How Groupon Integrates Social Media and Customer Experience

One Playbook for All

Groupon started as a local company that became global almost overnight, and this is baked right in to the culture. The question for Paul and his team then becomes, “How do we operate on the global level while still remaining as relevant as possible at a hyper-local level?”
Paul structures his team carefully to ensure Groupon is able to engage on a local level as a global company. His community managers are in charge of optimizing content and pushing it out to various channels, while a whole editorial staff creates content. He calls his employees who are in charge of strategy City Planners. They are the ones who have an intimate knowledge of local areas around the world and what deals might be appropriate for that locality; they’re tuned in to the culture so they can guide the content developers.

Globally, about 100 Groupon employees have a hand in social, but only a dozen of them are dedicated to social full-time.
When Eric Lefkofsky stepped in as the new CEO of Groupon, his first initiative was to create the “one playbook” plan. The idea was to make sure that Groupon, across all markets, was operating on the same set of principles and strategy.
“The other side of that coin,” Paul says, “is still to leave enough wiggle room to give each international country enough autonomy that they can develop their own relevant content.”
Using this strategy, Paul’s team is able to create relevant content for individual localities, using the local flavor of those places, and still maintain a consistent global voice.

Paul’s team uses Sprinklr to manage their social content across platforms and across countries. They send out between 2,500 and 3,000 posts per week and have 174 Twitter handles for specific localities. He credits a “very understanding legal team” who gives them the flexibility they need to succeed at such a high volume of content.
The recent launch of their integrated POS and marketing system, Gnome by Groupon, shows that Groupon will keep pushing the boundaries to deliver their customers – both individuals and businesses – the best they can offer.

Holy Social

Sony has created a new social network, and it’s dedicated entirely to football (well, soccer). One Stadium Live seeks to unify all the social buzz about soccer, and specifically the FIFA World Cup, into one unified platform.
Nick says, “It’s truly connecting the world in a social space all tied back to this one event.” And the platform takes advantage of Twitter’s most up-to-date language filtering technology to make it even more user-friendly.
Sony is also aggregating information in the app about the different teams and other relevant tidbits related to the World Cup. It’s a one-stop shop for everything a World Cup fan needs.
Nick points out that using Twitter’s API to build an intuitive experience for the user is not necessarily straightforward and gives props to Sony for creating such a usable app.

See you next week!