Plinkers

From “Social Marketing” era to “Opportunity Marketing” surge. Leader remains Facebook!

As you surely know M. Zuckerberg recently announced the launch of Facebook Deals. This recent announce suprisingly received a quite low echo in the blogosphere and newspapers. From our side, we do think this is a major one as it is the first step in the huge and expected monetization strategy of Facebook. As a consequence, we do think a major change of consideration will operate, getting us from an era of everything deals with “Social Marketing” to a new era of what we call “opportunity marketing”

Most of people agrees about Facebook as a major and highly valuable company. And this is despite a quite low income level compared to its big use and huge database. Consequently, most of those people wonder the way Facebook will succeed to transform that big potential into really big money. To me the latest announces from Zuckerberg represent the backbone strategy to transforms Facebook into a really profitable company.

At the begining was “facebook connect” then upgraded and called “Open Graph”

Let’s rewind a bit. Some months ago Facebook announces the launch of “Facebook connect“, an API allowing people to log in outside facebook websites. Quite practical but not really profitable invention until a while later when the young CEO announced the switch from “facebook connect” to “Open Graph”. We intuitively understand that new version of the API is a part of a huge datamining process to more and more learn and unerstand about you.

Then we had “Facebook Places”

Some while after, following to the quite noticeable growth of Foursquare, Facebook announces its counter-attack launching “Facebook Places”. That “geotargeting” service feeds now facebook datas with more real life datas about you.

And now comes “Facebook Deals”!

Now things are becoming really concrete. Introducing Facebook deals on the original ideas of GroupOn. With that new service, Facebook is federating around itself many special offers dealing with thousands different types of products (food, culture, clothes, trips…)

So why that evolution is so interesting ?

With that latest launch Facebook switches from funny “Social Marketing” to efficient & profitable “Opportunity marketing”. We could also call it “Contextual Marketing” as the idea is to provide a specific & stimulating offer to a specific person and match to a specific context. The idea is of course to generate a spontaneous & emotional purchase !

So, armed of that range of tools, Facebook is now able to associate the following issues at the mean time :

• Right Place
• Right Moment
• Right Person
• Right Offer

If you associate that revolution to the uprising “App” hegemony you quickly understand that Facebook will soon become your permanent shopping guide. The ultimate personal shopper who will be able to listen, to understand and to follow you to be able to whisper to your ear the next bargains you should catch-up at the exact moment you need or can do it.

So what role takes Plinkers in “opportunity marketing” ?

It’s quite simple !

• Open Graph gets the dtas about you, what you like what you don’t and influences you.
  
• Foursquare / Facebook places get the information about where you like to go or live, what kind of shops you regularly visit, what tv program you are regularly watching etc.
• Plinkers is one step ahead getting you to tell us what are the products you like or would like.

Then the advantages are obvious ! First you easily adapt the special offers to provide to each user. And second, you can also provide them at the paroxism of their desire which is the moment they watch their heros using/wearing it !

Of course in a very near future it will feed some iPhone’s App to generate some alerts about products they would have added as favourites at the exact moment they are walking by a shop selling that product…