I remember, back in 2008, preparing a presentation on social media and how it was starting to have a huge effect on customer services. Twitter was starting to gain traction beyond the early adopter/techie types, and brands were desperate to leap onto the band wagon. Facebook was already massive, and a relatively small number of brands were starting to use it well with others using it badly, and still more sitting on the sidelines, enviously looking in at the party, but too scared to get involved.

My advice to the client at the time was ‘you can’t afford NOT to get involved’. There had already been a number of famous cases of brands being seriously damaged by complainers who had taken their grievances to social media, and had been ignored by the brand in question. The internet had done its thing, and before the brand knew it the grouch had been turned into a cause célèbre, the public complaint and lack of brand action had gone viral, and the brand’s reputation was in tatters.

So far, so meh. Old news, right? Well yes, but recently we’ve been noticing, and getting increasingly annoyed by a new(ish) phenomena. Brand bullying. This is where some opportunist saboteur turns to Twitter complaining of poor service or poor quality or some other perceived snub from a brand, purely to see whether they can screw some free stuff out of said brand. They invariably use a holier than thou tone and seem to think that the world will side with them purely because they’re shouting, loudly and in public. And they’re not far wrong – ‘the internet’ is the ultimate champion of the little guy.

Brands often respond to this public airing of dirty washing by doing exactly what the opportunist wants – throwing a freebie at it. No matter whether the whinger was an incredibly brand-loyal person with a real grievance, and therefore worth responding to and nurturing, or someone who has heretofore demonstrated zero brand loyalty, if they complain long and loud enough, they’ll be looked after.

This pushes a button for me. It’s inherently unfair. And it actually goes against the internet ethos: the internet has given power to the individual, but (to quote Uncle Ben Parker) with great power comes great responsibility – and if the individual abuses that responsibility the power should be taken away from them. So I suddenly find myself in a slightly unlikely position, and questioning whether brands really do need to oil every squeaky wheel. Maybe there’s a better way. Maybe there’s a way to take the sting out of the complaint without giving in to the bullies. Maybe brands should stand up to them, sometimes.

This is obviously a much more delicate an operation than I make it sound, so really I’m throwing it out there as a question. Any social media managers out there care to weigh in?

I’m a bit of a regular at Future Human events, and a few weeks ago I attended their session ‘Social Animals’ – exploring how (and if) social networks are changing our personalities. It was an interesting session for a number of reasons, but one of the big take away points for me was around the fragmentation of social media – the idea that a number of factors are beginning to chip away at Facebook’s monopoly of social media, leading to fragmentation of social media into lots of smaller communities and networks.

One of the panel at the event was Alex Halliday, founder and CEO of Social Go, an online service that allows users to create their own, interest focussed, social networks. He talked about the fact that lots of social networkers are not restricting themselves to the big networks – Facebook, Twitter etc – but are turning away from these mass, general sites to more close-knit communities, where users can unite around objects of common interest. Obviously Alex’s business model is built on this idea, so he has an interest in talking it up, but it rang true. With so many people getting their ‘social media training’ on Facebook – and becoming accustomed to social tools and user experience styles through it – it wouldn’t surprise me to discover that users are taking these skills and knowledge and using them elsewhere on the web – elsewheres that perhaps in pre-Facebook days were principally the domain of fanboys and geeks.

Obviously Alex is not the only one to be thinking like this. The inexorable rise of Facebook may have shifted our attention away from community sites, but they are thriving still – look at the Daddy of them all (if you’ll forgive the pun), the all-powerful Mumsnet. And what’s more, community sites are building in more ‘social’ features as championed by Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to make them more useful to users. Other commentators such as Jack Wallington over on Brand Republic’s Wall Blog have talked in more depth on this niche network phenomena.

Another angle to the fragmentation theory is the social network Path which limits each user to 50 followers and cites Dunbar’s number as its rationale for doing so (there is an upper limit to the amount of people that an individual can know personally whilst also knowing how each person relates to one another – and it’s a lot less than the number of Facebook friends most people have). I find this a lot more interesting, as its often cited as a reason that we will never have a truly global society, or true homogenisation – yes we may have the same brands on our high streets, but our cognitive limitations mean that we will never be exactly the same.

Place these two ideas (the rise of nice communities and Dunbar’s number) against a backdrop of stories about Facebook losing users in its most established markets, and some people start putting two and two together and making five.

