Yesterday afternoon I moderated the “Daily Deals Suck” panel at the GeoLoco Conference featuring Lilia Martinez-Coburn of BluLabel, Lawrence Marks of Choozon, Chris Silva of Altimeter Group and Jeremy Geiger of Retailigence. Even before our discussion, we knew the reasons Daily Deals already have a dubious reputation — from over-saturation on recommendations, to lack of merchant education, to a lackluster redemption experience for the user. But perhaps the biggest reason Daily Deals as we know them currently suck, is because most of the leading business models are flawed.
THAT’S A DEAL BREAKER LADIES
In the last few months, Groupon was forced to cut 10 percent of its sales staff. Meanwhile, BuyWithMe cut half of its staff and was aquired by Gilt Groupe (likely for a song). And finally, even with all of its demographic targeting and endless resources, Facebook cut its Deals product after only a four month test due to low performance. Clearly, there’s something wrong when an industry’s shining examples are struggling. The one large company continuing to invest in the local deals space is Google. 
GOOGLE’S PLAY
Yesterday morning Google launched its Google Offers product. Between Google’s ability to display local in-stock inventory through the Blue Dot search feature, its foray into mobile payment systems via Google Wallet, and its acquisition of Dealmap to place inventory into Google Maps — the search goliath is poised to takeover the space. The problem is, with customer loyalty and conversion being as low as it is on existing deal services, it may not be worth it to become a leader in what could possibly be a losing approach to a great market opportunity.
Clearly, I’m just a critical bystander here. If you’ve got questions on the deal space for the real experts, feel free to ping my fellow panelists. Their Twitter handles are: @BluLabel, @choozon, @802dotchris and @retailigence.
Whoa. I just read an article where 5 severed heads were found in front of a primary school in Acapulco. The killings are said to be drug-related and immediately I remembered a YouTube meme I came across about four years ago where scenes of killings were set to grupero narcorrido (drug cartel) country-style ballads. Back then North Eastern Mexicans connected to Gulf cartels were uploading gruesome murder scenes as a warning to rival cartels and the videos were going viral. Grupero musicians were targeted and killed and the bloody battle between the cartels had for the first time, moved online.
In recent years journalists have also been targeted for their investigative pieces, but real-time technologies have allowed concerned citizens to anonymously tip off police and authorities to narco activities without violent repercussions. Nevertheless, September 13 raised new fears for those updating online sites as two blogger/Twitter users connected to an anti-narco forum called Frontera Al Rojo Vivo were found dead, hanging from a bridge and labeled as “snitches” by the Zeta cartel .
Regular government and employee whistle blowers already have their challenges, but reporting on drug cartel activity is a whole other level of terrifying. Perhaps privacy both online and offline are for the most part dead as Steve Rambaum suggests, but we certainly can’t get over it. Between web profiling, cookies, or access at the ISP level, I have no idea how the murdered bloggers were tracked down, but clearly there is a need for greater privacy controls from those who might be harmed for their opinions. I’m not sure thatTor can do much when dangerous groups assert their reach and power, but it’s definitely worth a revisit.
On Friday afternoon I came across a great NYTimes article on the now common practice of paying Mechanical Turks to post positive reviews for hotels, venues and restaurants. The article goes on to cite a new Cornell study that roots out “deceptive opinion spam” at 90 percent accuracy simply by using computational linguistic analysis. While this would help with fictitious opinions, it doesn’t solve the fact that there’s a clear shadow economy for the larger review-driven landscape.
In as early as 2009, The East Bay Express accused Yelp of offering to hide negative user reviews for a price. While Yelp wasn’t accused of offering to post fraudulent reviews, the company was suspected of hiding the whole truth. For an organization whose slogan is “real people, real reviews”, that felt like a betrayal.
But even when review sites aren’t accused of slippery dealings, there’s little we can do to police real reviews, because quite honestly, sometimes real people suck. Really. Grifters gonna grift. If people are naive enough to buy the old pig in a poke without doing some research, inspecting the merchandise and using a traceable payment system, then perhaps there should be a Turing test for basic common sense.
While I don’t condone grifting by any means, I do quite like ye olde-timey language of the glim-dropper, the melon drop and the badger game. This new fandangled “social engineering” scam game lacks the same panache. To protect yourself against the pitfalls of the common grift, Wikipedia has an extensive list of confidence tricks. Nevertheless, I find watching the Gangs of New York while simultaneously thumbing through my favorite tome, The Wordsworth Reference Dictionary of Pirates to be an excellent starter.
