Perry Evans, a founder of Local Matters and MapQuest, has launched Closely, Inc., a new group-based promotions company, joining the 100 or more companies that hope to follow in the footsteps of Groupon, and perhaps improve on the deal-a-day experience. Groupon has more than 1 million registered users.
First up is a beta version of Closely’s Business Edition, a real-time service that allows small businesses to centrally launch, manage and measure promotions via Facebook and Twitter, enabling them to build their customer base and manage demand with real-time, socially engaged offers. The service connects a live offer page to each social media post.
Evans tells us the eight-person company is being positioned, in part, to “help traditional media companies get better at this.” Instead of hashing together a new technology on top of an old technology, this is all new, he says. “If direct marketing were being created now, it would be done this way.”
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Hey, Peter thanks for the “ink”!
To expand a little (if I may!)…we’re big fans of GroupOn, but feel it’s still a fundamentally “old media” model. That is, businesses have to buy placement into GroupOn’s audience. What we’re doing is taking a page from their playbook, but pushing this DOWN to the individual business and their own social network. At the end of the day, these are compatible models, but small businesses have joined Twitter and Facebook to build and leverage their OWN social network.
Hope this helps. We’re not at all head-to-head with GroupOn, we do feel group and live offers are about to reconstruct the local direct marketing space, and we’ll do this in parallel with GroupOn and their 50 or so clones!