I just had a fantastic exchange with a business owner in Eau Claire, Wisconsin that really got my juices flowing. It was a follow up to my blog post the other day about social shopping. Sherry Mohr owns a Ford/Lincoln/Mercury dealership in Eau Claire and she was asking my opinion on how to reach people who are, well, who are hard to reach. Here is the conversation that took place over the course of a few emails. From: SherryDate: May 12, 2010To: Larry WeintraubSubject: social media article in imedia connection Good Morning, I read your article on the Day Spa and the expansion of localize marketing "deals". I am going to take you up on your offer to email you. My concern and question:My husband and I purchased our first business 6 years ago and moved to Eau Claire, WI and renamed our business Eau Claire Ford Lincoln Mercury. We just launched a real time online service scheduling on our web site which involves the option of texting or emailing a reminder for the customers. We also started in Nov a Facebook page which I have been trying to commit to a posting of twice a week and soft more informal communications. We... Read more
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Tags: eau claire ford, imedia, sherry mohr, Social Media, tips
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The Next Big Thing
Social Shopping.
It's exploding.
And it is evolving quickly.
A year ago if you had asked me about social shopping I would have pointed you to Amazon and told you that the product reviews from actual buyers were examples of social shopping. Six months ago I would have told you about shopping aggregation websites like Kaboodle which allow you to view, comment, and receive deals from multiple retailers. Two weeks ago I would have told you about the new Facebook integration into websites like Levi's "Friend Store" and how you can see what your friends like. And today. Well today I'd tell you it's all about what I call the Discount Crowdsourced Shopping Experience (DCSE) being powered by Groupon, Living Social, Gilt, Blackboard Eats, Wines Til Sold Out (WTSO) and more.
I'll give you a quick glossary-like description on each referenced DCSE at the end of this post, but first let me explain what this is.
A few months back I wrote a post about a new business ready to take off. What I described there was the advancement of location-based applications like Foursquare, Gowalla, and MyTown... Read more
Tags: blackboard eats, dcse, discount crowdsourced shopping experience, gilt, groupon, kaboodle, levis, living social, social shopping, wtso
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PlumberSpace
I was on a panel recently and I got asked the question, "Now that our mom's are on Facebook, will we still use it?"
My answer is that yes, for the moment, we will continue to use Facebook. But we're all a little more guarded now, aren't we? Remember what happened when mom got on MySpace? We all fled to Facebook. Now mom is on Facebook and we're all fleeing to Twitter. Mom will be Tweeting a lot sooner than she was friending on MySpace and Facebook. Mom is catching up fast!
The bigger picture is this. We're building bigger social networks and getting farther and farther away from the people we really want to talk to. When Facebook first started, it was a place for just college kids to talk to other college kids. You were privileged to be part of this network. I had an intern show me what it was like to be on Facebook and I admit, I was quite jealous. Facebook was a response to MySpace, which had gotten way too big, too crowded, and in the words of those college kids, too annoying. Facebook was theirs.
Ask a college kid today if... Read more
Tags: Facebook, myspace, plumberspace, social networks, twitter
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