Relocations: 05.20.11
Comings and goings in hyperlocal.
TroopSwap, a website focused on daily deals for the military, has named a new board director along with a $585,000 funding round: Kelly Perdew, CEO of FastGames and a former Army Ranger. … Hyperlocal ad sales talent wanted: by virtually everyone. DNAInfo, the Manhattan hyperlocal publishing company, is among them. … Journal Register hires another former TBD.com staffer, naming Steve Buttry engagement director, joining former TBD general manager Jim Brady, hired in March. …. Merrill Brown joins Main Street Connect as strategic adviser and Jack Schofield has been named publisher of MSC-Massachusetts as part of Main Street’s acquisition of his site CentralMassNews.com. …
Send job announcements to [email protected].
Google’s Plan for Places: Third-Party Data
How does the saying go? “If you can’t beat them, join them”? Google Places’ market share trails that of rival Facebook, and Yelp, so it’s taking the portal approach: add a feed of any of your check-in services, and it’ll link up with ratings data found on Google Places. It hasn’t officially partnered with Foursquare or any other service, but that’s exactly the kind of data likely to be added.
Street Fight Daily: 05.20.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Main Street Connect, which owns 10 hyperlocal news sites in Connecticut, just picked up CentralMassNews, which owns ten local news sites in central Massachusetts. That means the company will soon have 52 sites — when you include 32 sites that the company says it is launching next month in Westchester County, N.Y. (Paid Content)…
What can Foursquare tell us about how people live? New infographic data from the location-based social network, gives a pretty good picture of life for a certain demographic in New York and San Francisco. (Wall Street Journal)…
With Quiznos, Groupon Tries to Prove It Can Spur Repeat Business
In an attempt to show its deals aren’t all one-offs, Groupon yesterday announced a deal with repeat business built in — a punch card for eight sandwiches or salads at Quizno’s sub shops worth approximately $50, offered for nearly half price.
Street Fight Daily: 05.19.11
Google Places has announced a new feature that lets you import the places you’ve checked-in to on Foursquare into Google to rate and review. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Zaarly is looking to be a sort of Craigslist for local mobile users, helping buyers find a quick way to obtain what they’re looking for from neighbors and local merchants. (GigaOm)…
Study: Local Search to Top $8B by 2015
The annual local search advertising market is expected to grow 60 percent by 2015 to $8.2 billion, according to media researcher BIA/Kelsey. In 2010 advertisers spent $5.1 billion on local search advertising. The revenue growth is expected to be driven by a surge in search ad volume — 30 percent of search is expected to be local in nature by 2015 — and smarter, targeted methods, said Matt Booth, senior vice president and program director of BIA/Kelsey’s Interactive Local Media group…
Memo From Patch EIC: More Articles = More UVs
In an email to regional editors last week obtained by Street Fight, Brian Farnham, the editor-in-chief of AOL’s Patch network of hyperlocal sites, suggested that the sites should increase unique visitors by upping post production, and touted an experiment at 14 Florida sites where increased posting resulted in more uniques. …
Five Elements of a Successful Hyperlocal Site
There are numerous places where local content producers can get advice about how to find the right groove with readers. Some have created guides to those businesses who have executed well, or “7 Habits” lists for successful hyperlocal sites. The folks at J-Lab did their own in-depth investigation into “what works” in hyperlocal journalism and came up with this, while a journalist across the pond takes a diplomatic view when considering hyperlocal content/news sites…
Main Street Connect’s Tucker: Hyperlocal Needs Scale
A veteran in the community news business, Carll Tucker founded the community news company Trader Publications in 1981, built it up, and sold out to Gannett in 1999. Then, two years ago, he came to the conclusion that the community news model he’d been so successful at offline hadn’t really been replicated on the Web. And so he founded Main Street Connect, a small-but-growing collection of community sites that began in Connecticut and soon will expand into Westchester (N.Y.), and beyond…
Street Fight Daily: 05.17.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.… Local directory company Yell Group has set a July timetable for announcing the conclusion of its strategic review, which it set in motion early this year in the face of continuing declines at its printed Yellow Pages business. (Paid Content)…
Groupon and Scvngr’s moves last week demonstrated how daily deals and geo-social are on a collision course. Here’s why Facebook might be a step behind other marketing options for deals and geo-social. (Clickz)…
An Engaged Audience Is Key to Hyperlocal Success
The true value of a hyperlocal site is its audience, but eyeballs alone aren’t enough. To create a thriving hyperlocal site today, an editor needs to attract and hold the attention of an engaged readership. Even more importantly, to sustain a hyperlocal site with limited resources, that audience needs to play an active role in providing and responding to its content.
Case Study: Pilates Studio’s Successful LivingSocial Campaign
Carla Vercoe is the owner of Studio BE, a popular Pilates studio in Fairfax, Va. Although running a deal with LivingSocial may have cost her money up front, she says it was worth it to be able to instantly connect with her target clientele...
Geomentum’s Lisa Bradner: Thinking Differently About ‘Scale’
When she joined the hyperlocal marketing firm Geomentum in the summer of 2010, Lisa Bradner had worked for two decades in consumer marketing, most recently as an analyst for Forrester Research. With the hyperlocal advertising market expanding rapidly, the move put her in a great position to explore the ways that micro-targeted location-based ads can create more relevant consumer engagement…
Billboards Get Into the Hyperlocal Game
The outdoor advertising industry has seen the writing on the wall, and it’s all about GPS.
At the Geoworld Summit Friday in Brooklyn, N.Y., the representatives of a dozen or more hyperlocal companies hashed through the potential and hurdles for reach the local advertising market.
Most of them sat squarely in the hyperlocal space, offering location-based data services to power publishers, marketers and deals, such as SimpleGeo, JiWire and LocalResponse. Others were there as publishers sharing their experiences, challenges and solutions, such as Baristanet and Gothamist. And mobile services and platforms naturally made up the dialogue, as well, including Goby and LoKast…
Making Peace (and Money) with Local Newspapers
The single-best deal, assertion, investment or other strategy out there.
Who: Gothamist
Why: Because they’ve turned over their hyperlocal ad sales to a local newspaper, the Village Voice
“It’s still ramping up, but I’ve noticed they’ve been selling more each week. For us, the rationale is that it gives us coverage in three verticals that we can’t easily do ourselves – real estate, restaurants and bars. That lets our sales team focus on the verticals they are good at, and sourcing national deals. As long as their performance continues, we’ll begin expanding to the other cities we both have properties in – Los Angeles will be next,” Jake Dobkin, co-founder and publisher of Gothamist, wrote in an email today.
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Groupon Pulls a Netflix with Groupon Now (and That’s a Good Thing)
As with other Groupon subscribers, a $10 credit landed in my in-box this week. The catch? I have to subscribe to Groupon’s mobile app. It’s part of the ongoing and accelerating full-court press by the biggest daily deal site around the launch of Groupon Now, a geotargeted deal product with much tighter time limitations. This is part of Groupon’s grand plan to shift towards becoming a real-time, location specific, expiring inventory deal site rather than a glorified coupon clipper. … Give Groupon credit for taking a page from the Netflix playbook in rapidly moving to seize a better sales mechanism after spying the declining value of its existing one.
LinkedIn – The Ultimate Hyperlocal B2B Play?
In which our columnist posits that LinkedIn is queued up to take market share away from Facebook, Twitter and others while making a big business out of hyperlocally-targeted business-to-business ads, even as “wags continue to deride LinkedIn as a glorified recruiting tool.”