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With Googles’ fresh update, retailers and marketers hoping to boost their natural search rankings in the coming months, this new year could be dubbed the Year of Content. The relationship between original, updated and popular content on an e-commerce site, and potentially higher search rankings for a brand, merchant or product page, is hardly unknown.

In 2012, however, is how Google’s'  latest major update to its search algorithm—those mathematical formulas that carry so much weight in digital marketing—is pushing retailers to offer stronger content on their web sites, update that content more often and encourage those in-bound links that signal page quality to the search engine.

With relatively little original content most retailers are scrambling for more, while those web merchants that have long had staffers producing how-to articles, product demonstrations and the like are working toward improvements.

Another Google update called Panda was designed to punish what Google views as low-quality web sites, which includes those with unoriginal content, such as retail sites that rely on the same manufacturer product descriptions that many other e-retailers display. It also sought to downgrade sites that web users seemed to find of little value.

E-commerce site are likely to be downgraded if it fails to attract links from reputable sites, without paying for them. Paid links are worse than no links at all—if a retailer gets caught by Google.

Retailers used  manufacturer-supplied descriptions on its site instead of original content.  Retailers have worked to improve rankings by hiring  copywriters to write original product descriptions that contain keywords that consumers use when searching for products.  They also removed content that caused pages to load relatively slowly—another negative signal that can depress a site’s position in Google organic search ranking.

But now retailers will have to do even more  than they did to protect themselves from demotions in search rankings under Panda. Fresh is meant to help shoppers find the latest product information— and that points to all kinds of content-related improvements for e-commerce sites.  That includes, for instance, a steady stream of new user reviews on product pages. Merchants should rethink both their own product descriptions and also make sure that user reviews are happening whenever possible, especially when they are good reviews. Retailers should continually update content, starting with best-selling products and pages that already rank high in search results.

Google’s fresh update will kick in around April or May, after Google finishes testing the changes. But retailers need to prepare their content efforts now. By studying what consumers search for, along with comments left by consumers via Facebook, e-mails and even phone calls to sales agents.

That old wisdom of search engine optimization hasn’t changed too much with Fresh, but the update, with its emphasis on new content, drives home how important a social media campaign and retailer-produced blogs are for retailers. engages consumers on  Twitter and Facebook, the search engine update will require even  more posting and communication via those social networks. It also underscores the importance of paying attention to Google+, the search engine’s own social network. A strong social presence, one that demonstrates a loyalty among consumers that can translates into links, is another sign of good content, and therefore another way to earn the good graces of Google.

Retailers are on the right SEO track if they are putting more effort into social media. The ‘freshness algorithm’ is Google’s attempt to continue to provide more relevant, real-time results for search queries, further highlighting the need for marketers to accelerate their focus on integrating SEO and social marketing practices to ensure pertinent, up-todate content is accessible to Google. Retailers can maximize the impact of their content by making sure they have the “social
share” buttons embedded on their sites, enabling consumers to pass on appealing content to friends and other shoppers on social networks, which also encourages links and builds credibility.

Retailers and marketers are increasingly using a variation of this mantra as both social networks and updated content assume more importance within e-commerce: SEO is social media, and vice versa.

Besides participation in social networks, retailers hoping to keep ahead of Google’s changes will want to invest in such marketing services as price optimization—technology that can help a retailer better compete with competitors’ off ers—and display ads based on consumers’ behavior.

Whatever the effects of the algorithm change over the next few months, retailers hoping to keep up or improve their rankings should embrace another concept besides fresh—speed.  That means getting fresh content onto a site quickly.

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Lets look at Facebook Metrics to Track Other Activities on your own.

-Follower measures

(A)Number of page followers: As often as you wish, you can track the number of people who follow—or like—your Facebook page. On Facebook, this information is on the left-hand column, about halfway down the page. Most small businesses have a goal of having 1,000 followers; this number tended to be based on what “other” businesses had and what they thought was possible.

(B)Increase in followers: Most businesses want to be consistently increasing the total number of people following them. As a rule of thumb, increasing your total Facebook followers by 4 percent every month is in line with average Facebook growth.

(C)Follower’s activities: In addition to a raw count of followers, you can track your friends or fans daily and correlate the data to other activities that you are doing to attract people to your page. For example, if you send out an email message inviting people to your page, you can see if your numbers increase after the email goes up.

