Another tidbit I share with my students at UNH: lead with a compliment. Whether it’s a comment on a social networking site, a comment to a post, a letter to a potential employer, an e-mail to whomever … lead with a genuine compliment. It’s about making “…someone else feel special” as you also pointed out here.

Kudos on your post. And on your web success.

Take care!

John

My main concern, as you can tell, is not for the buyer; and, it’s certainly not for Groupon, Google, LivingSocialDeals, or Ace’s Used Ford Pickup and Social Deal Mecca! My concern is for the local business. Most businesses can run on a tight margin for a while. And most local (read: small, brick and mortar, mom and pop, etc) businesses are happy with the increased activity and traffic for a time, as you pointed out. But most businesses cannot survive on the incredibly tight margins and the type of client who is only interested in “the deal!”

Like the old discounters joke:

We lose a little on each sale but we make it up in wolume!

Read what a fellow Bay Village, Ohio resident and world renowned direct marketing and copywriting expert Dan Kennedy has to say about price as the driving force in the success or failure of a business.

Wanna bury the business right now, today? Simple! Allow someone to broker what you offer, your inventory and/or services, with virtually no out of pocket investment of their own, at incredibly low prices, and allow them to take a significant portion of the profits while you wait for the “ifcome!” That’s called betting on the come and no one worth their salt in business, accounting, management, business law, or banking will advocate it as a long term growth or survival strategy for small businesses. It just doesn’t make sense!

Incredibly, I see inbound consulting firms here in Cleveland and elsewhere posting prices. How can a supposed expert in the field allow their own business to be price driven, even if they are at the top of the scale, much less advocate such a strategy for a client?

WOW!

BTW, I am not sure if Dan is still in Bay or not but it is a small world and there are also some very smart marketing experts in and around Northeast and North Central Ohio…but it takes all kinds!

Mark my words, this will create havoc and it will not take all that long. In the short run, and with billions at stake, the companies with the most to gain will prop this thing up and hype it to the heavens! However, it will end and when Groupon or Google or whomever becomes the Amazon of the local scene.

A direct quote from Andrew Mason, Founder and CEO of Groupon:

“We’d like to become what Amazon has become for products, we want to become this for local… 2011 is the year when Groupon become much more of a technology company, and a lot of that is personalization….We’re not a discounting service; I think of us as local e-commerce…. It’s one of the original things that people wanted to do on the Internet…. With Groupon it’s the first time in history that local businesses have been able to pay for what really matters, and that’s customers at the door….”

Read between the lines here! Who do you think will ultimately be selling to those customers? An e-commerce business? Really?

I feel like we have, in a very real and scary sense, invited a vampire into our homes…our businesses! Interestingly, they couldn’t have made entry if the victims, the very people seeking their help and an opportunity, hadn’t let them in. And now they will be sucked dry!

Sorry for the graphic analogy! Or metaphor? I’m a marketing consultant and a physical anthropologist, not an English professor. But the writing is on the wall and it is not that tough to decipher the message. It isn’t an ancient Transylvanian dialect!

Remember when small towns thought Walmart was such a super idea? You know the ones I’m talking about, the ghost towns across America! Can it happen to local, brick and mortar businesses after allowing Group Online Buying to take hold? You betcha!

Remember when everyone was sure Amazon would fail? Where are those experts now?

This has a while before it plays out. There are billions to be made and myriad local businesses to be artificially inflated on their way to collapse. Gosh, I hope I’m wrong!

Either way, it should be interesting.

And sad!

Thanks for getting me going again Sandy! Great comment!

John Zajaros