I think its early days to make any sort of rash forecasts about the demise of Facebook at the hands of smaller communities – there have always been smaller niche communities online, and there always will be – that doesn’t mean people don’t want to talk to their larger ‘friend’ base as well as a group of strangers they are linked to through common interest. I also think Facebook will be remiss if it doesn’t up its niche interest game – after all, from a monetisation perspective, Facebook’s revenue comes squarely from knowing as much about its users as possible to allow for high levels of targeting. But I do think there is something to the Dunbar’s number criticism. I think eventually we start to feel overwhelmed by the numbers, and we either ignore a huge amount of people we’re friends with – only actively responding to and interacting with a relatively small sub-group within our friend lists, go through mass culling exercises, or in some extreme cases drop out of Facebook altogether.

I’d love to generate a bit of discussion around this as I find the way the internet is developing in front of our eyes – and the way it’s so hard to predict – fascinating. So let us know your thoughts and leave a comment below!

Instead, we’re interested in the ‘frictionless sharing’ that Facebook have been trumpeting and that is a result of the changes they’ve made to Open Graph.

Lots of commentators have already talked about the possibilities that Open Graph apps open up, and the effect they’re going to have on brands – how pages will become less important, how a brand’s updates will show up in feeds much less often and how therefore in order to connect with their audiences, brands need to start developing their own Open Graph apps. You can read about this elsewhere. The important thing to note about frictionless sharing is that if it heralds a new way of sharing content across the web, it means that the sharing of what we are reading, listening to or watching will increasingly become automatic – it will no longer require a manual action such as liking, tagging, or tweeting.

This is what we’re more interested in right now: the act – or rather non-act – of frictionless sharing.  Neil Perkin wrote an interesting column on frictionless sharing on NMA recently. He makes this point, which I shall quote in full:

“The fact that a piece of content is deliberately selected, judged, commented on and passed on by one of my friends or someone I follow attributes a certain significance and context to it. It’s a significance that I cherish. Social curation has come to sit alongside algorithmic and professional curation as a valuable way to distinguish signal from noise.”

I’m in full agreement with this – aside from the obvious ‘filter bubble’ issues around both social and algorithmic curation, I do get most of my daily intelligence (if you’ll forgive the pretension of the term) via social curation and this will immediately be devalued by frictionless sharing.

Why? Well, if I’m now not only being passed a ‘piece of content deliberately selected, judged, commented on’ by one of my friends, but also the stuff that one of my friends has read, listened to or watched, but thought was a bit rubbish and not worth passing on, then social curation is useless. After all, you wouldn’t necessarily buy a book just because you saw a mate reading it on the bus. You’d want to know whether it was any good first.

Photo (cc) Katie Sayer.

So it was with interest that I read a piece by Dermot McCormack on Mashable Business entitled ’3 commandments for the next online content leaders’.

According to McCormack, the art of successfully using content to market a brand comes down to  to three simple things:  authority, curation and context. More specifically, it comes down to earning  authority by curating your content well, within context. His article is great and I agree with all of it, so have a look. The bit I’m specifically interested in here though is the first part, ‘authority’.

What does McCormack mean? Well, he says that brands need to become trusted as content providers. And trust, according to McCormack, comes from authority. The BBC for example has authority when I want UK news. Pitchfork has authority when I want new music suggestions (although I also turn to the BBC in the form of six music for that). For US political news I go to The Huffington Post or The Daily Beast. You get the picture. But these are all media owners, not brands, and the authority they have has taken time to earn, and has come partly because they are an independent voice, not trying to sell something. So brands have to try to generate authority, and quickly – leading to trust. McCormack acknowledges that this process can only be achieved by brands knowing who their audience is, then constantly fine-tuning the way they communicate with their customers, and always, always remaining honest, talking to them about things they care about and striving to improve the way they do things. So far, so obvious. But he also says brands must ask themselves ‘is my voice authentic’, and this is the really interesting part for me.

I’ve had debates over this question for years, but for me, authenticity of voice is something that needs to be carefully considered and planned hand in hand with brand positioning. Sometimes authenticity can be manufactured – see Red Bull’s authority in adrenaline sports after years of careful sponsorship. And sometimes that authenticity is customer-led (ie the brand notices that certain consumers are using their product in a certain way and uses that behaviour to its advantage) – see Converse and music. But either way, for me what your brand can speak with authenticity and authority about shouldn’t be a casual decision. The authentic voice that your brand develops must be integral to EVERYTHING you do.