-Engagement measures

(A)Number of active versus passive followers: How many of your followers are actively engaged on your page—posting content, asking questions, even indicating that they like a certain post? The more engaged your followers are, the more likely they are to spread the word about your business. Your goal should be to constantly increase these followers. Your goal should be to have about 2.5 percent of your fans interact each week on your site and have 10 percent of your followers becoming regular active participants on your social media site.

(B)Number of comments about brand or product: You want to track the response to the actual posts you make on your page. An average business posts about six times per week. Your goal should be to achieve a certain level of engagement with every post. If 2.5 percent of your fans should be interacting every week, then about 0.4 percent of your fans should reply to every post. If you have 1,000 fans, for example, then 4 people should respond to every post. Topics that generate comments are the types of posts you should continue doing. If a topic generates no comments, reduce your use of that type of post in the future.

(C)Quality of comments on the brand page: Some comments to your  posts will be short and sweet: “I agree!” or “I love your store!” While these are great, having followers write longer and more thoughtful posts will do more to build your brand. Track whether you are getting more “higher-quality” comments as time goes on by counting the number of words in an average post. Higher quality posts have more words and sentences.

-Mention measures

Track the number of times a follower uses the@symbol to talk about  your business. These comments will appear to other people in your followers’  network, and may encourage others to follow you and, hopefully,  engage in discussions and talk to others about your business.

-Conversation measures

(A)If you offer a “Facebook-only” deal, track how many people take advantage of the deal.

(B)While it might not be an overwhelming number, be sure you track how many leads come from Facebook.

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Facebook provides several tools for Facebook metrics that page owners and administrators can access easily. These tools provide a baseline of quantitative data that you can use to track your visitors’ activities. Additionally, you can develop some quantitative and qualitative metrics on your own that can help you get a better picture of what is happening on your Facebook page. Page owners and administrators have access to an “insights” box on the left-hand column of your page.

–The “users” graph displays the total number of people who “like” your page  as well as the number of people who are daily active users of your page. This data includes:

(1)Daily active users—by day, the number of people who visit your page. You can track and see which days of the week    are the most popular, correlating this information to specific posts. This can indicate the types of posts that attract the most visitors.

(2)By day, the number of people who “dislike” your page. This could be a reaction to specific content, a reaction to some in-person interaction at your business, or the result of an individual “culling” their Facebook lists. If you get one or two dislikes a week, it should not be a concern. One day that generates five or more dislikes should lead you to investigate what might have happened.

(3)A graph of demographics, which shows a breakdown of your fans by age, gender, and country of origin.

(4)The activity measure, which shows in addition to visiting the page, what other types of activities visitors engaged in. These could include downloading images, watching videos, and listening to podcasts.

–The interactions graph is an engagement measure. Most people will want to keep a steady amount of interactions going on at the page, with interactions increasing when important things are announced on the page. The interactions measured in the Insight box include:

(1)Total Interactions on the page (the total number of wall posts and comments to wall posts on the page).

(2)Total comments on the page (the total number of responses to your wall posts).

(3)Total wall posts on the page (the number of different posts made by you, and others, to your wall).

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There are different ways for you to promote your videos. You could use blogs, email blasts and even word of mouth.  You should begin promotion of videos on YouTube.

Post regularly: It is important to post regulary, especially once you have a subscriber base. Your subscribers are eagerly awaiting your next video. If you fail to post new work, your subscribers will forget about you and move o to more regular contributors. The key is to create videos quickly and staying in touch with the community.

Share Option: Your videos will get good exposure on YouTube for a brief time. When viewers click on a category link they can zero in on videos of interest by clicking on the hyperlinks across the top, which include Featured, Rising Videos, and Most Discussed. If they click the down arrow next to the more link, however, they can display Recent Videos.

The best tools to promote your video on YouTube is the Share link.  Click that, and one of the options you’ll get is to “send this video.” You can fill in an e-mail address in the box, or just highlight All Contacts or Friends, and YouTube will send it to the people on those lists. You become friends with other YouTubers, by the way, when they’ve accepted your invitation to do so. You send those invitations from your Channel page. And contacts consist of the list of people you’ve
added to your address book.

Comments: When you upload your video, you can allow this feature. Viewers can comment on your video, and begin a dialogue and suggests how popular your video is. Comments can work against you as easily as they can work for you. You need to watch the comments posted for your video. Keep a lookout for unacceptable comments such as spam pointing people to another video or site, comments riddled with typos and curse words or something completely off target.

