Here’s a quote from Zuckerberg:

One thing that I think is really important — that I think is context for this, is that I generally think that most other companies now are undervaluing how important social integration is. Right, so even the companies that are starting to come around to thinking, ‘oh maybe we should do some social stuff’, I still think a lot of them are only thinking about it on a surface layer, where it’s like “OK, I have my product, maybe I’ll add two or three social features and we’ll check that box”. That’s not what social is. Social is. You have to design it in from the ground up. These experiences like what Zynga is doing or what a company like Quora is doing, I think that they have just a really good social integration. They’ve designed their whole product around the idea that your friends will be here with you. Everyone has a real identity for themselves. And those are fundamental building blocks. Now, I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get the mobile environments that you see today to a state where you can build really robust social applications on top of it. So that’s the biggest driving force for us — to try to work with these folks and see how deep we can get on our own to make sure that we can build that plumbing. Our goal is to make it exist.

The key take (away in case you missed my obvious bold of the lines above ) is that if you’re building something today, whether it be a new website, consumer driven software, or heck – even thinking about building a company in 2010, you need to be thinking about building it from the ground up as a social site/piece of software/product/service/enterprise.

It’s not good enough anymore to strap a social layer on to what you’re already doing. Building social in is as important as having a name, number, and a website address. It’s got to be baked right in.

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• the sheer volume of business from the group of consumers

• the exposure, both through the consumers themselves and the word-of-mouth buzz if the experience was good

The method for setting up such a deal is through a broker of the service itself.  These companies operate by signing companies up to offer a deal to their subscribers, and then taking a cut of the deal to make a profit.  Enter the core of the group buying phenomenon: the group buying website.

Group buying websites (such as Groupon, featured in my post earlier this week) were started in big, social media savvy cities with a city-wide scope.  Since then, they have spread to nearly every urban centre in North America and Europe.  Not only that, the trend shows no sign of slowing down or becoming yesterday’s fad.  In fact, the coupon conoisseur has a range of options, with many cities represented by multiple deal-brokering group buying websites.

Here are a few players in what has become a very saturated market.  Deal lovers should have more than their fill of discounts after signing up for a few of these services:

• Groupon
• Citydeal (operated in Europe; subsequently bought out by Groupon)
• Shnoop
• Grooster
• CheapToday
• LivingSocial
• Tippr
• OfferMint
• DealOn
• Offermatic
• 8Coupons
• StealTheDeal
  

The group buying concept has proven to be so popular with consumers that there is even a website where you can sell your unused coupons – CoupRecoup.com claims to be the Craigslist of Groupons, so consumers can buy coupons that are sold out, or that they didn’t  purchase before the deadline.

Group buying sites are here to stay – particularly with the young, newly-affluent professional urban crowd.  Part of the success of the concept is the willingness of businesses to offer deals in exchange for large-scale exposure.  Knowing that the population segments they are going to reach are actively looking for interesting venues, these businesses offer great deals that they hope will generate regular customers, as well as a lot of word-of-mouth advertising.  Young urbanites in turn love the selection of hip, new places to choose from, and purchase coupons.  As more and more of this demographic continues to sign up, the draw for young or little-known businesses becomes even greater, and selling a coupon becomes a more integral part of their advertising strategy – and so on, and so forth.

In short, if you’re a city-dweller looking for fun – look no further than group-bought coupons; if you’re a small business owner looking for cheap exposure, group coupons should be part of your marketing strategy.

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Are you ready?

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Just before Christmas I updated my voicemail message to something along the lines of: “…text or email me rather than leaving a message as I receive these much quicker than messages…” For the actual msg call 778.899.5423.

The idea to do this came from the realization that certain friends were no longer returning messages and the realization that I too found myself taking days in some cases to check voicemail. Texts and emails however, are responded to almost immediately.

I then came across people discussing the same thing in Twitter and decided a new trend had emerged.

The fact is, people are getting used to consuming smaller and smaller pieces of information and in quicker time frames. Texts, emails sent via mobile devices and services such as Twitter (which limits posts to 140 characters) are forcing us to cut out the waste and get to the point.

The question for 2009 is: how can you take this insight and work it into the sales, marketing, and customer service sides of your business?

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It’s interesting to see Darren strike off in a new direction after the tremendous amount of work he’s put into Problogger.net. His most recent post discusses his switch from focusing on 2 main blogs to launching a new site and what the pro’s might be of starting a new venture. It’s worth a read.

There and back again comes to mind for you Tolkein fans….

On a related note see adamkillam tweets <- here.

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