Excerpt from this very insightful blog post:

So by now, you’ve heard endlessly about the Facebook/Goldman quasi-IPO. What is its larger significance?

Consider, for a moment, a historical contrast. When Google IPO’d, it explicitly refused to play by Wall St’s rules—instead, issuing equity in a relatively open Dutch auction:

“…Among other things, Google issued a firm warning to speculators hoping to make a buck by quickly flipping their shares, a hallmark of many hot technology IPOs in the past. Instead, Google hopes to place its shares in a way that avoids the typical investment banking strategy of intentional underpricing—and the volatility that frequently follows.

“Our goal is to have an efficient market price—a rational price set by informed buyers and sellers—for our shares at the IPO and afterward,” the filing states. “Our goal is to achieve a relatively stable price in the days following the IPO and that buyers and sellers receive a fair price at the IPO.”
To make that sharper:
“…According to its filing, Google seems willing, eager even, to start off life as a publicly traded company on the right foot, hoping to steer clear of some of the sweetheart dealmaking that characterized the last wave of go-go IPOs. Instead, Google plans an auction of its shares to raise up to $2.7 billion; a process open to all bidders.”
Today, we have Facebook—not challenging Wall St’s rules, but, instead, endorsing and subscribing to them. Facebook’s quasi-IPO is a deal with Goldman to build an SPV through which high-net-worth investors can essentially buy blocks of Facebook equity…

read the whole thing on Bubblegeneration

There have been many anecdotes lately from business owners about how Groupon, the online coupon site for local businesses, isn’t actually that good for business, but now there’s some data to back it up. According to a study out of Rice University, 42 percent of businesses who participated in a Groupon deal said they would not do so again, even though the majority of those who participated said their promotion was profitable.

Further reading

• Groupon Effectiveness Study, September 28, 2010 version (PDF) (ruf.rice.edu)
• Groupon in Retrospect (posiescafe.com)

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good read

By Priya Ramesh (@newpr)

Happy New Year! I am sure you are tired of the “Top ten trends in 2011” blog posts that most of us forget anyways in less than ten days so let me take you through a different route with this one I am writing from Bangalore, the Silicon Valley capital of India where I have spent the last two weeks on vacation with family and friends. One consistent theme that I noticed during this vacation is that Facebook has redefined our social interactions. From my aunts, nephews and childhood friends to new business contacts in India, no one asked for my email or phone number anymore but definitely asked me, “Are you on Facebook?” No doubt, the Social Network has brought a paradigm shift in how we communicate and maintain relationships but the bigger message to marketers is how Facebook is rewriting the rules of advertising and search and how that affects your brand in 2011. Here’s why you should treat Facebook more seriously in 2011:

Chances of customer engagement higher on Facebook than on any other social network:  The 2010 Facebook usage report shows that over the past year its 500 million users uploaded more than 2.7 million photographs shared one million links and ‘Liked’ 7.6 million pages every 20 minutes. Take a look at what 20 minutes on Facebook looks like:

Shared links: 1,000,000 every 20 minutes
Tagged photos: 1,323,000
Event invites sent out: 1,484,000
Wall Posts: 1,587,000
Status updates: 1,851,000
Friend requests accepted: 1,972,000
Photos uploaded: 2,716,000
Comments: 10,208,000
Messages: 4,632,000
Likes: 7,657,000

Facebook moving from “atrocious” clickthrough rates to higher conversions: Analysts predict that the six-year-old company will report $2 billion in revenue in 2010 and close to twice that in 2011. The bulk of that revenue is predicted to come from selling ads.  Facebook ads are not for everyone and there is a huge gap between brands like Starbucks (17.5 million Likes) and Coca Cola (18 million Likes) that are considered benchmarks in Facebook engagement and millions of other brands that struggle to increase clickthrough rates. Having said that, Craig MacDonald, writing for Search Engine Watch, stated he estimated pay per click marketing providers are planning to spend between 10 and 20 percent of their budgets for the year on Facebook campaigns.

He explained that, while last year clickthrough rates for Facebook promotions were “atrocious” and there were virtually no conversion rates, the site is now onpar with major search engines for returns on investment. MacDonald noted the key factors that make the service appealing to marketers are that it is “huge, it’s global and it’s growing”, adding the sites performance on a dollar-for-dollar basis is the same as Google’s. 

