Groupon – a two year old online couponing business – has turned down a $6bn offer from Google. Just remember: News Corp bought MySpace for $580m; Google bought YouTube for $1.65m and DoubleClick for $3.1bn. Twitter’s latest valuation is $4bn.

Groupon has first mover and brand building advantage in a new place. Let’s call it social retail. Groupon is an idea that has captured the mood of a growing social, post credit crunch, instant gratification consumer.

It got accelerated social media word of mouth and PR. It got its users cheaply – but has them in an opt-in local email database and it’s growing rapidly & organically.

Subscribers get and spread a deal a day via email, commonly a 50% discount from a local retail/service type brand. Once the deal hooks a predetermined number of people, everyone opted-in then “buys” the deal.

The brand/business gets awareness, commonly new trial customers and Groupon its cut, which is usually 30%-50%.

It now has approaching 3,000 staff worldwide and its global network has more than 33 million subscribers in 35 countries. It’s Forbes’ fastest growing company ever, with revenue already at $1bn.

The huge rise of social media and Facebook, or perhaps Twitter, are obvious, but turning them into hardnosed marketing tools is less easy.

Google knows its brand preference and revenues lie with delivering against instant consumer need, staying ahead and habit. Google was a beneficiary of previous change. It wants to ensure this position continues.

Spending on advertising on a brand or an offer proposition matters – but if the consumer less frequently completes the journey to try, or purchase, or repeat, then marketers start to look at new models.

Who would have thought the key message of Sony’s pre-Christmas ad campaign would be giving VAT back? Who would have thought that $45bn would be spent in retail and online offers on “Black Friday” sales a few weeks ago in the USA? (Black Friday was a name Police gave it due to the traffic chaos caused as consumers rushed to get hold of bargains in a short time window.)

Who would have thought that one third of those smartphone carrying consumers in the USA (IDC survey) were prepared to use their mobile devices to transform the way in which they shop everywhere and, in particular, at retailers?

Known as mobile shopping warriors, two thirds are aged 25 to 44. The 45-54 MSWs are most likely to use the information they gained from their mobile devices to get an advantage by requesting a discount.

As consumers mutate to concurrent omni-channel behaviours, customer journeys weaken, as does the influence on purchase decisions at the shelf.

Google’s bid for Groupon was bold, but also offensive and defensive. With geo-location social networks like Foursquare – and now Facebook’s own version, Places – people, places, opinions and some offers in location are out there, but the big future revenues are still up for grabs.

Google’s mobile-first view is very clear. Groupon was a possible way to quickly scale monetisation to an offer wherever you were. Just maybe it saw a new perfect storm brewing (or at least some big waves) sooner than we think.

A more memorable name is needed for the space where credit crunch attitudes meet the rise in active use of social media, consumer spending online, the real time use of smartphones and the ability to deliver targeted real time geo-located offers in scale; I’m throwing in: SOMOPROMO.

This blog was first published by my very good friends at Brand Republic on 8th December 2010.  I sneaked in while they went out for  Christmas Pizza.