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Like everyone else, I watched "The Social Network" while munching popcorn and sipping coca-cola. It is a gorgeous movie, Fincher completed another masterpiece. Young actors did awesome job, the whole story is in total harmony, it carried me from beginning to the end.

The other day I got an email from a service provider informing about some changes, most likely new update/function of the service became available. I got some questions want to reply, but of course the email ended with "This is a computer generated email, please do not reply." Then I just thought to myself 'Forget it'.

I believe this happens to everyone at least once in today's data-fled environment, how many good opportunities that companies have lost in this way to talk further with the prospects?

What a shame.

Since last time I wrote the post of 'group shopping', the deals companies in Australia just springing up like mushroom after the rain...suddenly across all major media, you hear "70% discount of facial to pamper yourself", "why not enjoy this great opportunity to have 3 course dinner for just 60 dollars"?...

I myself have consumed a few deal services, & a few still waiting to be arranged. Some friends/colleagues (main female) around me also are enthusiastic about the deals, we chatted & exchange thoughts on it. Here are what I learned:

Häagen-Dazs was and is the top premium ice-cream in China. It stands for 'Romantic' & 'pleasure', as the sound of it, from France or Switzerland, some faraway European countries. If a boy dating a girl, he'd better take her to "Häagen-Dazs" shop which centrally locates in the cities, which is another way to say "I like you and I want to spend a lot of quality time with you for a wonderful experience."

Remember when I discussed with fellow research students once upon a time, the distinctiveness between qualitative and quantitative research, we thought it’s the emotion factor. Quite obviously, ‘quan’ presents data in a language of numbers, columns or pie charts, ‘qual’ offers more insights about what consumers think and feel. But are you sure that all the participants telling the truth?

Hmm. So what’s next?

Didn’t take a long for big guys to take on new kid on the block – Foursquare. Facebook announced Places. Applications that pretty much copying FourSquare. Oh, yes, you can’t become mayor yet. Not yet... But you can ‘check-in’ where you are, share places with your friends, let them know what is good, embrace local business... you know, in general everything you can do on FourSquare, just this time on Facebook. Hmm, even that name is known from somewhere, maybe www.google.com/places ? And don’t mix this with Google latitude! Will this kick off?

I think “group shopping” is not a new idea. From the time that I started buy things for myself, I already knew that if you buy bulk, the price will be cheaper. For a lot of events, if you buy as a group (different organization has different policy, 10 or 20 as the benchmark) then you get cheaper tickets. And so on.

At now digital age, we had “groupon” (groupon.com) in the US, similar format “Jumponit” (jumponit.com.au) in Australia…this website just in market for about two months, but I already shopped 5 times, and I haven’t used any of them yet--- all paid in advance. Why did I do that?

Popular mobile social network Foursquare will open online shop soon. Devoted users will be able to buy branded merchandise including t-shirts, stickers, badges and pins. Shop will be open this summer on Foursqure.com

Location based network is next social phenomenon. In just over a year and half of existence they attracted over 1.6M members, whom are very active and passionate users of Foursquare services.

In the previous blog, I mentioned that a lot of FMCG and fashion companies leverage social media to communicate with consumers and listen to them, engage them. I have been wondering how other industries to embrace this web2.0 trend. But think about it --- social media, which we are using these days, which is expanding our social circle to connect or reconnect with new/old friends, etc.; providing a platform for ordinary audience to freely confront any issue or body, in a way strengthening the social collected power.

She mastered craft, cooking, publishing business, catalogue sales and now Twitter. Master Martha Stewart have close to 2 million followers and won’t stop any time soon. But she have to restrict herself to only 5 minutes of tweeting a day, as it’s “too addictive”.

As usual we can learn from Martha. Few Twitter marketing tips are below: