Sorry about the hyperbole but I think the Facebook Deals announcement is quite significant for the local space — for marketers large and small as well as consumers.
The large number of businesses using Facebook as well as its consumer reach makes it immediately a huge competitor in the coupons/deals segment. I won’t call it a “Foursquare killer” or a “Groupon killer.” But Deals will be very successful and popular.
And the one page merchant sign up may mean that this product becomes the first true mass SMB self-service platform. We’ll see.
What are your views about how significant an impact Facebook Deals will have on the local and SMB markets?
November 3rd, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Yes, it’s big, but self-service has an opportunity cost. My accountant would charge me $X to do the bookkeeping as well. What if I have to figure out is if it’s worth paying someone to do that work. The same goes for online advertising, and there are two issues as with any outsourcing:
1) What could you as a business be doing instead of the activity that might be more profitable?
2) Can outsourcing the activity to an agency generate more profit net of the agency cost?
This is exactly the same issue as outbound telemarketing. Almost any organization can set up their own outbound center, but they have to address whether they want that becoming a core competency.
The same holds true for local businesses that were running their own PPC through AdWords three weeks ago. That activity can’t be set it & forget it.
November 3rd, 2010 at 6:56 pm
Third party experts will always be better at doing these sorts of things. But this is a very simple tool and conceptually accessible to SMBs. We may ultimately see several million try and use it as well as national marketers and retailers.
November 3rd, 2010 at 10:43 pm
I’m curious to see the adoption for these “deals”. The whole Facebook “page” vs. “place” option is confusing enough for SMB’s. Less “FB savvy” businesses are even creating a Facebook profile with a personal account? Overall, great features and the businesses that are informed and take advantage will quickly reap the benefits!
November 4th, 2010 at 1:55 am
…or as we like to call it around the the office: the dead birdy effect. This speaks to the amount of dead Twitter business accounts that we see either from potential clients, leads or accounts we come in and resurrect. The truth is, as much as these tools may seem easy to set up and operate, business owners and old school marketing managers rarely, if ever, understand the concept of content, habitual use and strategy.
As much as Facebook is easy to use, even the most rudimentary tools and their ease of use for most SMB, usually wears off. They just don’t have the time or patience as individual business owners to continue using these tools to generate a conversation with their customers.
Their is a business there. The question is, how do you monetize it?
November 4th, 2010 at 10:13 am
“They just don’t have the time or patience as individual business owners to continue using these tools to generate a conversation with their customers.”
That’s common behaviour for quite a lot of SMBs. In my eyes it is still and will continue to be the biggest challenge to sensibilize & educate local business owners how to integrate online-marketing in the daily business routine. As long as sites like FB move more and more aggressively into the local online-market, they “over-educate” customers by letting them get used to an illusion of the overall (online)markting-savy small business owner… sometimes it’s just ridiculous, since SMBs just often aren’t able to fulfill these expectations AND do just their work…
November 4th, 2010 at 10:55 am
Greg, perhaps I’m missing something, but this doesn’t feel like that dramatic a moment.
The use of LBS/check-in is still very nascent (http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2010/11/027193.htm) and this product is check-in centric. Most SMB’s (beyond a core that probably numbers in the tens of thousands) really don’t understand FB Places, let alone understand “check-in” (plus, a significant portion of SMB’s deliver services that don’t fit the physical check-in model). The pull/appeal of Daily Deals is not captured here (pre-paid customer lead generation).
As for the ability of the product to pull consumers in, the Facebook UX does not feel mature enough to make this anywhere near mainstream. Today it’s not obvious to the vast majority of FB consumers how you discover a local business on FB (other than via a social connection stream), or (perhaps more importantly) why you should use FB for this.
“Nearby Places” is a new experience that isn’t entrenched in any usage pattern with FB users. My hunch is most users would simply start at Yelp or Google if local mobile search or discovery for that use case. FB has a lot of work to do to enhance the content and discovery navigation for local businesses into their mobile usage pattern. It’s a delicate balance to pull off since it’s not why users go there in the first place.
This is a great leading indicator of how FB will evolve, but it doesn’t feel like a “rocking Local” moment, yet. Without Places usage materially shifting, I don’t get why most SMB’s would jump in.
November 4th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
The availability of a coupon will drive more activity i.e. ‘Check Ins’ . As we’ve seen with Groupon, if a deal can be had, people will find it and massive adoption will take place.
November 4th, 2010 at 6:57 pm
[...] while experts like Screenwerk’s Greg Stirling expect that the Deals platform will become a major social marketing channel for small to mid-sized local business , there’s nothing in the platform to prevent major national chains from using it as a [...]
November 4th, 2010 at 6:57 pm
[...] while experts like Screenwerk’s Greg Stirling expect that the Deals platform will become a major social marketing channel for small to mid-sized local business , there’s nothing in the platform to prevent major national chains from using it as a [...]
November 5th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Sebastian is right on with his points. You might have a small number of small businesses in some segments that will do this. Sometime, sites and users like FB and 4SQ are too ahead of the small businesses mind set.
November 6th, 2010 at 5:08 am
We need a layer not a source for local knowledge..
November 6th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
With all of these services there is still a fundamental disconnect in the consumer behavior model. I have a hard time understanding how Joe User is thinking, “Hey, I’m standing on a street corner. Let me whip out my Facebook app and see what kind of deals I can get of the 15 businesses that happen to be the closest businesses to this corner. Oh, hey, there’s an accountant. What, no deals? Oh look. There’s a bail bondsman? Damn. No deals (coulda used one last week). Let me fill up the next 15 listings on the screen and see what I can find.”
It just gauls me that there never seems to be an actual, honest-to-god marketing adult involved in the decision-making at these giant companies asking the basic questions – “So what?” What are the consumer’s – not the USER’s needs in this situation. These decisions always seem to be driven by a bunch of technical alpha geeks that go “Like, hey, man. Dude. Check it out. We got these businesses and we got this GPS thing. Like, businesses use these things called coupons to get these things called customers. So, like, if we know where a user is and we know where these business things are nearby, we could, like, connect the coupon things to the business thing and, like, all these customer things will use them, and we’ll make, like, money, which I think is useful to our, like, bosses, or that hot chick in marketing that I never have the balls to ask out.”
November 6th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
Michael:
Groupon and its cohort allow for “planning.” And there are myriad other coupon or deal sources online. If people start using FB deals it will validate the assumptions behind the program. If not, they’ll have to change it.
Twitter @earlybird got axed effectively because it probably wasn’t working.
November 8th, 2010 at 1:11 am
Greg, I have to agree with most of what the dissenters here are saying. Most SMBs are just fine with their websites and may or may not have a Facebook Page or Place or whatever you call it them. There isn’t enough focus on the actual needs of that restaurant owner who will actually never really be marketed to about this. The focus instead is towards the early adopters who now effectively use services such as FourSquare. The restaurant owner? He or she will get around to hearing it from somewhere. But there will basically be will no one who will sit down with them and tell them about how they can integrate this into their marketing strategy. Or if has anything to do with branding.
I do, however, think that this will get many of them to think that the digital arena is now a marketing vehicle that they need to tap into. Facebook Deals will be one of those vehicles for sure, but it will take longer that many think.
Right now, I’m putting together a study of how restaurants are using social media here in my section of Northern Virginia. There will be a focus on services such as FourSquare. It amazes me how many haven’t “claimed’ there presence there. Not just the mom and pop restaurants, but those that are part of restaruant groups that have actual marketing departments who should know about stuff like this. I’ll let you know how it goes.
November 8th, 2010 at 2:16 am
Agree that these services don’t really do very well with “education.” Yelp, after five years is not devoting time and energy to helping merchants. Regardless, Facebook’s sheer reach is something that can’t and won’t be ignored. Many SMBs will have to hear about this from someone, as you say. But the sign-up process is quite simple. I think the actual flaw right now is not the merchant side so much as the weakness of the user experience.
March 16th, 2011 at 1:48 pm
[...] launched Deals late last year and this week entered the group buying and deals aggregation fray. Yesterday the company announced [...]
December 13th, 2011 at 6:27 am
[...] lack of a robust user experience in regards to helping people actually use them. I went off in his Facebook Deals will Rock Local where I questioned what possible use is there in giving me the nearest 15 businesses with the [...]