright violations.

Now back to gaming!

Copy of PS Tweets:

The 2010 Razorfish Outlook Report is out and, as always, it’s a very interesting read. Every year Razorfish looks back at the media trends and spends from their clients, and then looks forward to make some educated guesses as to possible influences moving forward.

“We analyzed how our clients adapted to the challenging environment, what media proved effective, what didn’t deliver as expected, and how this information can be used to direct successful strategy moving forward.”
Jeremy Lockhorn, VP of emerging media, Razorfish.

This year they’re looking back at the media mix during the worst parts of the recession and found that, despite increased pressure on budgets, many companies actually turned to more brand-focused marketing during the tough times rather than direct response.

Some other key findings from the past year:
-  Clients continued to experiment with new media. Digital out-of-home in particular experienced significant growth, along with ad exchanges, data brokers and social media.
-  Social media, which has exploded in popularity over the past few years, still only garners 4% of average client media spend. However, much of the cost of social media comes in the form of labor, not ad space – an important distinction when analyzing and planning media budgets.

Looking forward:
-  Local online advertising – As the iPad and other similar devices breathe new life into local newspapers, we expect to see an increase in both local display and local search digital advertising
-  In-game advertising – As gaming and social media continues to intertwine with location-based services, the opportunity for brands to provide relevant and meaningful interactions within a game is growing.
-  Digital out-of-home – With growing popularity across the board, retail clients especially are embracing this technology as a way to communicate and connect with consumers in stores.

Remember, these finding are focused largely on Razorfish clients, but they make an interesting barometer for the industry as a whole.

Here’s the link to the entire report, you can read it online or download a PDF.

It’s not often I get warm and fuzzy feelings for big brands like Coca-Cola, but there are exceptions. This video has made the rounds, but as always there are people who haven’t seen it. Posted for them, enjoy.

It just so happens that I am a fan of book clubs. The whole idea of sitting around with friends and some wine and cheese is just fun. But, being able to talk with them about something that doesn’t typically enter into the conversion, such as great/strange/interesting book is amazing. They force you to read books you might not have chosen on your own and think of them from a different point of view. Now what if you could do this on a global scale? That would be really cool.

One Book, One Twitter launched last week. This club is the social media version of the One Book, One City programs that have been very popular in many communities. The aim of this club is to get as many people reading and discussing/tweeting about the same book.

Readers have been voting on the book over the last month and the winning book is a fantasy “American Gods” by Neil Gaiman.

I have to admit I will miss the wine, cheese and occasional gossip, but I’m going to give this book club a try.

I’ve been following the antics of one Johnny Cupcakes for a few years now. This guy impresses like no other, his passion for what he does rivals only Gary Vaynerchuk in my book, and that’s a good thing.

Recently Johnny did something you never see from the face of a company, a throwback to his early days of hustling t-shirts out of his suitcase while on tour with his band. Johnny along with his crew of people have embarked on a “Suitcase Tour” visiting bake shops, galleries and toy stores nation wide. Check the video below for the full story.

So what? Some guy you’ve probably never heard of decides to pack up some t-shirts into an old suitcase and document their antics of all the tour stops along their journey. Why is this important at all? Why take the time? The effort? Proof of how awesome this whole concept is for the JC brand is immediately evident if you watch any of the tour stop videos. The lineups alone show the dedication of people to the cupcakes brand, their love for Johnny and his shirts. But it extends further. People tell their stories about how they first found out about Johnny, how they randomly connected with somebody over a brand of t-shirt. Like VW owners giving each other the friendly nod when they drive past. This brand has captured its fanbase and is actively participating with it, seamlessly, honestly and transparently. Even before the tour you might find Johnny tweeting out and posting to the Facebook page that if you just showed up to a spot that night with a cupcakes shirt on you could get a free icecream sandwich. (see below)

All of this does wonders for the people that love Johnny Cupcakes. The fans are rallied together to create a memorable experience that they’ll share with their friends and family for years to come. That kind of experience is seemingly simple to accomplish with a little bit of planning and the desire to meet with your fans, interact with them and give a part of yourself back. How much is that worth in the end? Johnny success relies heavily on his dedication to his fans. He lives out his brand to everybody doing that requires guts and persistence and you have to admit that seeing what hes accomplished is nothing short of awesome.

Skip on over to the JC blog and watch some videos, get inspired and figure out how this type of thing can be incorporated into the work your doing now. Yet another example of brands who understand their fans.

Dear Facebook,

I can’t speak for everyone in the advertising business, that wouldn’t be fair.
But I will speak for myself and say that I am sorry. I am so, so, so very sorry.

We have abused you. We have treated you like a bar tab on a corporate MasterCard.
We’ve simply gone too far.

I have been judging some awards shows lately, and I have come to realize that we have filled you with millions (perhaps billions) of profiles for every major (and excruciatingly minor) character from every ad campaign on the face of the earth. Don’t get me wrong, there are great examples of agencies treating you well, but too often your role in our work seems to get relegated (in terms of time and budget) to some poor art director creating a fan page at 3am on the night before a campaign launches.  This is not fair to the art director, it’s not fair to the audience, but mostly, it’s not fair to you.

To make amends, I will go on record right now and say that the guy in the oversized hat the background of a spot does not need a fan page. Nor does the flying dog. And nor does the fake company that sells the fake product we invented that’s worse than our client’s product.

I am very sorry.
I will try to do better.

Sincerely,
Jason McCann