Marketing Pilgrim Published: "Official Google Webmaster Central Blog Feed Hacked, Busted, or Just Strange?" plus 6 more |  |
- Official Google Webmaster Central Blog Feed Hacked, Busted, or Just Strange?
- Thanks To All of Our Great Advertisers and Sponsors
- Groupon Numbers Should Cause One to Pause
- Groupon IPO Is Finally A Go
- Twitter Buys AdGrok Team To Work on Monetization
- Amazon Gets in on the Local Game
- Visit Marketing Pilgrim's Internet Marketing Job Board Today!
| Official Google Webmaster Central Blog Feed Hacked, Busted, or Just Strange? Posted: 03 Jun 2011 05:59 AM PDT Who wants to provide an explanation as to what just happened in my Google Reader this morning? I subscribe to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog's RSS feed to keep up-to-date with the 2-3 posts the team publish each week. Except this morning, the feed looked like this: What the fudge? OK, maybe I'm seeing things. Maybe this is not actually coming from the Google Webmaster Central feed. So, I went to "Manage Subscriptions" to take a look. Nope, it shows the same items, take a look:
OK, I thought, maybe someone found a way to hijack the feed, Maybe China is redirecting Google's RSS feeds to phishing or spam sites. Well, maybe not, because those new items above all go to the same personal site of a photographer. I'm guess they have no idea that this happened. So, what did happen? Any ideas? | |
| Thanks To All of Our Great Advertisers and Sponsors Posted: 03 Jun 2011 05:42 AM PDT
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| Groupon Numbers Should Cause One to Pause Posted: 03 Jun 2011 05:13 AM PDT I am not trying to rain on anyone's IPO parade. What the people at Groupon have done is pretty amazing. But just because there are big revenue numbers associated with the company, it's important to see if the thing is profitable. As of yesterday's IPO filing, it is not. This chart from SAI tells the story.
And remember when Groupon raised $950 million not so long ago? Guess what that did? It simply paid out the early investors in handsome sums. It did little to build the business. You can get the details in the All Things Digital post. Once again, congrats to the very small group of individuals that have already cashed in on the Groupon deal. Does that mean that all the rest of the investment world will have the same shot through the IPO? Unless Groupon figures out a way to scale without losing money (not easy at all) this could be a stinker and it could harken in another dark age of overvalued, overhyped companies that will just take the money and run. Your take?
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| Posted: 02 Jun 2011 01:10 PM PDT
Dear Potential Stockholders, On the day of this writing, Groupon's over 7,000 employees offered more than 1,000 daily deals to 83 million subscribers across 43 countries and have sold to date over 70 million Groupons. Reaching this scale in about 30 months required a great deal of operating flexibility, dating back to Groupon's founding. Before Groupon, there was The Point—a website launched in November 2007 after my former employer and one of my co-founders, Eric Lefkofsky, asked me to leave graduate school so we could start a business. The Point is a social action platform that lets anyone organize a campaign asking others to give money or take action as a group, but only once a "tipping point" of people agree to participate. I started The Point to empower the little guy and solve the world's unsolvable problems. A year later, I started Groupon to get Eric to stop bugging me to find a business model. Groupon, which started as a side project in November 2008, applied The Point's technology to group buying. By January 2009, its popularity soaring, we had fully shifted our attention to Groupon. I'm writing this letter to provide some insight into how we run Groupon. While we're looking forward to being a public company, we intend to continue operating according to the long-term focused principles that have gotten us to this point. These include: We aggressively invest in growth. We spend a lot of money acquiring new subscribers because we can measure the return and believe in the long-term value of the marketplace we're creating. In the past, we've made investments in growth that turned a healthy forecasted quarterly profit into a sizable loss. When we see opportunities to invest in long-term growth, expect that we will pursue them regardless of certain short-term consequences. We are always reinventing ourselves. In our early days, each Groupon market featured only one deal per day. The model was built around our limitations: We had a tiny community of customers and merchants. As we grew, we ran into the opposite problem. Overwhelming demand from merchants, with nine-month waiting lists in some markets, left merchant demand unfilled and contributed to hundreds of Groupon clones springing up around the world. And our customer base grew so large that many of our merchants had an entirely new problem: Struggling with too many customers instead of too few. To adapt, we increased our investment in technology and released deal targeting, enabling us to feature different deals for different subscribers in the same market based on their personal preferences. In addition to providing a more relevant customer experience, this helped us to manage the flow of customers and opened the Groupon marketplace to more merchants, in turn diminishing a reason for clones to exist. Today, we are pursuing models of reinvention that would not be possible without the critical mass of customers and merchants we have achieved. Groupon NOW, for example, allows customers to pull deals on demand for immediate redemption, and helps keep merchants bustling throughout the day. Expect us to make ambitious bets on our future that distract us from our current business. Some bets we'll get right, and others we'll get wrong, but we think it's the only way to continuously build disruptive products. We are unusual and we like it that way. We want the time people spend with Groupon to be memorable. Life is too short to be a boring company. Whether it's with a deal for something unusual, such as fire dancing classes, or a marketing campaign such as Grouspawn, we seek to create experiences for our customers that make today different enough from yesterday to justify getting out of bed. While weighted toward the measurable, our decision-making process also considers what we feel in our gut to be great for our customers and merchants, even if it can't be quantified over a short time horizon. Our customers and merchants are all we care about. After selling out on our original mission of saving the world to start hawking coupons, in order to live with ourselves, we vowed to make Groupon a service that people love using. We set out to upturn the stigmas created by traditional