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How to use social media and save on Small Business Saturday

Molly McHugh
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small business saturdayBetween Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the unending onslaught of online deals, there is another holiday shopping day that might get lost in the shuffle: Small Business Saturday. This year marks the second annual such event, a new tradition that tries to steal some addition from chain retailers and big e-commerce sites and give it to local vendors.

And this year, the fledging ritual is getting some serious attention from social media sites. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have all pledge their efforts in support, offering and encouraging small business owners to use their sites’ tools to promote shopping this weekend.

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Local retailers aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit this weekend. What happens to consumers who want the discounts but sans the chain names (that are sometimes attached to controversy) they go hand in hand with? Small business Saturday can fill that void along with the help of some geo-social applications.

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Foursquare

amex-foursquareFoursquare has been at the top of the social-meets-location game since it began, and Small Business Saturday will be no exception. If you have an American Express card, sync it to your Foursquare account following these directions. Then when you check-in to shops who have partnered with the service via Foursquare on Saturday, you will see a button that says “load to card.” Then when you spend at least $25 or more at the participating store, you’ll get a notification saying $25 was credited to your Amex account. American Express is a sponsor of Small Business Saturday, so ratcheting up sales is in its best interest, but turns out they’re willing to compensate you for helping make the event a success.

etsy_iconEtsy

The purveyor of all things handcrafted is a natural fit for small business Saturday—and will appeal to those who want to buy “local” without leaving their living rooms. Just searching “Small Business Saturday” on the site brought up a slew of items that will be on sale this weekend, and this blog catalogued some of the best e-shops on the site that offered discounts last year.

thedealmixDaily deal sites

While the likes of LivingSocial and Groupon tend to offer food and spa deals, the occasional local retailer pops up. Between now and Small Business Saturday, a minimal amount of homework and creating an account with one (or all) of these sites could save you some Monday. We’d advise getting with something like The Dealmix, which collects a large variety of all these local deals. Keep an eye out on any of these applications for vendor or shop deals in your area. Then make a call or check Facebook to see if they are participating in Small Business Saturday. Then add those savings to whatever discount the daily deal site was offering. Of course, you should check that you can use coupons during the Saturday sale.

Facebook

Facebook is offering a slew of tools for small businesses to take advantage of, but the site is also catering to consumers. Check out the Small Business Saturday Facebook page and you’ll have access to a variety of information, including city guides for optimizing your local shopping in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, as well as organized events in cities nationwide. Some of them include raffles, free gift wrapping, Santa visits for the kids, and community breakfasts.

smallbiz twitterTwitter

Be sure to follow your favorite local business on Twitter, if you haven’t already. We’re sure a great many of these sites will have implemented a Follow button (one of the tools in the Small Business Saturday kid), and will be using the hashtags #ShopSmall, #ShopSmallNov26, #SmallBizSaturday and #SmallBusinessSaturday to spread word of their discounts this weekend. 

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How American Express is doing e-commerce right
amexfoursquare

The power of social media remains unrealized. Even Facebook is learning by trial and error, experimenting with this new medium while we simultaneously consume it. And because the industry remains constantly in-flux, the missteps are various and many.
But a surprising contender is leveraging social platforms to its advantage. American Express has made a thorough and multi-faceted go at social this holiday season, using a handful of networks to fuel its focus on e-commerce.
Some brands are natural fits for social applications—generally, consumer product manufacturers like Target, Vitamin Water, Pepsi, and Old Spice easily fit the social media mold. While it might not fit in this category, American Express is getting ample help from the e-commerce surge this holiday shopping season. Formerly small startups like Groupon and Foursquare have been pioneering the evolution of how we buy things using social media, so it’s only natural that a company with the background and resources that Amex has would want a piece. Here are a few ways the company is cleverly exploiting social shopping trends.
The stamp card
The idea of a virtual stamp card isn’t novel. Everyone wants to be rewarded for their loyalty, a scheme various deal and location sites have capitalized on—and now, Amex. The company is partnering with Seamless, a New York-based startup that specializes in ordering takeout and delivery online. For every four orders of at least $15 you make using Seamless, Amex credits you $10. And this isn't the first time Amex has shown interest in digital commerce startups: the company will be heavily investing in this market. 
The fine print: The deal runs through October 31, 2012 and you can only get a max of $120 credited to your card. Eligible cards include Blue from American Express, Blue Cash, Blue Cash Everyday, Blue Cash Preferred, Blue Sky, or Blue Sky Preferred Card from American Express.
 
