Megan McArdle is skeptical that Groupon’s business model remains viable. It has commanded little loyalty from its customers or the businesses that offer the deals. Perhaps worse, it operates in a crowded field with few ways to sustain its competitive advantage:

Moreover, to the extent that the model did work in other sectors, it would be very easy to imitate.  (And it was, endlessly).  Groupon’s core asset is essentially a mailing list, and mailing lists don’t have great network effects, or economies of scale, to protect their owners against competitors.

It sounds like the firm needs a primer on Porter’s Five Forces.

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A new group aims to foster stronger Republican and conservative online efforts:

They decided that the conservative movement simply did not have what liberals did: An infrastructure to train and nurture the next generation of campaign operatives and develop cutting-edge techniques. So they decided to take a shot at filling the void, by developing a proposal for a suite of new outside groups that would mimic, and eventually outpace, Democratic efforts.

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Chris Hexton offers four tips to improve how your e-mails perform:

1. Write strong subject lines. You need to be relevant and clear without giving everything away.
2. Craft personal e-mails. That means both using your customer’s name—it really works!—and writing in a friendly, personal style.
3. Include a P.S. People read it, so it’s “a golden opportunity to make sure your customers read the CTA.”
4. Be careful with images. Not everyone’s e-mail program will render your beautiful, image-heavy e-mail, so make sure you have a text fallback.

Remember to test every technique you try, since your audience may be different. And always remember that you can spoil your perfect e-mail with a crappy landing page.

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Alex Chitu:

You might remember the [do a barrel roll] Easter Egg which rotates Google’s search results page. The query is so popular that it’s the first suggestion when you type “do a” and Google Instant automatically shows the results for [do a barrel roll] and triggers the Easter Egg… This is an example of [an] Easter Egg that disrupts the user experience and makes Google Search more difficult to use.

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Democratic technologists and online marketers have organized institutions to allow individuals to collaborate and share ideas–what Patrick Ruffini calls a “free market” of ideas. Republicans, by contrast, often rely on top-down direction and old-guard consultants.

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