Open up your mind and say, ahh...

LivingSocial’s traffic skyrocketed by 80% last week with a little help from Amazon, closing the gap between it and group-buying leader Groupon.

Before last week, LivingSocial had 1/10 of the web traffic of Groupon. Thanks to Google’s $6 billion offer and Groupon’s subsequent rejection of that offer, the deal-a-day service has been experiencing a new wave of growth. The second largest competitor in the space, LivingSocial, experienced an uptick in traffic as well, but nothing as dramatic as Groupon’s rise.

New data from Hitwise Intelligence shows that last week was a major inflection point for LivingSocial, though. It garnered 0.018% of all U.S. visits on the web, an 80% increase from 0.010%. Groupon, on the other hand, actually dropped by 20% to 0.035% market share of U.S. visits.

Why the sudden spike in traffic? The answer’s simple: Amazon. The e-commerce giant made a strategic investment of $175 million in LivingSocial last month to counteract a potential Google-Groupon combination. Last week, LivingSocial offered 50% off of Amazon.com, which resulted in over 1 million Amazon vouchers sold. It was the biggest group-buying deal in history.

With a deal as good as 50% off Amazon, it’s no wonder traffic skyrocketed so fast. However, we bet that when this week’s data comes in, LivingSocial’s traffic will fall back to Earth. Still, the Amazon deal gave LivingSocial a lot of attention and helped it sign up new customers, which could help accelerate its growth and bring it within striking distance of Groupon.

Both companies are about to get some serious competition, though. Google is building its own group-buying service, Google Offers and Facebook is testing a group-buying prototype of its own.

My guess is not lately.

When you first got a fancy job, you had a tie shortage, and thus attention was paid to ties. You bought “enough for now.” Then you solved the tie problem and moved on.

When you first bought an iPhone, you had an app shortage, so attention was paid to apps. You bought “enough for now.” Then you moved on.

Music might be an exception (buying a new stereo doesn’t often lead to a new music binge). But in general, some external event occurs that creates a fissure, an opportunity, a problem. We search, we buy, we’re done.

The challenge, then, is to develop products that match what the market is looking for, and more important, to overtly and aggressively seek out the people in that situation and ignore the rest. Which is precisely what most marketers large and small are not doing right now.

RELATED: Many marketers I know have a great idea for a product or service that will target a segment of the market that doesn’t know to look for the great idea. For example, you might want to sell a better, easier to use hatchet for women. The problem is that women, long accustomed to never being able to find an axe that they’re comfortable with, have given up looking, perhaps several generations ago.

Alerting a market segment that isn’t looking is a thousand times harder than activating a segment that just can’t wait for your arrival. Since it’s your choice, since the segment is up to you, why not pick one that is itching for you to show up?

I asked people to point out the most compelling Facebook fan pages they knew about. I was asking because I am interested in making something actually happen on Facebook. My efforts to market within Facebook haven’t gone especially well. I can move a lot of people around other parts of the web quite well. But inside Facebook? Where there are TONS of people? Nothing. I never seem to get motion. So, I asked the community who they liked. Here’s who they pointed me towards:

Debt Wise

Debt Wise

Social Rank

Social Rank

Living in Pleasanton

Living in Pleasanton

Diesel

Diesel

The Pampered Chef

The Pampered Chef

Bigelow Tea

Bigelow Tea

Lake Nona Pools

Lake Nona Pools

Prolific Living

Prolific Living, but the part I like is a bit further down:

She has an email marketing signup embedded in there.

So What’s Compelling?

We respond to the graphics and prettiness of well-crafted FBML (FaceBook Markup Language). We like offers, evidently (I didn’t think this was so, but the stats seem to prove it). We like things that keep us in-system (within Facebook as opposed to sending us outside of Facebook). We like feeling that by being here, we’re getting something special. We like sharing if it’s something we like.

Still On the Fence

I’m still on the fence. I’m debating putting together a few Facebook fan pages to test some things, and as I do this, I’ll share more information. I’ll share even more information inside Third Tribe Marketing, where my LevelUP series is a promise to share my marketing insights behind my own projects throughout 2011.

But what about you? Do you find the above examples compelling? Do you have other compelling examples? (Remember that URLs get sent to quarantine and I have to manually approve them, so give me some time.) And what do you want from your Facebook experience?

Verizon has agreed to acquire IT and cloud services company Terremark Worldwide for a price of $19 per share, a total equity value of $1.4 billion.

Terremark, which controls 13 data centers throughout the U.S., Europe and Latin America, will operate as a subsidiary of Verizon, retaining its own name and management team.

Goldman Sachs and Weil, Gotshal & Manges represented Verizon in the deal, and Terremark was represented by Credit Suisse Securities and Greenberg Traurig.