This might seem obvious, but sometimes when I talk to customer magazine publishers (or custom publishers in the US, Canada and Australia) they argue the case for bands producing ‘lifestyle’ features in their customer magazines – for example a bank doing a feature on a home makeover, or a top ten gadget feature. Their argument is that the lifestyle content somehow adds value for the customer. This has always worried me, mainly because the brand doesn’t necessarily have any authority in that area, or really any authentic voice, and therefore I’m skeptical about how much value it really adds. Red Bull spent years building up their authority in adrenaline sports before it launched its (fairly adventure sport-dominated) Bulletin. Waterstone’s Books Quarterly is a magazine about books and, much as you might doubt the objective nature of their reviews, there is no doubt that they have an authority to talk about books. They also have an authenticity which comes from the again undoubted knowledge and passion of their booksellers, if not their (previously) corporate owners. But I never really believed in the insurance magazine I produced that did features on how to fit out your home-working office, or style your new bathroom – I just didn’t see why I should trust the brand to tell me about that stuff.

This is alway going to be a slightly controversial argument, because it implies that using content as a marketing tool isn’t right for some brands. That’s not what I’m saying though – I’m saying be more careful about the content you choose, because it should both add to your perceived authority and come from a position of authenticity. I’m also saying be more careful about the channel – it may be that a magazine isn’t the right forum for your brand’s content, but a blog or a Facebook page is.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter!

Patricia McDonald over at planninginhighheels.com wrote a great post about how marketing has changed over the years. She makes the point that whereas once upon a time, marketing was a science involving assessing a marketplace and then understanding  which combination of four ‘levers’ – the  ’4 Ps’: Product, Price, Place and Promotion – to pull to best drive a brand or product  forward, it has become preoccupied with the fourth P: Promotion.

Her point is that the ‘digital world’ takes many of the cost and infrastructure problems out of ‘product, place and price’ and therefore gives back the opportunity to marketers to influence much more than just the promotional message: they can profoundly influence their businesses, transforming processes, developing new products, innovating and thinking radically.

Rei Inamoto, AKQA’s Chief Creative Officer makes an interesting point in an opinion column for Contagious Magazine. His piece is about mobile, and, broadly, about how we (the agency world) should stop using it as a promotional channel and start using mobile the way it works best: as a medium that is USED. However, he uses uses a great example to illustrate his point, which also happens to back up Patricia’s thinking: imagine if Kodak had come up with Instagram. It’s a perfect fit for them. It would have provided a new avenue to engage customers, raised awareness of the brand amongst a demographic that barely remembers analogue photography and what a giant Kodak was in that era, AND provided a revenue stream. Truly disruptive innovation.

Then, to get the agency triumvirate, we have Peter Bardell, Senior Account Director at McCann London. Again in an opinion piece for Contagious Magazine, Peter talks about the danger of chasing the next technical ‘big thing’ and checking boxes: too many agencies look for the next big thing to sell their clients. Social media? Check. Gamification? Check. Instead, technology should be used when it has a genuine purpose. So, instead of hiring technical gurus, Peter says, we (the agency world) should be hiring people who have ideas across all disciplines. In other words, innovators. Of course, that’s not to say that technical gurus can’t be innovators, more that the technical savvy should be accompanied by an innovative mindset. With that in mind, in their mock pitch McCann ask candidate employees not to present a campaign, but to pitch ‘an idea, no parameters’.

They’re all right, of course. Thinking of marketing purely in terms of promotion of a product wastes the talent of marketers on both client and agency sides, but, whilst the pace of technical change IS giving us the opportunity to disrupt, innovate and influence much more, many businesses still aren’t set up to harness that. At  Better Things I’m surrounded by creative people – and I don’t just mean people who can make something look beautiful, I mean people who can think creatively and INNOVATE. When we get a client brief, we often come up with ideas that involve changing a product or process, but so often the marketing team at the client end are not empowered to do anything with those ideas – what they want is a solid response to the brief, and the brief often states not only the promotional message, but often the preferred channel. A business structure in which the client side marketing team are empowered to influence the whole business might well be Mad Men era marketing, but it’s also the future.