Response Videos: This is a YouTube feature that lets your viewers respond to you video not through textual comments but in video form. Videos that have a lot of response videos are usually popular and provocative. But response videos work the other way, too. Post your own videos as video responses to gain additional exposure. Just be sure to post them where they will be relevant.

Related Videos:  If a thumbnail of your video happens to appear as a related video next to lots of other videos, its getting more views. This happens if your video covers the same territory as other videos. It then appears to the right of those
videos under the headline Related Videos. But YouTube makes it clear that you have no control over when your video appears as a Related Video. Obviously, your video’s topic, title, tags, and description help determine what other videos are related to it.

Subscribers: On YouTube your subscriber base is one big fan club, a club you want to build and cultivate. There are two steps to serving your fan club: building a subscriber list and then communicating with that list. The people who comment on your videos are a great source of potential subscribers. Another way to get subscribers is to just ask for them: encourage people to become subscribers to your channel right on your Channel page. Its the quality of your videos that builds your subscriber base more than anything.

Once you have a subscriber base, reaching out to them through tools like Twitter and addressing them on your MySpace and Facebook pages helps keep them connected.

YouTube Home Page:  If you can make it to there, your video can make it anywhere.  It helps to have lots of subscribers or views. Once your video appears there, you will get a lot of publicity.

YouTube Honours: YouTube automatically tracks statistics for all the videos on the site. If any of yours are standouts, they will receive “honors” in categories such as viewings, ratings, how much they’re discussed, and so on. Your overall channel can also receive honors related to the number of subscribers you have. Any of these honors will show up on your Channel page.

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Location-based services all have one thing in common: They create semantic information around the concept of a place. Semantic information means that the way the data is expressed is via a set of common attributes. A place contains a name, address, description, category, and phone number. Some of that data — such as the category — is even standardized, which means that you have only a finite number of values to choose from.

Categorizing Location-Based Services:

Mobile: Mobile location-based services give you the ability to reach just about anybody with a mobile phone in the place that they are at the time that they need the information. You may assume that all location based services are mobile because of the strong association of location and global positioning systems and the fact that all mobile phones have
GPS. Companies build applications to run on smartphones— such as Apple’s iPhone, the HTC Incredible that runs Google’s popular Android operating system, and many others.

Mobile applications can also be accessed via the (mobile) web. While many companies favor building applications that are delivered via stores like iTunes, Android Market, Blackberry’s App World, and many more, developers can also deliver applications via the mobile web and SMS (text messaging) so that feature phones can also get some of the benefits.

Check-in: One of the most common application types is the check-in. A check-in is the ability to announce “I am here.” The idea is simple, but the barriers to entry are high, though, as checking in to a location isn’t very useful on its own. The check-in can deliver a lot of highly standard data for you to analyze: the person, place, and time.

Knowing that a person checked in to a place allows you to begin to build profiles of users who check in to your business. Those profiles can tell a story about who checks in and why they check in.

Social: What good is a check-in if nobody knows? Social applications allow users to maintain a list of trusted friends that they can share the information with. Location-based applications allow users to share check-ins with a wide range of entities, including friends, colleagues, business associates, and even strangers. Some services allow a user to share this information through other social applications, too. In other words, a location-based application — such as foursquare — might plug into a larger network like Twitter or Facebook.

Discovery: When you talk about location, you have to talk about discovery. Accidental discovery, which is one of the driving forces behind the popularity of location-based services. Location-based services can document the secrets of your business through content attached to places in the form of pictures, recommendations, and even video.

Helping others discover businesses, places, products, and services that they might enjoy — isn’t limited to the application users. You can add tips in places to help customers unlock the secrets of your business. Some platforms offer users the ability to declare that they saw your tip and tried your recommendation.

Engagement: Some location-based services allow you to have a conversation. Engagement is a one-to-one, more personal sort of conversation. If you can carry on a dialogue or group conversation, this is engagement. Think of Twitter and Facebook as the ultimate platforms for engagement.

Ambient: Ambient networks use the device’s environment to do interesting things like building a social graph without the input of the user. These networks use attributes like place, time, and even the noise in the room to see who is together and then decide who the user’s friends are. To use this technology, encourage loyal customers to take pictures that represent your brand. Those customers are then lumped into the social graph of early adopters, and they can then interact with other early adopters and encourage others to join the fun.