Search and Shop on Facebook to gain momentum in 2011: BusinessWeek (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2010/tc20101217_877527.htm) recently confirmed senior execs at the Palo Alto based social network have met in the past month with more than 20 companies, to help retailers set up shop on its pages and build tools that let Web users interact while buying. Facebook is adding e-commerce features to attract users, keep them logged-on longer and generate higher advertising sales. Companies like P&G and Delta Airlines are investing heavily on Facebook e-commerce, and this is just the start of what’s to redefine how we search and shop online.

There is a good reason why 500 million chose to join Facebook and more than half of them log-in every single day to update their status. Now as digital marketers we need to think smartly about how to get your brand mentioned in those status updates, Likes, comments and discussion threads to ensure when someone searched for you on this growing social network, you DO have a favorable wall to show off.

Good luck Facebooking (yes that’s officially a verb now) in 2011!

Image courtesy: Time magazine.

Jobs provide more than a paycheck, though. For most workers, their employer is their source of health and retirement benefits, and for many, the workplace gives a structure to their social life and a shape to their sense of themselves. A shift is already underway with health care: The legislation before Congress could make it easier to get health insurance without relying on one’s employer. But the more workers there are outside traditional workplaces, the more people will have to figure out alternative sources for all of those things.

[…]

Interesting article. I think we cant have enough barcamps, open coffee clubs, and other gatherings…

Davos could use some children. There is a strange irony in all of this talk about how the future will be while none of it includes the people who will actually be the future. It is like binding the whole world to an arranged marriage that is rational but largely loveless, designed by parents who are simultaneously in control of and out of touch with the times. When you spend your life in private cars and boardrooms, it is hard to know what is happening outside in the street, and it is too dangerous for you to go and see for yourself, because the streets don’t have security except for the snipers and the weather can quickly turn nasty.

The youngest people you see are perched in shop windows, and they are not people but dolls, who are much more cooperative anyway, and don’t speak out so much. This is why it is good to go to the local high school, to be back among ordinary people and especially teens, who are trying so hard to discover who it is they are going to be. You know their explorations are honest and they don’t want much except to understand themselves, even though they don’t yet know that’s what they’re trying to do, which is what makes it beautiful.

They were there to hear Muhammad Yunis, who won the peace prize in 2006 for his work with Grameen Bank, and his major message was not to follow the rules just because they are rules, but only if they are good.

“Teachers say go to class, get good grades so you can get a good college, get a degree so you can get a good job, so you can work for a corporation, so you can make a lot of money for the person who owns the company. That’s it. Nothing else. Is that all life is for? I said no. It is not to make money. It is to help people,” he said to raucous applause.

This was a nice message, and he was smiling and laughing and saying very wise things, and everybody loved him. I always like to see how someone everyone loves behaves after he leaves the stage, and whether he is somebody else. The media asked him questions he didn’t want to answer, and he was not so smily then, but spoke in a low voice that was frustrated and curt. Outside in the snow he put on his hat and asked them to turn off the camera. He had a North Face jacket, and he looked like a regular guy.

At night there was the Google party, which is the party everyone wants to get into, but where they are very strict at the door, and only let you in if you are young and / or famous in that particular Googley way.

At the Google party the adults became kids, breathing from flavored oxygen tubes, ordering drinks from acrobatic bartenders, eating sushi served by waiters wearing wetsuits who were dripping water onto the floor, and rocking out on rainbow Twister dance floors to loudly lip-synched music. As it got later things got wilder, and people paired off into young and / or famous couples, before grabbing their coats and heading out through metal detectors into the night, where the moon was full and the brightest it will be in 2010, making the Alps all purple until the clouds came in, which happened sooner than it should have.

and via @jkleske Thanks!

Trusting Simple Kitchen on Venmo is like leaving your credit card with them so they can just charge you whenever you’re done eating. You don’t need to bring cash or wait for them to process your credit card anymore. Plus, they’re going to be sending special Venmo cash back deals to their trusting customers.

This sounds great!