Oh and if you’re interested in creating culture of innovation at your business have a read of Schumpeter at The Economist on Cley Christensen.

We thought we’d let the dust settle a little bit around Google+ before posting out thoughts up here. But since its launch on June 18th, the dust has shown no sign of settling – in fact there seems to be more and more dust being kicked up every second.

I’m going to stop with the dust metaphor now because I’m annoying myself.  Google+ has added 18 million users and notched up a billion shares a day. It’s being touted as the Facebook killer, the Twitter killer. Business is clamouring to get involved. Every where we turn in the blogosphere, the twittersphere, even in (the) Facebook(sphere) there’s a new article on Google+, and almost every website we look at now has the ‘+1′ button integrated next to their ‘like’ and ‘tweets’ counters (just scroll down toward the bottom of this piece). It feels, already, like part of the landscape.

But let’s break this down a little:

Those figures

I like to think of myself as an early adopter, and indeed, was amongst the first 18 million Google+ users. Not bad, eh? I digress. Anyway as an ‘early adopter’ messing about in Google+ feels a bit lonely. Even with all those folks on there I have about 20 people in my circles. Of which I would say 3 are posting things regularly. The rest have set up a profile and as yet have posted NOTHING – no activity. A large user base is good, lots of shares is good, but if it’s limited to a small elite then it’s not. Of course, it’s early days. There are some interesting stats on usage on Mashable if you want further reading.

UPDATE: In addition it appears that Facebook users spend 4 times as long on the site as Google+ users – again indicative of the fledgling nature of the site, but nevertheless not all that impressive as yet.

Google+ as the Twitter killer

Some commentators have said Google+ is akin to Twitter in that you can follow people without their permission (rather than them having to accept your request, as in Facebook), and therefore this makes Google+ the Twitter killer. Obviously this doesn’t take into account the stripped-down appeal of Twitter – the single-function nature of it that allows people to rapidly scan a whole load of information. And Twitter’s die-hard fanbase. And the niche it’s carved its-self as a real-time news feed. NEXT!

Google+ as the Facebook killer

Facebook killer. Well, again, no. Facebook is entrenched in Western society to the point that it is showing signs of reaching a natural saturation point, but in countries that were a little slower on the uptake, Facebook is still registering phenomenal growth. And good luck if you think you’re going take Facebook’s audience – comfortable and familiar with the user interface as they are – and prize them away. Look at the uproar that happens when Facebook change their own page layout. Oh no, people DO NOT like change. Yes Google allows you to combine multiple networks and integrate your contacts and email – but I know a lot of people who don’t have an email address and communicate online exclusively via Facebook’s messaging feature. Google has taken most of Facebook’s features (lists is basically a less sexy interfaced version of circles; video chat is coming to FB via the Skype link-up, etc etc) and made them a bit slicker in some cases, but I don’t think enough to get people to move. Having said that, I don’t think it has to be an either or.

Google+ for business

Google+ have actively asked businesses to wait for a few months until they have their specific business version ready. And that makes a lot of sense. Brand who are desperate to get onto Google+ now – why? We don’t yet have enough data on how, when and why people use it to know what your strategy should be for the medium. It took a long time before Facebook opened up properly to brands and with good reason – they now have a fantastic brand offering, which acts as a second CRM for brands that use it. Google+ are wise to follow suit.

UPDATE: here’s a little more info on Google+ brand pages, and how brands can prepare for their launch.

Summary

So in summary – I think Facebook, Twitter and Google+ can certainly co-exist in the medium term. I’m not sure exactly how my Google+ use will differ from my Facebook and Twitter posts as yet, or whether I’ll just end up replicating – it depends what my network on there ends up looking like. But I don’t see myself shutting down any of them. At the worst, Facebook gets marginally less facetime from me. At the best, I spend exactly the same amount of time on Facebook but work a longer day.

And – lame though I know this sounds – I think it’s way too early to say how useful it will be to me, you or business. But I had to contribute to that dust cloud!

The report re-stated some things that are obvious just from looking around, and formalised some things that for us were gut-instinct. The major thrust of the report is that a movement away from content creation to content distribution, fragmentation of the devices and platforms from which we access and consume the internet, and changing perceptions of the internet as an entertainment platform, are all bringing about a return to the traditional hierarchies of professional content generators, paid-for content, media giants, big brands and the political elite.