The grab bag
There’s something to be said for the element of surprise: as humans, we’re suckers for it. Enter Amex’s Gift Chain, a newly-launched program where members will get a surprise gift for spending $25 at participating online retailers. The catch, that you have no idea what you’re getting, is obvious. But possibilities include a year membership to ShopRunner, a $200 Amex e-gift card, or $100 in Nike gift cards. Or it could be the $5 Godiva gift card. Still, it’s an effective campaign since consumers are scouring online sales, and the extra incentive will likely end quite a few to the participating retailers’ sites.
The fine print: You have to sign up using an eligible Amex card (Macy's, Bloomingdale's, corporate, and prepaid Cards including American Express Gift Cards and SERVE Cards are not eligible), and you have to have been a member before November 27 of this year. You have to spend online using the card sometime between November 28 and December 21. Also, there’s a “while supplies last” clause attached.
 
Going local
Amex was a major sponsor of Small Business Saturday this year, the Saturday after Thanksgiving where consumers are encouraged to shop locally. Of course, the company attached its name to the day not only to get a little recognition for promoting small vendors. Amex teamed up with Foursquare (the two announced a partnership this past summer) to offer $25 for spending $25 or more at participating retailers. That isn’t where the integration ends, however: the company announced recently that card members can still sync their Amex to Foursquare for special offers and to get $10 back for spending $10.
The fine print: Again, the $10 for $10 is available at participating outlets. Prepaid cards and corporate cards are not eligible, either. 

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Daily deal predictions for 2012: Who’s in, who’s out, and what discounts to expect
daily deals

The daily deal market is at a crossroads. In one corner, its advocates claim there’s new life to be squeezed out of the already over-saturated industry. In the other, detractors are screaming from the rooftops that Groupon’s controversial IPO process has been proof enough that the market is flawed and has reached its tipping point.
It’s been a tumultuous year, with predictions of collapse one day and promising statistics the next. And while the debate rages on, stand-alone sites as well as established platforms continue to jump into the fray, launching their own discount-a-day applications. So where is the industry heading in 2012?
Teaming up 
According to Tippr CEO Martin Tobias, the market will be rife with new deals and contracts, the biggest of them being a LivingSocial sale. “Going public would be hard for them because of just looking at what happened to Groupon, and investors are going to want their money back,” he says. “LivingSocial is having the same cash problem that Groupon has.”
A now-infamous problem: Groupon owed $230 million more than it had to its name when the company filed to go public earlier this year, and some iffy accounting metrics seemed to try to hide that fact. “They would have gone bankrupt at the end of the month if they hadn’t gone public,” Tobias says.
And it’s because of all this that LivingSocial will instead put itself up for sale. A likely buyer is Amazon, which already own a considerable stake in the company. But others are on the ballot as well, including the likes of Yahoo, Microsoft, and eBay. “Somebody with a large audience already,” says Tobias, “that adding this business to makes sense.”
It’s a smart move for these bigger companies, who can use LivingSocial’s man power to do the daily deals work for it. And according to recent Yipit data, Amazon’s already doing this: “Amazon, which invested $175 million in LivingSocial last December, continues to leverage LivingSocial’s sales force to sell its deals to merchants rather than investing heavily in its own sales force.”
There will also be plenty of efforts by smaller outlets to hook their fate to successful social sites (i.e., ScoutMob’s recent partnership with Foursquare). Containing the user experience within one app or site is better for the consumer, who doesn’t want to switch between applications to fully utilize everything that’s being offered.
Who’s out
To be brief, there’s one clear loser will emerge in 2012: The Groupon clone--something we've seen coming for awhile. Now to be clear, we need to define what that is exactly. A Groupon clone is a stand-alone site that isn’t affiliated with any larger company, that creates its own deals and b2b relationships and finds its own audience. It’s not Google Offers or Amazon Local, for instance.
These sites followed in Groupon’s and LivingSocial’s footsteps, watching the trend take a hold of the e-commerce scene. Unfortunately in this case, the first to the game may have sucked the niche dry before new competitors could even have a chance, and now they will experience the struggles but without the market share and investor relations to fall back on.
“If you’re already established, you don’t have to spend as much building this up,” says Tobias. “Groupon is stumbling and anyone new who wants to compete with it will similarly struggle.” Building a brand from the ground up isn’t easy, and those who are trying to do this on their own have missed the window.  
“I don’t think any of them have a chance,” Tobias says about these clones. “In the last six months 170 of them have gone bankrupt or closed and at the same time 120 of them have been launched.”
Who’s in
But there is hope: “The model isn’t screwed. The direct model is screwed,” he says. Sites that are adding daily deals to their already established platforms have a much better shot at success in this market—sites like Google Offers, Amazon Local, MSN Offers and the like.
Google Offers has had a relatively quiet introduction, although new data from Yipit shows it’s growing steadily. According to the same report, Amazon Local has recently experienced a surge in its expansion. These types, Tobias says, will play out in the long run because they are just part of an entire package of solutions for retailers.
Which brings us to what remains a large hurdle: merchant trust. Many local business owners have sworn off the scheme and the sleazy tales of vendors duped into terrible money-losing deals are never-ending. 
It’s been said time and time again that Groupon is in direct competition with the vendors who use it for customer loyalty, and often the consumers attracted to the site in the first place are motivated by saving money. But building this business around a site that people visit for a variety of reasons—to read, to chat, to email—could mean a very different type of e-commerce experience altogether. And Jerry Nettuno, CEO of small business solutions application Schedulicity says that the market still has room for improvement, and that this will play out next year: "Random go-for-broke deals will evolve into well-thought-out offers." So expect to see this evolution over the next year--from oulets that can manage to promote this kind of thing, which are likely to be big players and not fringe sites. 
2012 Deals: Travel and experience
The Yipit report shows that “spa and beauty” and “restaurant” offers continued to be incredibly popular, both in bookings and percentage of deals on the table. But there are a few emerging trends we’re likely to see in 2012. Groupon’s Getaways have been a solid performer, and a huge sell for the site.
Likewise, LivingSocial Escapes have taken off. “LivingSocial Escapes, LivingSocial’s travel product, experienced a 94-percent growth in gross billings in October after the number of deals increased 64-percent and vouchers sold per deal jumped 40-percent.” LivingSocial Adventures has also done well for the company, so it would stand to reason that experiences and travel could become increasingly important for the daily discount industry. 

