Looking for coupons and bargains from your favorite brands and retailers?
Check their website for an e-mail list you can join. While you're at their website check to see if they have coupons posted, many brands do.
Search twitter and facebook and follow them. These are great ways to stay informed of their offerings and often to receive exclusive specials and discounts.
If you have a brand you are particularly fond of tell them. You may get coupons in response, or at least a nice thank-you. If nothing else it lets them know what's working.
I recently mentioned a Cheerios product in a twitter tweet, something to the effect that my kids like Multi-Grain Cheerios (which they do, a lot). I was contacted by Cheerios and given a duffel bag, travel cup, snack container, and coupons ... and all I did was randomly mention them (with no thought to getting something in return)!
I mentioned the Cheerios freebies to my brother and he told me that his bank has staff devoted solely to monitoring social networks, both the running of facebook, twitter, and the like, and reading what others say about the bank and responding to both the good or bad. I thought that was very interesting, another example of the power of the internet.