Good to read it all in one place and backed up by robust data though – and we like their name for it: The Social Entertainment Age. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Here’s a bit more detail on what the report says.

GlobalWebIndex identified three key themes in their report.

The rise of real time social

This is one of those so-far-so-obvious observations that we all knew anyway but is good to have verified by data. There has been, and is an ongoing, shift from the old text-based social media of blogs and forums, to real-time sharing of information and content enabled by micro-blogging services – such as status updates and tweets. This means that the emphasis of social media is no longer on creating content and publishing it, but on sharing other people’s content and real-time opinions about real world events. So the social web is now about distribution rather than creation, and consequently there is a shift of focus back to traditional media and professional content. This is major: for years the web has been seen as a threat to the traditional world of media giants, big brands and the political elite – now these changing trends in the way people participate in the social web are pushing us back towards those same hierarchies.

Packaged internet platforms

The way we access the internet is changing. The way we all know – the open, browser-based web – is losing out to ‘packaged’ internet platforms: tablets, mobile apps, internet connected TVs, e-readers, gaming and video platforms, PC apps. Increasingly, everything is wired in to the web. And Mobile is leading the way: over 17% of people surveyed watched TV in the last month on their mobile, and 26% watched an on-demand video on mobile. In keeping with the theme of ‘real-time social’, this is giving traditional media owners a second bite of the cherry – these packaged platforms allow them the means to create sustainable business models, to actually charge for their content – something that the browser-based web totally failed to accommodate.

The entertainment platform of choice

The online experience is now very strongly centred around ‘traditional style’ content. For hundreds of millions of consumers the internet , across multiple platforms, is about entertainment. This is caused by the growth in (legal and illegal) video sites, the rise of real-time and the sharing of traditional content that that implies, and the growth of packaged platforms.

Time will tell whether GlobalWebIndex are right in their assumptions and predictions, but one thing is for sure – the changes in behaviour that they are reporting are real, the data is good, and the drive back to the status quo seems inexorable. The question is whether this is a good or a bad thing, and for whom. What do you think?

Path calls itself the “The Personal Network”, because unlike Twitter, which encourages users to aquire large numbers of ‘followers’, it limits your personal network to just 50 users.This isn’t just being churlish though – it’s based on the thories of Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford Robin Dunbar, who reckons that 150 is the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships“. By limiting to 50, the guys at Path figure that your network will be limited to your closest friends and family and so there will be a high level of trust in the network. So far, so laudable.

But what does it actually do? Well, it’s a suite of apps (the Monday launch was the iPhone app, I would assume Android and other platforms will be available soon) that focus on sharing photos with your group of close friends. Basically, it uses location services to allow users to give their photo three pieces of contextual information: people, places and things.

So I can take a photo, tag one of my Path friends to it, use geo-tagging to say where it was taken and state the ‘thing’ which could be a noun (‘notebook’, ‘garden gnome’, ‘traffic light’ etc) or a verb (‘walking’, ‘partying’, ‘dancing’). Then I share it with my Path network. That’s it. No sharing across other social networks, no comments or ‘likes’ or hipstamatic filters, just People, Places, Things.

As I said, so far it’s kinda fun – but I need more friends to truly see how much fun it’ll be, so time will tell. One thing that strikes me starightaway though, is that the extremely personal nature of the network means that there isn’t an obvious ‘in’ here for brands. You can’t ‘broadcast’ if you can only have 50 friends, and I doubt brands would lavish the time and attention needed to maintain a social network presence on just 50 individuals – no matter how big fans they are of the brand.

On the other hand, for smart brands, there might be an opportunity. If you’re willing to give one of your limited friend spots to a brand, you have to really love them. Marketers could use Path friendship as a serious level of reward for the most engaged and dedicate fans of a brand, and friendship could come with a whole host of benefits for those lucky enough to be one of the 50. And 50 uber-advocates could be worth their weight in gold.

We all know that the internet has shaped a new paradigm of content creation: no longer do we rely on traditional sources – books, newspapers, magazines – to provide our content. So far so obvious.

And Neil doesn’t talk about content generation. Rather, he talks about the way the internet is creating new paradigms of content curation. The content that is shared through social networks like twitter, or socially enabled tools like spotify mean that we no longer look exclusively to traditional ‘editors’ for curation.