discounting services, trusting that nothing would be as crucial to our long-term success as happy customers and merchants. We put our phone number on our printed Groupons and built a huge customer service operation, manned in part with members of Chicago's improv community. We developed a sophisticated, multi-stage process to pick deals from high quality merchants with vigorously fact-checked editorial content. We built a dedicated merchant services team that works with our merchant partners to ensure satisfaction. And we have a completely open return policy, giving customers a refund if they ever feel like Groupon let them down. We do these things to make our customers and merchants happy, knowing that market success would be a side effect. We believe that when once-great companies fall, they don't lose to competitors, they lose to themselves—and that happens when they stop focusing on making people happy. As such, we do not intend to be reactive to competitors. We will watch them, but we won't distract ourselves with decisions that aren't designed primarily to make our customers and merchants happy. We don't measure ourselves in conventional ways. There are three main financial metrics that we track closely. First, we track gross profit, which we believe is the best proxy for the value we're creating. Second, we measure free cash flow—there is no better metric for long-term financial stability. Finally, we use a third metric to measure our financial performance—Adjusted Consolidated Segment Operating Income, or Adjusted CSOI. This metric is our consolidated segment operating income before our new subscriber acquisition costs and certain non-cash charges; we think of it as our operating profitability before marketing costs incurred for long-term growth. If you're thinking about investing, hopefully it's because, like me, you believe that Groupon is better positioned than any company in history to reshape local commerce. The speed of our growth reflects the enormous opportunity before us to create a more efficient local marketplace. As with any business in a 30-month-old industry, the path to success will have twists and turns, moments of brilliance and other moments of sheer stupidity. Knowing that this will at times be a bumpy ride, we thank you for considering joining us. Andrew Mason So let all the speculation begin. We'll wait until the day the numbers happen. Until then happy shopping!
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| Twitter Buys AdGrok Team To Work on Monetization Posted: 02 Jun 2011 12:31 PM PDT
The AdGrok system included a GrokBar, the Grok-o-Matic and the Groknoculars, all of which made you a Pro-Groker for only $59.00 a month. And I tell you all of this only because I like the word Grok as much as they do. But now, sadly, the time has come to move on to a world where everything happens in under 140 characters, which is enough to say Live long and prosper six times in one Tweet, so it's all good. Actually, things aren't good in the Grokingdom. According to their blog, AdGrok will be shutting down their servers on June 30, leaving all of their current customers weightlessly floating in space. Sounds like the perfect time for a competitor to swoop in and save the day. This is how it goes in the internet world, start-ups happen, they do good, they get bought and they close. Great news for those who transfer over, but not so much for the rest of the staff and the customers. In this case, it's been confirmed that two of the AdGrok men are now working at Twitter's HQ, while a third is working for Facebook. Kind of like how the Romulans split from the Vulcans and in turn, the United Federation of Planets. The good news for any marketer who wasn't using AdGrok software, is that Twitter is fast becoming a viable option for an online campaign. They still have some growing to do, but it looks like they could be eating into Facebook's 4 billion dollar ad revenue sooner than expected. Pilgrim's Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz! | |
| Amazon Gets in on the Local Game Posted: 02 Jun 2011 11:30 AM PDT
Now, I've got nothing against the folks of, what I'm sure, is a lovely city in Idaho, but really? According to TNW, Amazon chose the city because they liked their sense of whimsy, as demonstrated by BSU's blue football field. Got me on that one, but everything has to start somewhere so why not Boise. When I went to check out the service, it already knew my name, which always creeps me out. Obviously it pulled my name from my Amazon login, but it still wanted to know where I lived. As I moved through the process, I had this strange feeling of deja vu. TNW says that's because Amazon isn't sourcing their own deals (yet), they're getting them from partnerships with other sites such as LivingSocial. That being said, why buy through AmazonLocal instead of another daily deal site? Ease of use. Since I'm already an Amazon customer, all I had to do was click buy, choose from my already entered credit cards and submit. It's so easy that I almost bought 50% off Ice Cream at Goody's in Boise by accident. If Amazon will allow you to buy with credit from an Amazon gift card, that would be the kicker. It appears this might be true, but since I don't have any credit in at the moment, I couldn't say for sure. What do you think of AmazonLocal? With the recognizable name and the ease of use, I think it's going to be a hit.
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| Visit Marketing Pilgrim's Internet Marketing Job Board Today! Posted: 02 Jun 2011 09:00 AM PDT
Below are listed just a few of the great jobs listed just yesterday on the Marketing Pilgrim Internet Marketing Job Board. Check back often as we add more and more great jobs all the time. If you are an employer looking to hire the right person for your job, we receive comments all the time about the great success employers found in reaching an extremely talented pool of candidates in our readers. For just $27 per month per listing how can you go wrong? Associate Account Director, Imagination Publishing, Chicago, IL Marketing Specialist, Hanapin Marketing, Bloomington, IN Director of Sales, Hanapin Marketing, Bloomington, IN Broadcast Media Buyer, Media Agency, Baltimore, MD Online Content Specialist, Rosetta Stone, Harrisonburg, VA Project Manager (Web Marketing), Yoh, Bellevue, WA Trade Marketing Manager, Yoh, Ridgefield, CT Marketing Intern, Deluxe, Shoreview, MN Marketing Manager/Sr. Marketing Manager, Retention & Loyalty Kabam Redwood City, CA If you are looking to list a job for just $27 per month per listing (with discounts for multiple listings) you can complete the process completely online and with no hassles. Thanks to our readers and job listers! We wish you all the best! Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community |
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