Verizon is hoping the Terremark acquisition will be a keystone in its “everything-as-a-service” cloud strategy, in which it plans to provide its enterprise and government customers “a powerful portfolio of highly secure, scalable on-demand solutions… through a unified enterprise IT platform and unique business cloud offerings that leverage the companies’ collective strengths,” according to a release sent out today.

The goal is to be able to offer customers business intelligence and collaboration tools anytime, anywhere and on any kind of connected device.

“Cloud computing continues to fundamentally alter the way enterprises procure, deploy and manage IT resources, and this combination helps create a tipping point for ‘everything-as-a-service,’” said Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s CEO.

I’ve been thinking through my social presence, but further more, I was thinking about what it’s going to be like for a business (small or large) to manage their social presence. The thing is, there are a lot of different ways people are going at this, and not any one of them is perfect, but I like looking at what is there and then thinking about what else I’d want.

For instance, I’m a user and affiliate for the Hootsuite application. If you look at the graphic to the left, it lets you post messages and read messages from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare and elsewhere. It also lets you cook up searches in Twitter search, plus a few other things. There’s a built in link shortener (though I’d love to be able to swap out my own), which means that I get stats and tracking, too.

But what else would something like Hootsuite have to do for you to make it your standalone dashboard for managing your social presence? Here’s a small list of thoughts:

• • A way to listen beyond Twitter search. I need Google Blogsearch, for instance, so I can have bigger ears. Plug in Radian6 or Sysomos or similar and this would be done (for a fee).
  • A blog editor. (They’ve dabbled with linking Hootsuite to WordPress.com, but this shouldn’t be that hard.
  • Email marketing integration. Would love to have my stats in one place for my Blue Sky Factory account.
  • Site analytics, like Google Analytics.

Social Presence Management Needs

But What Else?

What else would you want with a presence management dashboard? What else do you need it to do for you? And what would move it past managing your own (or business) presence, and into managing relationships?

Kind of fun to think about, eh?

Google has begun testing display ads in Gmail user accounts, the company confirmed Thursday.

“We’re always trying out new ad formats and placements in Gmail, and we recently started experimenting with image ads on messages with heavy image content,” a spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to Mashable. Google began running the test ads on Friday, January 21.

The news came to light when Greg Sterling, a contributing editor at Search Engine Land, shared a screenshot of a display ad that appeared in his inbox this morning:

Google has been looking for ways to expand its display ad network, and Gmail is a logical next step. Google can serve ads based on keywords that appear in a user’s personal Gmail (Sterling was served an ad for organic men’s tees after opening an e-mail from a clothing retailer), although those ads will no doubt be distracting for many Gmail users. Yahoo Mail already serves display ads in users’ inboxes.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pavlen

Contrary to Wednesday’s report, Facebook has denied partnering with HTC for a mobile device.

The two rumored devices from HTC appear to be real, but Facebook’s involvement in their development isn’t as important as the report claimed.

Speaking at a company event in London, Dan Rose, head of business development at Facebook, said the device is “just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs (application programing interfaces) and integrated them into their device in an interesting way,” adding that the device will not be Facebook-branded.

“The rumors around there being something more to this HTC device are overblown,” said Rose.

January 27, 2010 brought the launch of Apple’s iPad tablet device — Thursday marks its first year.

Leading up to its launch, the world was all atwitter with a number of rumors — Would it be called the iSlate? When would it be released? Would it just be a giant iPhone? There was even a comprehensive picture created to document all the iPad rumors. One year later, rumors of a second generation iPad are now rampant.

Now is a great time to look back on the device’s success thus far and ponder its future. To celebrate the iPad’s first year, the folks at OnSwipe created this infographic:

Volkswagen says the 261-mpg diesel-electric XL1 concept could see limited — very limited — production within two years.

The Germans unveiled the super-efficient Volkswagen XL1 at the Qatar auto show today, showcasing some of its most forward-thinking technology with a promise to offer the car in small numbers.

“We want to go into series production with this car starting in 2013,” VW Chairman Ferdinand Piëch told Automotive News Europe.

VW boss Martin Winterkorn said the car will be offered in Germany first, then throughout Europe. The United States and China “will follow at a later date,” he said.

We’ve heard this before, of course.

The XL1 is the most practical and refined of the company’s 1-liter cars, so named because the goal was to develop a car capable of traveling 100 kilometers on a liter of fuel (roughly 235 mpg). It is the third iteration of a project launched in 2002.

It features a 48-horsepower two-cylinder diesel engine displacing just 800 cc. It’s bolted to a seven-speed DSG gearbox and mated to a 27-horsepower electric motor drawing power from a lithium-ion battery of undisclosed size. The plug-in hybrid has an electric range of 21 miles and fuel consumption of just 0.9 liters per 100 kilometers, which comes to 261 mpg by our math. It emits 24 grams of CO2 per kilometer — compared to the 89 grams emitted by the Toyota Prius.

