leads

If You Build It, The Leads Will Come

It’s quickly becoming the mantra of interactive strategists: lead or be led. You either lead your online community, or they will lead you. There’s no stopping the swell of communal opinion generation that has become the hallmark of our society’s online engagement.

The most die-hard critics of social media are beginning to utter: If you cant beat them, join them. But is simply joining the online community enough for a business to discover the elusive Return on Investment from social media activities? Many practitioners call this the catch 22 of the medium: overtly selling in social networks is counter-community and quickly kills your following; not selling is counter-intuitive to most business culture.

So if selling is counter-intuitive to community-building where do the leads come from? My philosophy has always been to let the leads find me! Its quite ingenious if I do say so myself! Why sell when, if done right, social media will have people lining up to ask for my service? Sound good? It is, but its not easy to achieve.

Read more

The Heart of Groupon’s Business Model

The heart of Groupon’s business model for their clients is not direct profitable commerce (it is only profitable upfront for Groupon). As many understand Groupon is not an ecommerce business. The business proposition that Groupon offers its clients is lead generation.

A very, very small percentage of Groupon clients make money when they generate all those sales. The business model here is aggressive acquisition through an engine that generates a huge amount of “hot” leads with credit cards ready. The challenge is to convert a workable percentage of those ‘loss leader” buyers into profitable customers and have a metric that covers the upfront investment.

There is a reason that the majority of their customers are small, local businesses. They do not have the upfront capital necessary to use more traditional acquisition models, and more importantly they are less sophisticated in the modeling abilities used to determine life-time value of a customer…. especially a customer acquired through aggressive discounting. So for now the growth is miraculous since so many are jumping on the bandwagon with Groupon recommended discounts that cannot possibly end up profitable for those making the offers.

If Groupon’s strategy is to grab the real estate now, and worry about how to evolve the model so that the businesses making the offers can truly benefit, then let’s wait and see how that is accomplished before final judgement is passed.

I am not saying that Groupon will not survive, and they certainly have a business model, although their sales for the year seem to be grossly overstated in many circles. I simply believe passing up what was offered by Google showed tremendous hubris and that I believe they will come to regret the decision… even if they never voice that regret or remain successful.

Ted Rubin

Mastering social media is all about who LEADS!

Having been continuously inundated for the last few years with social media how to books, articles, the five steps to the ten steps of social media greatness and so on, I am now at the point of saying enough already, STOP!

Under such duress my brain has been crying out for a way to crystallize a simplified explanation of the core requirements and sequence required to assist people and businesses to master social media in a straight forward, meaningful and practical manner.

And so recently the LEADS social media concept was born and simply stated, it is an acronym for Listen, Engage, Activate, Dominate and Social mandate or just LEADS for short.

Read more