Remember when Gilt Group and Rue La La first launched and you had to be “invited”? It was a genius marketing effort that established a brand of high-end exclusivity. It also was important in jump-starting …

Yesterday, TechCrunch covered the $1m that eBay / PayPal had raised for Japan earthquake and tsunami relief. It’s been heartwarming to see such big brands and platforms leverage their communities – and their scale – …

Redbox is a service I love, a product that is terrificly done and a business whose future is murky (negative: moving digital and Netflix as a competitor; positive: Netflix as an example of transitioning perfectly). …

Social commerce sites like Gilt, Rue La La, ShoeDazzle, Groupon and LivingSocial have been among the leaders in ‘social marketing’… and they find success through relatively straightforward, sometimes simple products and promotions.

Gilt Group has rolled out their new group-buying / coupon site Gilt City to six cities (New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Chicago). With it comes the Gilt City iPhone app.
There isn’t …

This is picture from Twitpic sums up the options that consumers and brick & mortar retailers face: choice overload. Google Places, Facebook Places and/or Fan Pages, Twitter, Yelp… and that doesn’t include Groupon, LivingSocial, and …

Smashing Magazine has a terrific guide to designing “call to action buttons.” Design and optimization can increase conversions dramatically – just ask (and study!) these conversion-focused leaders:
- Social gaming: RockYou, Slide, Zynga, etc
- Flash Sales: …

You could do several classes around Groupon and LivingSocial’s product / product marketing expertise. Here is a very simple example of how Groupon does the little things very well.
Many sites have Facebook Connect buttons across …

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The top four developers on Facebook have three very recognizable names… and one you probably are familiar with by product – but not by name: LivingSocial (whom I have …

Less than a week ago, I wrote about LivingSocial’s meteoric rise up Facebook:
Last week of March: 2,000,000 users
End of March: 10,000,000 users
First week of April: 14,500,000 users

If you’ve been on Facebook recently, you’ve certainly seen something like the below screenshot:

A list of five things, ranked in order. Usually followed by several friend comments… who then post their own “Top Five”.
It’s simple, …