Incomprehensible irrelevant uncertainty as a marketing tool

My question for today is: Does gratuitously injecting an element of incomprehensible irrelevant uncertainty into a sales pitch increase sales?

I think not, but I'm not an advertising professional and I don't have access to the split-test comparison data.

At first glance, the deal offered by Louisville's Bard's Town Pub through Groupon.com is straightforward. Spend $10 today, get $20 in beer and burgers tomorrow, and the opportunity will be available for another 2 days, 16 hours, and 19 minutes, more or less.

First thing in the morning I can understand that much.  I can even read the fine print without being shocked, dismayed or confused. In my mind it is a really good deal to make your beer and burger money go twice as far.

Then I get to the "46 bought, 54 more needed to get the deal" part of the ad.

I don't appreciate my WTF? moments to start coming quite this early in the day.

Nowhere in the fine print does it say "Offer not valid until a minimum of 100 people buy-in."  It would be a logistical and logical nightmare, not to mention a big legal problem, to structure the deal that way.  You can buy it today but you have to wait 24 hours before using it (fine print) tomorrow, except if less than 100 people opt-in before the offer ends on Tuesday in which case it is not valid at all?  This does not work.

What sensible reason does Goupon have for doing this?  What are they thinking?

Social media: Local mobile Facebook check-in

Facebook introduced a check-in feature for its mobile equipped users who are inclined to tell their friends exactly where they are at any given point in time during the day. As CNN reports, the good folk at Facebook have given special attention to users' privacy concerns. My personal solution to these type of privacy concerns is to not go out of my way to tell anyone where I am or what I'm doing, but that's just me.

Michael Sharon wrote of the official Facebook blog, "Ever gone to a show, only to find out afterward that your friends were there too? With Places, you can discover moments when you and your friends are at the same place at the same time."

On the bright side, this technology can be viewed as encouraging spontaneous bonding experiences and social cohesion. There is a remote possibility that it could impinge on the party planning business, or be used by political dissidents to orchestrate impromptu civil unrest. Worst case, the technology might be used to co-ordinate the illegal activity of street gangs. If Facebook wants to focus on creating a service that would be useful for the social lives of users, there may be surprises in store when it finally comes out all the ways of devious and inventive societies on the fringe. Whatever can be used can also be misused.

I'd bet that before the end of the year there is a technical means to spoof the system into reporting you at one location when in fact you are at another. The market for the app would be cheating husbands or wives, and there aren't that many systems which genius hackers can't crack.

The recent development at Facebook puts it in direct competition with other local mobile social media providers like Foursquare Labs Inc and Gowalla. Facebook's plan to make the new service pay for itself is unclear. I predict that some form of advertising will be involved.

To use this new service requires one of the smartphones supported by Facebook.