Color is an ambient social network. Other ambient networks allow users to interact with each other based on proximity. They use chat rooms and text messaging to form temporary networks of people in a particular place.

Intent: Sometimes you know what you’re going to do and you want to let people know. Whether it’s going to an event or having a coffee, you might want to let people know so that you can connect with them or solicit their opinions about what you should do. People like recommendations and advice from people they trust. They also like to know who’s going to be at an event so that they can decide not only how they’ll spend their time, but with whom.

Platforms: Platforms allow you to take a set of functionality and build something else. Location-based platforms provide places databases, check-in functionality, tips and recommendations, authentication, and much more. You can use these platforms to build your own application to cater to your specific purposes.

Content network: Some location-based systems have copious amounts of user-generated and publisher/professional content. User-generated content is created voluntarily by someone who isn’t paid. Reviews on Amazon and Yelp, videos on YouTube, tweets on Twitter, plurks on Plurk, and highlights on Gowalla are all examples of user-generated content.

Analysis: A series of tools allow you to build campaigns and measure their impact. Some of them are location-specific and provide a look at what’s happening in check-in spaces. Others require you to have the data, but provide strong tools for visualizing the impact.

Offers: Many platforms let you offer specials and deals to people who check in at your place. The idea is that location adds contextual relevance. Sending the ideal offer exactly when someone needs it is the idea that marketers really latch onto.

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As  people get connected online, and connect to others, their social profiles grow. Facebook and Twitter have millions of registered users, and Google starting Google plus services  that will increase social interaction and an obvious relationship  in social media and search.

Google and Bing both use Twitter to determine search ranking. Bing also receives data from Facebook to rank pages for users who are logged into Facebook profiles. From a search measurement standpoint, the key things to measure are Facebook likes, tweets and retweets on Twitter and +1s on Google.

The challenge of using social signals is that there are many ways to consider their influence over a search result. A tweet from one user may be more valuable than many tweets from other users, and a tweet that is retweeted may have a stronger influence than it did when its author wrote it. But what impact do several tweets all linking to the same page have versus a single retweet of the same topic.

Much as PageRank was developed as a measure of a page’s relevancy and authority, the same will likely happen in the social space, with stronger social voices carrying more weight than weaker voices. A strong voice may be defined as someone who is repeated a lot (retweeted). It may also be someone who has many followers, but who does not follow a large number of people. The Klout Score (http://www.klout.com) is one metric that is already in use,  it measures influence based on data collected from sites such as Twitter and Facebook regarding the size of a person’s network, the content that person creates, and how others interact with that content (likes, retweets, etc.).

Personalization and Social Media: recognizes people in your social circle and provides results that these people have shared and the sources from which they have shared them.

Bing has partnered directly with Facebook to tap into Facebook data to provide personalized results. These personalized results are slowly popping up and will be influenced by how many of your friends are active on social media. The same happens with Google and Twitter, with Google giving emphasis to results that friends of yours have retweeted. These results are based on the experiences and actions of your friends or people you follow. Essentially, you are getting personalized results based on the activities of other people in your social circle and the influence people in that circle may have over you.

With personalized results becoming more and more prevalent, you may be able to affect your rankings not only through your optimization efforts, but also through your social influence and impact. It may not be surprising to see rankings change dramatically from one person to another, based on differences in their social circles and the different influences social sharing has on results.

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Facebook has an extraordinary security infrastructure known as the Facebook Immune System  to fight spam and other cyber-scams.

The Facebook Immune System (FIS), has a massive defence network and has considerably reduced spam. It took time for FIS to evolve into an all seeing set of algorithms that monitors every photo posted to the network, every status update and every click made by everyone of it’s users.There are about 25 billion of these “read and write actions” everyday. Facebook’s defence system is one of the largest in existence.

It protects against scams by invoking artificially intelligent software to detect suspicious patterns of behaviour. The system can learn in real time and is able to take action without human intervention.

Some months ago there was a notable attack on Facebook. Several users were duped into copying computer code into their browser’s address bar. The code commandeered the person’s Facebook account and stated sending chat messages to their friends, along with a link where the friends could get their own free ipad. Friends who clicked on the link went to a site that encouraged them to paste the same code into their browsers. These type of attacks can generate millions of messages per minute.

Users are less likely to fall for a similar tactic when using email, because a message would have to sent by a stranger. It’s easier to exploit trust relationships in social networks.

