"Are We Approaching the End of the Daily Deals Era?" That's the headline for Ben Parr's column in MASHABLE.
In the article, Parr presents evidence of the decline of consumer interest in the frantic digital chase after daily deal discounts. It is also dawning on businesses which participated in that discounting that they weren't making much if any money. Customers who swung by for the bargains weren't returning to shop the traditional way.
No surprise, Groupon traffic has had a 50% drop in traffic since July 2011 [Source: Experian Hitwise]. Facebook dumped its four-month old Deals. Yelp, which began testing out daily deals in July 2010, is phasing out of that niche.
Might this be a sign of The Great Pushback against the total embrace of social media as an end in itself? That was hot and not it's not.
The analogy here goes back to the time when organizations and individuals were determined to be state-of-the-art in their implementation of technology. High-tech companies could sell them just about anything. Then, there began the return of common business sense. Good-enough systems and stand-alones would remain good-enough. There wasn't going to be change for innovation's sake.
In my conversations with social media colleagues as well as prospects and clients, there is that same realization that being up-to-speed with every new social media platform, capability, gadget, and more might have little or no correlation to increasing revenue. If Facebook is working just fine, why make the decision to add on Google+ or transition away from Facebook? Sure WordPress has many more features than Typepad. But, if those features such as transmitting newsletters aren't needed, then why transfer to another platform?
Then there are more fundamental questions, especially about the numbers game. Businesses want to convert browsers into buyers. If the lion's share of the browsers to the site aren't likely to buy, then the traffic metrics aren't relevant. Targeting trumps trafficking.
Those same number issues apply to that now-mature medium of blogging. If the objective is to develop new business, then what matters is that the right prospects come to the blog, not the raw traffic statistics. Those kinds of metrics count if the objective is to sell advertising. For the more common creation of partnership the focus is on who's visiting and coming back for more.
As the fall business season starts after Labor Day we can observe what organizations and individuals declare "basta" [Italian for "enough"] in relation to what's new in social media.
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