All that hardware is wrapped in carbon-fiber polymer bodywork attached to a carbon-fiber monocoque. Extensive use of aluminum, magnesium and other exotic materials keeps the weight to just 1,700 pounds.

When VW unveiled 1-liter cars in the past, it said the car could be built by 2012 or so. But cost has always been the limiting factor — these cars are chock-full of expensive technology and even more expensive materials.

But Piëch tells Automotive News that costs have come down significantly, making production feasible. For example, the carbon fiber body of the first-gen 1L car cost 35,000 euros (about $47,000). The body for the XL1 cost 5,000 euros (about $6,800). VW expects the lithium-ion battery to cost 250 to 300 euros ($410) by 2013.

That said, no one at VW would say what the XL1 will cost if and when it sees production. Ulrich Hackenberg, director of development for VW, said production could be limited to 100 vehicles to start.

It’s safe to say the car won’t be cheap, especially at volumes that low. But then this car almost certainly isn’t meant for the mass market. It will be a halo car, intended to show what is possible and showcase some of VW’s most advanced technologies and materials.

In that regard, it will be much like the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf (and the amazing Porsche 918 plug-in hybrid, if it’s built) — cars with a small initial market but the potential to influence many subsequent models.

For example, the XL1’s drivetrain is a natural for the VW Polo since the two vehicles are roughly the same size. And it isn’t hard to imagine the XL1’s carbon polymer bodywork being used on the Audi eTron electric vehicle, or the R8 for that matter.

Although Winterkorn said the XL1’s initial production run will be “small,” Piech said the cars definitely will be offered for sale and not limited to test fleets or demonstration programs.

Images: Volkswagen

Often times, people are appalled at the parts of their city that I spend my time in. For instance, in San Francisco, I spend my time in and around Market Street and Union Square. Great, if you’re a tourist, but San Francisco types don’t really want that to represent all that they offer. When I visit New York, it’s Times Square. I love it there. I go there every time I visit New York.

But places, your places, are best defined by experiences and people and familiar elements that you want to share with people, should they choose to visit. When I went to New Orleans, Tom Martin showed me the typical Cafe Du Monde beignet experience, but he showed me some of the other neighborhoods that he loved. What makes me love Pittsburgh has everything to do with Justin Kownacki, including our visits to Bellevue to Affogato, the coffee shop that was the set of his wildly successful web series. Being there felt like being on the SET of a big show (it was-and is- a big show to me).

What does it mean to think about “your places” in the real world, and then what does that mean to reimagine “your places” on the web.

Your Places are a Recipe

When I take people to my small town, I take them by the “yellow place,” my coffee (and ice cream) shop, run by a sweet woman from Italy, who makes great coffee, and who treats my guests very well. If you come to lunch at the Barking Dog or the Ale House, you’ll get a level of service that will leave you impressed and will make me proud for taking you there. And it’s a recipe or a formula:

Ambiance + (Unique) Touch + Personal Service = Memorable (Place). A + T + P = M

Right? That’s why you take me to the places you take me when I visit. Sometimes, it’s one element more than another. When I visited Birmingham, Alabama, I fell in love with the place, but that’s because Merrill Stewart took me around and connected me to amazing people. The “personal service” part was what really hooked me more than the rest of the equation. When I go to somewhere like Cafe Du Monde, it’s more about the unique touch, I guess.

Your Places on the Web

When we try to show someone around Twitter, invariably, the crowd we want to show off is somewhere else. We’ll see a stream of comments about Justin Bieber and sushi when we’re trying to show off all this serendipitous business value. When I want to show off my own website, sometimes it’s on a day when I’ve pitched some product or service, so it’s not like you’re all excited to read about my brilliant insights, because it’s me selling something.

But go beyond that. How does your place on the web (and your other places) stack up with the recipe?

Ambiance + (Unique) Touch + Personal (Service) = Memorable (Place).

Your site design might contribute to ambiance, but then, so does the sense of whether people comment, the sense of whether you’re beating them over the head with things to buy versus sharing information and ideas, and much more. Your uniqueness matters. Are you “yet another product review blog” or are you “A Cowboy’s Wife?” Are you responding to your commenters and other contacts, or are you a quiet monolith?

What Will You Do To Make Your Places More Wonderful?

When I stop by Small Biz Survival, I’m stopping by a place that has a warm feeling, a great voice, and information that matters to me. It’s as personable as a little airport breakfast diner by an airport near Norman, Oklahoma. When I read 300 Words a Day, it’s my opportunity to read a far more accessible version of religion, and it’s one of my places I like to show off. I love when people visit my places.

What will you do to make your places more memorable, online and off? What do you think adds to your places? Why will people choose your online and offline favorites as their places?