To handle such attacks FIS has generated a signature to differentiate between spam and legitimate messages. The links in spam messages that contain keywords like “free” and the IP addresses of the computers sending the messages.

Spammers use multiple machines for the purpose of switching IP addresses, and use link redirection services to change links in real time. FIS checks to see which messages are marked as spam by users and blocked the messages with similar keywords in the text. The system developed a signature that can detect spam within seconds of an attack.

Any defence based on patterns of known behaviour, FIS is vulnerable to new strategies not known to it. “Socialbots” -software that can pose as a human and control a Facebook account can exploit and elude this defence system. The bots send friend requests to random users. Then they send requests to friends of people they had connected with. The number of accepted requests will increase considerably.

Facebook’s privacy settings allow users to conceal personal information from public view. Since socialbots pose as friends, they are able to extract thousands of email addresses and physical addresses from users’ profiles. This information could be used to launch phishing attacks or aid in identity theft.

Social bots behave differently to people that enter Facebook for the first time because they have no real-world  friends to connect with.

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As people interested in growing website traffic, it is important that we understand social media and SEO. SEO is the one that, through time and understanding, will bring you the most traffic, most consistently. But social media can do some surprising things for your business.

The main way that SEO and social media intersect is in the area of links. Social media sites have them, and SEO needs them. You can use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to generate inbound links from popular, high-TrustRank websites. You could use social media campaigns to attract links from news sites, social bookmarking sites, and popular blogs.

Social networks like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter represent the masses. And while a single link or status update on one of these social networks has no significance, there is great power in numbers. If you post a link to a video you took, and it strikes a chord in the average person, she will share it with her friends, who will share it with their friends, and so on. If you are the creator of a piece of content that goes viral, your website can get links rained upon it. This is why social media is a powerful complement in the world of SEO. In the future, SEO and social media will evolve together to incorporate our profiles, preferences, and relationships into search results.

The flow of information: Traditionally, the most powerful ways of getting exposure have been advertisements, press, and word of mouth. Although these tools have always been the backbone of marketing, the rise of social media websites has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for online marketers.

In the past,you might see an ad in a magazine, stare at it for a few seconds, and then either remember it or forget about it. Now the same company might place an ad on Facebook. Recognizing the company, you might click Like underneath the ad, indicating your acceptance of the brand. The next day, because of that “like,” you might get a status update showing you a YouTube video that the company made as part of a campaign for a new product. Finding the video interesting, you might then post it on your friend’s profile page. His 1,000 friends might then see it, and 3 of them might post it on their friends’ profile pages. An additional 2 of your friend’s friends might tweet about it, exposing it to their 800 combined followers. One of those peoples’ followers might then submit it to a social bookmarking site such as Digg, where the best content of the day gets posted on the home page. If enough people voted for this video, it would hit the front page of Digg, get 150,000 additional views and 550 comments, and even more sharing would occur. Because of the Digg exposure, 15 blogs might repost the video, including a major outlet that gets millions of visitors per month. And on goes the sharing. That entire journey started with just one click.

The significant event, SEO-wise, in that story was the part where the blogs reposted the video to their sites. If 15 blogs repost a video, that’s 15 links to a single web page. In this case, the web page hosting the content was on YouTube, but it could easily have been hosted on your website. As you know from earlier chapters, acquiring a link can be pretty tough in an age when most webmasters understand the value of linking.

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Social location marketing has the ability to impact the purchase decision cycle at all points—brand awareness, brand elevation, brand consideration and purchase. The concept of the purchase decision cycle is best defined as the continuous loop through which customers become aware, consider, select and finally reconsider purchases.

In the pre-social media market place, the purchase decision cycle involved much less influence from strangers. Purchasers were influenced by a closer network of people. Purchasers were also unable to take part in the level of comparison shopping that they are able to do now. With the advent of the internet the travel requirement declined but it still took time to visit all the websites and make notes on which product had which features and which site was offering the best prices.

Price comparison sites quickly became popular with members posting coupon codes and special offers as they became aware of them. Social media took all of this to the next level. Twitter and Facebook users can post a question and receive hundreds of responses about the best deals, perhaps even getting responses directly from brands themselves.