Instead, we create a consistently relevant stream of interesting and personalised content for ourselves. We elect to follow people on Twitter who we trust to only share information that we will find relevant. We receive spotify links from like-minded friends who share a similar taste in music. We self-select RSS feeds. Neil calls this a mash-up of social and personal curation, both of which I like as terms.

Neil works in the advertising and media community, as do I, and he notes that Twitter and RSS are the ideal tools to ‘curate’ information in and about our industry. He’s right. And, as a strategist, I can honestly say that I have been able to quickly build a stream of content around almost any subject, industry, passtime or interest I have needed to. It took very little time, when I started working with a public sector managed facilities supplier, to plug myself into a community of public sector thinkers. Working with an Automotive client led me to start absorbing information from dealers and car buyers and classified websites. The charity sector opened up very quickly for me when we were briefed to produce a social media campaign for Bliss. And I did it far more quickly than I might have by signing up subscriptions to industry publications or visiting a library.

Neil notes that these streams don’t necessarily replace traditional media curation (ie by a knowledgable, trained, recognised editor), rather that the best models use both sources. He sites the Guardian’s recent launch of the Guardian Science Blogs network as an example of traditional media (and by extension ‘curation’) workng with non-traditional (in this case the blogosphere). Incidentally this would have been a great plan for the Union of Concerned Scientists, had they given it some thought and not gone for the knee-jerk ‘let’s spank a load of cash on uneccessary advertising’ option. Neil goes on to talk about the way the Guardian opened up its entire ‘process of producing, hosting, and curating great content’ to the public, rather than simply facilitating user generated content. He talks about it a whole lot better than I could, so read his post. I agree with him.

The one thing I picked up on from Neils post that I found slightly risable was in the initial paragraph,where he quotes Christopher Bailey, CCO of Burberry, who said: “We are now as much a media-content company as we are a design company, because it’s all part of the overall experience.”

Now, I get brands creating content (although I think they should only create content where they have a real authority to talk on a subject, Burberry for instance shouldn’t start telling me how to maintain my car in winter), but being ‘as much’ a content generation company as a design company seems daft. Burberry can generate content about (clothes) design because they design clothes. If they stopped designing clothes and carried on talking about designing clothes, I’m not sure anyone would listen. So let’s not get carried away here: by all means, brands, hold forth on subjects where you have a passion and an authority and can give people genuine insight and advice. But don’t start thinking you are an independent editorial voice. That’s just forgetting what you are and what you exist to do.

He blamed this on two things: firstly, most of the bigger multiple grocers/retailers have increasingly large loyalty schemes which are replacing magazines as distribution channels with which brands can reach consumers with coupons. Replacing rather than working alongside because the data-driven loyalty schemes can be much, much more targeted because they hold much, much more data. And secondly because these same grocers are using mobile to traget their consumers with coupons: print is once again losing out to digital.

I was intrigued by all of this. I have a Tesco loyalty card, and they send me a DM piece through the post every now and again. It’s packed full of vouchers that either go staright in the bin or sit in a pile of other post for a couple of months before going in the bin. I pop into Tesco on the way home from work on a whim if I need something for dinner that night. I don’t plan to pop into Tesco that morning, or even that lunchtime, it’s usually as I leave the office, or even as I walk past the store. I don’t carry the vouchers with me just in case I do that.

More to the point, the idea of standing at the checkout faffing with bits of paper whilst the huge queue of people behind me builds and builds and gets more and more frustrated and annoyed doesn’t appeal either. When I see other people doing that I (totally unreasonably) want to scream at them that they’re eating into my tiny and extremely valuable leisure time just so they can get a penny off a bunch of bananas.

So, given all of that, would couponing, mobile style, work on me? Well the answer to that is…maybe. If I could tell Tesco that I’m interested in, say, offers on wine and pizza. If Tesco could detect, via geo-location, when I was in their store and either mail or SMS me an offer for wine or pizza. If I could present that offer, on my phone, at checkout. Then, I MIGHT think about using couponing.

Conincidentally I came across this infographic by Tiffany Farrant (via AP Find) about mobile couponing today. Great graphic, telling an interesting story:

Infographic By Promotional Codes

So what does all of this mean for my friend at Transcontinental? Well, either find a new revenue stream, or think about getting your data up to scratch. And all the time keep a very close eye on the development of the slate market and the way people use slates. If they, as many people expect, start to replce magazines, then maybe they can also replace magazines as a distributor of coupons.