Since its launch in 2008, Groupon has been celebrated, imitated, and criticized. Daily deals were already popular (think Woot.com daily deals and the popularity with technogeeks). However, Groupon created a niche and set the stage for local daily deals that could appeal to the city masses. It was so different that Groupon’s daily deal offering has been labeled a disruptive business model. Many lookalike sites like LivingSocial, Google Offers, and BuyWithMe have emerged creating a competitive market. Even so, Groupon and LivingSocial command about 90% of the daily deal market share.

To stay ahead of the competition, Groupon has evolved from simply offering one local daily deal to offering multiple deals in cities big and small. Now, it’s going to take more than simple, city-based segmentation to engage the Groupon customer base. Below you’ll find my top 3 ways Groupon can capitalize on customer segmentation to drive business.

1. Drive customers to personalize their deals. Did you know you could fill out your profile on Groupon so you can personalize the deals that are sent to you? No? Neither did I. Turns out Groupon began personalizing deals in 2010. Surprisingly, they don’t heavily push their existing or new customers to complete their profile in its entirety. If Groupon wants to build database information for segmentation, they’re going to need to drive their customers to provide this information. They need to guide registrants to fully fill out their profile – and possibly offer further segmentation opportunities through progressive profiling.

2. Customers love to give feedback, so ask for it. When you love a deal, you buy it. But what about when the customer doesn’t like the deal? Couldn’t Groupon collect information in order to understand why an individual doesn’t want a deal? A real-time feedback mechanism could help Groupon source new offerings AND begin to personalize an individual’s experience. By offering ways for individuals to actively ‘skip’ or ‘vote down’ a deal and provide feedback, Groupon could begin omitting irrelevant offers based on past feedback.

3. Don’t just ask customers what they want. Sometimes a customer doesn’t know what they want. Groupon could mine the purchasing data to start to understand the individual’s preferences, offering similar categories, offers, and discount levels. They could even incorporate email open and click rates to understand what offers are resonating with that particular customer.

Groupon has been wildly successful since its launch, but in order to continue to lead this competitive local daily deals market, they will need to become data-driven and drive the effectiveness of their offers. After all, the founding principal was all about group activity; doesn’t it make sense that Groupon’s success could come through the effective grouping of their customers?

My latest book obsession is a little different: it’s called The Happiness Project. I borrowed the nonfiction title from a friend on a whim. At first I was a little skeptical about reading a book ‘without a story’; but as I progressed through the book, I couldn’t put it down.

Now, if you know me, you may be groaning. “Does she really need to be any happier?” Yes, I’m a positive and upbeat person by nature and yes, I do need to be happier. And so do you.

The premise of the book: We’re in danger of wasting our lives. The author has this epiphany on a New York bus. Was she focusing on the things that really matter, or was she just letting time pass her by? And why are you always left thinking of the ‘good old days’ – why can’t we realize that today is a ‘good day’?

The book is a great compilation of happiness wisdom of the ages, some you may already know, some you may not realize you already know, and some that you really should know!

Ultimately, she comes up with her Four Splendid truths. They are:
1) If I want to be happier, I need to look at my life and think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right in an atmosphere of growth.
2) One of the best ways to make myself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy myself.
3) The days are long but the years are short.
4) If I think I’m happier, I am happier.

You’ll find you have your own truths, and your own commandments to live by. Here are a few of mine:

• Say thank you more than you should
• Pay it forward
• Say hello to passers-by
• Just breathe
• Smile
• And, taking a tip from the author: Be Brandi.

If you don’t have time to read the book, check out the Happiness Project Blog. There’s plenty of short stories you can draw happiness from there!

What are your commandments you live by?

P.S. Yes, I know it has been 144 days since my last blog post. Possible New Year’s resolution that will make me happier?

Oh, and I finally used Prezi for this presentation. It was really easy, and I’m hoping it makes the presentation a little more engaging. On the downside, it doesn’t seem to embed on a wordpress.com blog, but it’s still pretty cool!