What differentiates social location sharing from much of the rest of social media marketing is that it is specific to allocation. It happens as someone becomes or is in the process of becoming a customer,visitor, or user. When users check in at a specific location, they are publicly declaring an affinity with that location. Wittingly or unwittingly, they are making the statement that they use this location as part of their lives. Whether it is a grocery store, a clothing shop, a restaurant, or a hair salon, the effect is the same. They are telling the people in their networks, all of whom they have selected to share with, that this is a place they go to.

Perhaps at times they want to promote a local business because of the great service they have received from them. They believe that by announcing this location and its great service, they are helping to promote and prolong the business. All of these motivators can be leveraged by marketers and all have their place within the purchase decision cycle.

Brand Awareness: Making the target audience aware of the existence of the brand. This is traditionally something that is associated with advertising, but in the current environment of a society that is more “word of mouth aware,” getting existing customers to be your advertisers/advocates is a much more common effort. Social location sharing tools are
most definitely achieving that. These tools broadcast the fact that the user is not only grocery shopping but is shopping at a specific grocery store.

Brand Elevation: Making the target audience aware of a brand is not usually enough to trigger a purchase. Rather, having made the target audience aware of the brand, the next step is to move the brand into the consideration stage of the purchase decision cycle. To do that, the brand needs to position itself as a better choice than its competitors. Again,
social location sharing tools play their part here. Having an advocate in the form of a social location sharer share her decision to make a purchase at a location immediately aids that business in providing a reason why it is different from its competitors.

Consideration: This stage can be immediately before purchase or can be several months, even years ahead of purchase. Much of this depends on the immediate need of the purchaser, the price point of the product or service, and the amount of information available. A customer looking to buy a pair of jeans is unlikely to spend the same amount of time in the consideration phase as a customer buying a new car or even a home. However, social location sharing tools can and do play a part in all these decisions. Users checking in at the Apple store, for example, are stating a preference for a particular brand, but they are also stating a preference for a particular type of technology.

Purchase: Checking in at the time of purchase, and announcing that a purchase has been made, is obviously the most powerful use of these tools. Each of the tools allows for this in different ways, but at the most basic users can tag their check-in and in doing so start a conversation on other platforms such as Twitter.

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As competition is heating up online deals and coupons are getting easier to find. To compete, online businesses are offering free shipping on some online orders and even special parking space. Bigger online businesses are offering coupons and other incentives to encourage customers to spend more.

Mobile deals easier than ever to get it on, too.  Discounts are popping on packaging and displays: all you need is a smart phone to scan the codes. Some smart phone apps even use GPS technology to determine customer location  to send deal alerts when they are near the store.

Coupon sites and Apps: The biggest selection of coupon sites are found online. Sites such as Coupons.com and SmartSource.com usually have up to 100 deals at any time, compared with no more than 30 coupons in newspaper circulars. They also have new mobile versions that let you scroll through offers and pick the coupons the customers want from their phone without downloading special  software or apps. More stores and manufacturers are loading their websites and smart-phone apps with great deals, tracks items and prices from the latest store circulars, then cross-references all possible manufacturers’ coupons with the circulars and shows the bottom line for each item. These apps track down coupons in real time. When the customer creates the shopping list, items that have online coupons are highlighted.

Handheld Scanners:are used for ringing up products while shopping. Customers using this device get extra discounts based on where they are in the store. Another way to get more discounts by looking for kiosks in front of stores. Scan the loyalty card and offers are loaded directly onto the customer’s card. The discounts are applied at checkout when the products are bought.

Store Sites: There are  dozens of sites and apps for finding and managing coupons. Customers  check websites  and circulars  for list builders and downloadable apps of stores where they shop weekly. And ask stores whether it accepts  other stores coupons.

Loyalty cards: Customers can download coupons from a retailers website to a card. Instead of sorting coupons at checkout, they only need to swipe out their loyalty card. Loyalty cards help retailers track customers spending habits, information they use to gauge which coupons and deals to offer.

Groupon offers subscribers deals through their store loyalty cards. The discount is taken off at checkout, so no coupon printing is required. The have money-back deals if customers buy a minimum number of products from a single manufacturer and use a store loyalty card.

Social Network offers: Customers can use Foursquare on their phone to get deal alerts when driving near a store. Others use Facebook to post coupons as well as specials at the store closest to their Zip code.

QR codes: Another way companies are linking customers to savings is through quick response codes  or QR codes. They appear as bar codes on products or store displays. The deals can be accessed by scanning them with an app loaded smart phone.