Soshima - Connecting is New Selling! . : : . custom social media solution for your business . : : .

When I received the email from Living Social today, which called “Living Social Shop”, I thought to myself – that’s it, they confirmed the change. 
 
Although I myself has been a daily deal lover and advocate, in my conversations with friends, I could not help worrying about its future since its debut.  “What will happen when they run out of deals?” 
 

We still like daily deals, but do admit from time to time, the fatigue is there. It's not hard to notice that these days daily deal industry seems have some difficulties to move forward. ChristChruch-based daily deal site- Qupon.co.nz has been warned of “Bait Advertising” by the Commerce Commission and has taken the company site offline, redirecting all visitors to a maintenance page, and citing technical & operation issues as the cause. Jumponit Australia didn't publish any deals for Melbourne and Perth today, .

Yesterday Australia biggest supermarket chain brand Coles became another major brand to experience a string of hostile comments targeting one of its tweet --- "In my house it’s a crime not to buy….". Although only within one hour, they tried to cover and claim back the original tweet, but it was too late. Twitter users had already started tweets war towards the giant.

Before Coles, Cocacola, Qantas, McDonald, Chrysler all had the similar experience of Social Media rage from users. WHY?

Through my career I met a lot of managers, but very few leaders. Leadership is pure and rewarding skill that is revealed by a few. But actually the real leadership lay in all of us. We have never been taught to develop and spread this valuable skill.

In this video from TEDx in Toronto, brilliant and funny man Drew Dudley talks about everyday leadership. Just press play and enjoy!

I know. This is not a new topic. People have been debating since Google+ launched. I have FB account & visit everyday, I also have Google+, but rarely look at it sine only one friend using it, who is my Fiance?!

My two cents of comparison---

Users number---
Facebook: 800 millions
Google+: 40 millions (given it only launched 2nd half 2011, this performance has been amazing)

User gender---
Facebook: Equally distributed, Male 51%, Female 49%
Google+: Male skewed, Male 71% (I bet they are all someone a bit geeky like my fiance), Female 29%

Group---

Daily deals are part of our lives now. A lot of us have gone over the excitement at the very beginning, but now just want to use them to work for us in a very simple way. It’s like a marriage, passing through the thrill in early dates, turning into more practical everyday life.

However, Daily deal is yet a very young industry, a lot of entrepreneurs still trying to identify different opportunities to dive in. It’s still a gold mine.

There are of course plenty of flaws and frustrations---

Yes, again, Daily deals.

From my last blog post about daily deals, the waves have been even stronger than before. Honestly, I love the deals. Why not? I myself have been a loyal customers of the daily deals site, purchased more than 30 deals and enjoyed at least half of them. Some of my friends are also deal lovers, and we can try new restaurants together & some activities. It's great!

In the last 5 years I valuated at least 30 - 40 different email marketing and newsletter systems. From big guys such as Responsys to smaller providers such as Brandmail.

I ended up suing around 10 and sent around to 16M emails in the last few years. Yes, email marketing is big part of my marketing strategy and ALWAYS created great, quick cash flow for companies I was working for.

Groupon is getting ready for the China launch very soon and aggressively expressed that it wanted to dominate China market Group buying scene.

I have a few questions for Groupon:

1. No idea why Groupon use "Tibet" in the story for the Superbowl ad. right before China launch, any reasons?

I admit these days, if I can solve any banking easily online, I won't want to go to any of the branches to get my ticket and wait my number to be called.

I admit that it is kinda of difficult for bank employees to have the opportunities to cross sell or upsell any products or services to me since I don't talk to them.

I admit it's not easy to sell something to someone who don't want them.