Are Social Coupons a Good Idea but the Wrong Track

Coupons are so 1950 | How to Carry the Idea Forward with Social Currency

Social Coupons via companies like Groupon or Livingsocial are a great idea, especially for a down economy. There are hosts of complaints or issues from both consumers or businesses. The complaints range from too much or unpredictable discounts for businesses to consumers running into issues with the businesses or staff who are struggling to service full paying customers or gain tips based on total value. The second problem, at least with Groupon, is that the sales and ad content are created by Groupon staff. This is the model for a traditional linear growth business, but does not allow a customer sustaining model of growth such as wikipedia or facebook where increasing users create increasing content. Additionally, the current popular favorites fail to reward someone for finding a new gallery or event that has no means or method to create a 'coupon'. 

The root of idea has several good points; local economy, saving money, and discovery of new clients or shops. The best combinations of these ideas come from two people I have worked with. The first is from Marc Fawzi. Marc suggested some years back that what the web needed was a currency, similar to the idea of a gift economy. He was trying to point out the failures of web 2.0 in the sense that it is difficult to compensate users for valuable contributions to sites such as Wikipedia. While some sites reward you witih some notoriety for generating interesting content, it rarely translates into monetary or some other currency that could be traded. Think AMEX points you can trade for service or prodcuts rather than just street cred.

Something like bitcoin may be a solution for this in the future. Bitcoin or these sorts of things should terrify central banks or the I.R.S. I think this is the next evolution of currency and trade in economics. It could be an interesting change for society to have people rewarded on their total contributions to the group. Everyone has passed on at least one opportunity to contribute because there was no or little compensation. You could answer that question or you could go on to another article. Maybe later.

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