Groupons Problem: It is Not a Platform

At HBR.com, Rob Wheeler wrote a post entitled Groupon Doomed by Too Much of a Good Thing. Rob discusses why he believes that "Groupon's fundamental problem is that it has not yet discovered a viable business model."

I would disagree as I think Groupon does have a business model, it is just flawed and will never work. What do Facebook, Twitter, Constant Contact, Apple, Google, and LinkedIn all have in common? These firms all have built a platform. These are not single solution apps, like Groupon, but rather large scale platforms that can be used by these firms to add features and functions as well as tap into a community of users to help build out exciting new applications. What exactly can Groupon do to build out its application? Is it a platform? Can people leverage it in many different ways? No. It is what it is - an email application for the most part.

Think of Apples app store and all of the apps that people have built to make the iPad and iPod that much more useful and vital to people's everyday life. Can Groupon do something similar? No.

They key here is if you want to succeed and be relevant in today's web world, you need to build a platform, not a point solution.

 

Social Media: Broader Than Just Marketing

Most of the focus around the use of social media is that it is just a marketing tool. Social media is certainly a new and important form of PR and Marcomm, branding, lead generation (inbound and traditional marketing). However, if you are only utilizing and focusing on the use of social media solely as a marketing channel you are losing out on some other very important things you can accomplish with these platforms, such as:

• Competitor Intelligence
• Product Development
• Beta group
• Product testing
• Focus Groups
• Customer Support
• Strategy testing
• A/B testing (yes, technically marketing but have you tried it?)
• Sales presentations
• Community outreach 

If you are just using social media for marketing purporses you really need to think broader than that and get groups like those listed above involved. It is particularly true with firms that have a a large number of followers as you have an untapped audience that has shown interest in your firm/product that can be utilized for other things besides just leads. After all, the key to social media is connecting and communicating with prospects and by engaging them in other parts of your business you can deepen the relationships and drive leads and create evangelists.
Share any successes you have had using social media to promote other parts of your business!