Social Media Infographics on Prezi

You may recall from my previous post that I’ve been using social media as much as possible in planning my Florida destination wedding. Case in point – Amanda Suanne Photography. I had come across her name in my research, and happened to know someone who was standing up in a wedding in Florida. She mentioned that her friend’s engagement pictures were awesome – and the rest is history.

Here are a few of our favorites (more here). Hope you like them as much as we do! And thanks for allowing me to share my show-and-tell.

Image from andrewcaswell's flickr photostream

Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard many references to social media marketing – from praise to criticism. Listening to the conversation, I’ve come to a final conclusion: social media is NOT about the tools. You don’t get started by setting up a company Twitter account or your Facebook Fanpage.

How do you start? Monitoring.

Almost every conversation I have about social media immediately turns to a specific tool. The crutch for understanding the concept is focusing on the tools and how they work rather than the real question: Does social media make sense for my business?

The lightbulb went off for me. Whether you love social media or question the concept, you owe it to yourself and your business to start monitoring. That will guide strategy and, ultimately, the tactics and tools.

Monitoring doesn’t tie you to social media. In fact, no one even has to know you’re doing it. You don’t even have to do it in a formal manner. But you SHOULD have an idea of what’s being said about your brands in the social media. What’s being said about your brands? Where? How are your consumers interacting and using social media? Is anyone even talking about you? You should know how social media impacts your business.

Now, off my soapbox, and here are a few ideas to get started:

Begin by developing an initial list of keywords you want to begin monitoring. It could include your company name or brands, or maybe product categories, industry terms or thought leaders. You may also want to start monitoring your competition. As you monitor, you’ll start to see how customers talk about you and additional keywords will begin to make sense. Don’t forget common misspellings or slang terms!

Then, use some of the various free tools to begin monitoring. Many allow you to save the searches, so monitoring is as simple as opening the program and reviewing the new results every day (those are my favorite!). Here are a few sites or tools you can use:

• General Monitoring: Social Mention, Addictomatic
• Twitter: Hootsuite, Seesmic, Tweetdeck, Top Follow Friday, Twitter Search
• Blogs and Web: Google Alerts, Technorati

There are tons – and if you already monitor, what are you favorites?

I wanted to share the basic outline of my presentation. Feel free to use elements, and I would suggest providing specific examples of how the slides apply to your company. (P.S. this is my first presentation on SlideShare – it was so easy to use!)

I look forward to hearing your feedback!

I also need to thank and give credit to some people and organizations that I borrowed some content ideas from:
Hubspot, Marta Kagan, and MarketingSherpa.

No marketing communications professional looks forward to the day they must navigate a company crisis. Toyota’s recent floor mat and sticky pedal safety recalls are the most recent examples of balancing damage control with open communications. The safety recalls and Toyota’s subsequent responses open the potential for major damage to their strong brand built on safe, reliable, high-quality vehicles.

Meeting the challenge head-on, Toyota launched a comprehensive PR strategy to address the situation openly and honestly. Their website, www.toyota.com/recall, includes updates on what’s being done to address the problems and has videos with more information for consumers—such as what to do if they experience trouble braking.

Adding to the open dialogue, Jim Lentz, President & CEO of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., apologizes to customers in a video on the site, closing by saying: “Once again, I apologize for the situation and I hope you’ll give us the chance to earn back your trust.”

The newly released television commercial echoes his sincere words, telling a story of commitment and painting a picture that highlights 172,000 Toyota employees’ dedication.

But will this campaign be enough to calm consumers after months of bad news? It took nearly 10 days for Toyota to launch this response strategy, and consumer perception has dropped to a new low. If they hope to uphold their brand values, Toyota must avoid additional crises and continue to create open and honest dialogue to fuel positive brand momentum.

What do you think? Can Toyota restore the faith in their company?

Yesterday I ran across another reason to love Nike+. I decided to end my 3-month running hiatus and start incorporate running into my workout routine again. My first run was slow, but it felt great!