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Cyber Monday: from promotional myth to e-retail madness
cyber monday

Not that long ago, the industry was labeling Cyber Monday nothing but a marketing myth. Skeptics said it was far from the biggest online shopping day of the year, that nothing would be able to trump Black Friday, and that it would be nothing but a promotional term.
And now we know they were wrong. Cyber Monday has legitimized itself and then some this year, not only by trumping its own numbers, but by impacting Black Friday’s as well. According to an IBM Benchmark report, online spending yesterday was 33-percent over that of Cyber Monday 2010—and it was 29.3-percent higher than on Black Friday, which saw a particularly high amount of e-commerce traffic as well. 
Not only were more people partaking, they were also spending more money. The average order value increased from $193.24 last year to $198.26, 2.6-percent. But the real number worth noting is this: for the first time, Cyber Monday was the biggest online shopping day of the year in terms of sales, as well as the first day that online spending was over $1 billion.
What began as marketing buzz and e-retailers fervent hope that they could ride some of the Black Friday hangover is now a very real shopping phenomena. What’s even more interesting is that many online shops are witnessing Cyber Monday as the gateway to a months-long shopping spree. The Internet is a procrastinator’s best friend, and there’s no time like the holiday gifting season to prove it.
While online shopping has solidified its place in Black Friday weekend, the next emerging trends will be mobile and social. This year’s numbers proved more and more consumers are visiting retailers’ sites from mobile devices, with sales growing as well (both of these numbers were larger on Cyber Monday). And social networking proved to be a popular tool for discovering and discussing the weekend sales.
It seems to be an everybody-wins situation. Consumers have more options to shop how they want, when they want, and where they want, as well as social media outlets for optimizing the experience--whether that’s reporting unsavory retailer security guards or advertising cheaper online options. Online retailers are getting their due (and then some), and it’s not exactly as if this is at the expense of brick-and-mortar stores (at least not yet). The online hype surrounding the day and the amount of social media chatter and mobile apps devoted to it has likely increased interest.
But that’s short term. Long term, the game is changing—quickly. E-retail is undergoing an evolution of sorts, and what effect that will have on the holiday shopping season remains to be seen. 

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