Social Shopping

“I can’t believe we managed to keep it a secret!” Mercury President and CEO Chris Balfe told The Business Insider. The shopping site went live earlier this week with savings offers from longtime ad partner LifeLock.com as well as Chocolate.com.

These numbers and more are from this infographic that Foursquare released on its blog, along with ideas on how to find specials through the Foursquare app.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Unlike the primitive nature associated with Black Friday– stampedes, trampling, and general chaos– modern technological advances such as QR codes, apps, and tablets have given retailers the opportunity to accommodate shoppers from multiple mediums to leave Black Friday without a black eye. A survey conducted by the National Retail Federation revealed that social media and [...]

If you listen to today’s social media pundits, it would be easy to believe that email marketing is neither effective nor relevant in today’s digital environment. The logic goes that email has lost its luster to ‘sexier’ marketing channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, especially when the target audience is tech-savvy college students. Contrary to popular belief, email is the best engager of college kids as Boris Revskin, CEO of CampusLive, explains after the jump.

The Google Mobile Ads Blog provides six mobile advertising trends and recommendations to retailers in their latest blog entry.

8coupons is a free iPhone app that provides a variety of ways to look for coupon deals and specials in an area. The “Nearby” option (bottom left of screen) identifies locations of businesses and deals associated with them. Tapping the numbered balloons brings up detailed information about each offering. If you prefer a simple list, [...]

The Google Mobile Ads Blog provides interesting mobile statistics on their way to listing: Five mobile trends to watch and how you can get started today – 85% of mobile devices will be web enabled by 2012 – Mobile search grew by 400% in the past year – 33% of search have local intent – [...]

The 1.5 update for Google Shopper for iPhone brings hyperlocal to searches for deals. Find nearby deals with Google Shopper 1.5 for iPhone The app now shows deals for offers nearby as well as a map for the offers’ locations. These offers are based on deals from businesses who have listed themselves in Google Places. [...]

ThisIsMyNext noted ISIS’ press release announcing: MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover join ISIS mobile payment network The PayWithISIS press release indicates this may be the long awaited emergence of NFC (Near Field Communication) technology as a means of making mobile ecommerce transactions. Isis will bring mobile commerce to consumers and merchants by using mobile phones [...]

While some of wait to see if NFC (Near Field Communications) takes off as the mobile payment system technology of choice (it doesn’t look to be it so far), Sprint partnered with American Express and its Serve mobile digital payment system available to its customers. American Express and Sprint Collaborate to Promote Serve However, access [...]

This year (2011) was suppposed to be the year NFC (Near Field Communications) was rolled out in smartphones and retailers. And yet, here we are half-way through 2011 with nothing more than relatively small test rollouts and NFC embedded in Google Places signs. The NFC movement fragmented in the first half of 2011. Engadget reported [...]