Of course, I took my trusty iPod Nano and logged my run with the Nike+ system.  I returned from the run and immediately plugged my iPod into my computer so I could let all my Facebook and Twitter friends see what I’d done. Then I went to the Nike+ website to review my run.

I didn’t expect what I saw: there was a screen congratulating me on great 2009! It had a list of my accomplishments and stats:

• I ran a total of 173 miles
• I burned 12,834 calories
• My average pace was 8:43/mi
• Most of my runs were ‘Awesome’
• I ran the most on Mondays
• I usually ran in the mornings

How cool is that? Share on Facebook? Why yes, yes I will! I would’ve never known these accomplishments if I hadn’t had Nike+.

My new motivation? I have to beat my 2009 numbers!

My 2009 Running Rundown

Step 1: Define Strategy
This is the part where you have to prove: Why Twitter? Twitter was a good fit for our company for a few major reasons: Our competitors were active, our customers were present and talking about us, and it would be a good channel to expand communication and participate in the conversation.  Twitter can be used for communications, customer support, thought leadership or promotions. If you’re not 100% sure which strategy will work best, don’t worry.  Your community will drive you to what they want.

Step 2: Monitor
Through the initial research for strategy, I set up searches in Twitter so I could keep an eye on what people were saying. I found industry leaders and key customers on Twitter so I could see what they were talking about and what they were saying about us. I monitored what the competition did and what people were saying about them. I truly think this is one of the most important parts of social media, and proving active communities piques management’s interest.

Step 3: Educate
Start spreading the news! Oftentimes, you’ll have to present, explain and evangelize Twitter – it’s not always easy for your company’s stakeholders to understand. I really did Steps 1-3 simultaneously, leading to…

Step 4: Gain Buy-in and Write the Plan
When I knew things were catching on, I started tying together the monitoring and strategy into a formal plan, addressing the concerns you’ve come across in the process. Make sure you have everything in Step 5 and 6 outlined so that it’s easy to implement once you have signoff!

Step 5: Build an Editorial Calendar and Crisis Plan
Once you’ve brought everything together and gained the buy-in, make sure you have developed a crisis plan to tackle negative comments. For us, it was making sure I had a chain of command with backups so I could quickly address questions that I may not be able to answer myself. I also built a 90-day editorial calendar to prove we had enough content to provide value, keep the content fresh and slowly generate conversation.

Step 6: Build Your Profile
Now comes the fun part! You should have everything specified for your profile, including your profile name, webpage you plan to link to, a short bio and a background to pretty up your page!

Step 7: Posting and Profile Management
Start posting! You’ll probably want to find a tool to use to manage your account and track your posting. One that I use is Hootsuite. It has a built-in URL shortener, it’s easy to track clicks on your URLs and very easy to set up your monitoring  - so everything is in one spot!

Step 8: Promote
Emails, press releases, websites, email signatures… include Twitter in everything so you build your network! You can also use lots of widgets to cross-post your Twitter content to your websites, blogs, Facebook pages, etc.

Step 9: Engage
Now that you’ve posted, start engaging. Begin responding to those that are posting about your company – both good and bad. You’ll be surprised how quickly the negative comments are turned around!

Step 10: Repeat
Start over. Reassess and continue to tweak processes. Continue to engage. Your customers will let you know what information they want from you. This isn’t a one-time deal – this is an ongoing investment in your customer community.

I’m not one for resolutions, but I am a planner. I’m always looking ahead, always planning. However, this year’s a little strange. No milestone birthdays. No big life events.

When I look back on the year, I’ve accomplished so much. I’m nearly halfway done with graduate school. I’m an active participant and volunteer for great professional groups (Chicago American Marketing Association and Chicago Social Media Club). I’ve immersed myself in social media and I love it. On a personal note, I got engaged to the man who I think is the best guy in the world.

So what do I do? Do I coast?

I spent a lot of time thinking, and I don’t think so. I think 2010 is my year to push the limits. I’m setting the bar a little higher. Care to join me?