With Facebook Deals and Google Offers launching the exact same service as Groupon (and have been tagged “Groupon Killers“), pundits are questioning Groupon’s sustainability and market share. Deals have become commodities, and Groupon will certainly lose market share simply due to the growing volume of deals being distributed by a wider array of publishers. So [...]

– Groupon is now offering topic specific deals, and unveiled its first real estate deal last Friday with a $25 coupon redeemable for $1,000 cash at transaction closing. With over 163 sold over four days of a one week deal, Groupon validated the concept that home buyers and sellers will pay a nominal fee of [...]

— Groupon-like deals can work for real estate, but not as a typical $10 for $20 worth of product purchase. Real estate can’t be sold as a 30% off purchase price item (although they certainly tried variations of this at California real estate investment clubs in 2005). Real estate marketing has generally relied on variations [...]

– On my media blog last October, I explored the idea of real time deals, which requires consumption of a daily deal within a limited time frame. Merchants with perishable products – seats at a restaurant, theaters, hotel rooms, airlines – want a deals system that quickly and efficiently fills excess inventory, especially at a moment’s [...]

Mass media publishers have always lagged in leveraging new opportunities that the Internet exposes. Just as the Internet undercut the value of the news and content they sourced and delivered through their media pipeline, Groupon has demonstrated a vibrant new way to capture the local advertiser that were once their domain. In reaction, mass media [...]

AOL’s acquisition of the Huffington Post firmly entrenches AOL as a journalistic media endeavor eye-to-eye with Gannett, Murdoch and, gasp, the other newspapers. What is strikingly different about Huffington Post is that content is sourced from celebrities – politicians, actors, college professors, locals – and not from the ivory news desks that still embody the [...]

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Patrick Kitano, Principal of the Domus Consulting Group. Social commerce won’t be just the playground of Internet giants Groupon, Google and Facebook. White label social commerce platform providers will allow any publishing entrepreneur to easily build social buying applications. In my previous post, I discussed how [...]

– The term “social commerce” was rarely discussed until Groupon’s massive 1/2 off coupon they sold for the Gap last August: Social media provides everybody with a voice. Social media however changed the rules of commercial engagement by discounting, even denigrating the sales pitch; it changed the focus of online marketing from direct advertising to [...]

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Patrick Kitano, Principal of the Domus Consulting Group. Before Groupon, the local advertising dollar was spent primarily on local media – newspapers, TV and radio – and the well documented stagnation in media ad revenues put a lid on employment opportunities for local sales reps.  Groupon, [...]