Case Study: Deals Earns Restaurant 30% Repeat Business and $120,000

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In Winnetka, Illinois, chef Michael Lachowicz has strong opinions on what it takes to run successful daily deal promotions. Lachowicz has run six Groupon deals at his establishment, Restaurant Michael, resulting in more than 5,000 coupons sold and $120,000 in revenue generated in the last two years. He estimates that 30% of coupon buyers have returned after their vouchers were redeemed, and says he’s negotiated a deal with Groupon to get 90% of his payouts just two days after his deals end.

Street Fight Daily: 12.19.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

Groupon, LivingSocial, and the Holy Grail of Commerce (E-Commerce Times) … Barclay’s: Lower Ad Growth for ’12 (MediaPost) … Merchants Get Savvy About Daily Deals, to the Detriment of Consumers, Groupon and LivingSocial (VentureBeat)

Hyperlocal Has Cracked ‘Local’ and ‘Now’ — Sosh Now Looks to Target Intent

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Because it is intentional and transactional in nature, Sosh is probably more likely to see responses akin to search engine advertising, where people who are there know what they want and are ready to buy. And that could be a particularly excellent venue for local advertisers…

Local Quotables: Mutter, Orrick, Rainert, Grubisich, Cocotas and more…

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This week in hyperlocal: Positive predictions for Groupon from Barclays Capital; thumbs-down on Yelp from BI Research. Foursquare’s Alex Rainert thinks we should teach code to kids; Alan Mutter foresees a tech buying spree on local in 2012; Street Fight’s Grubisich eyes the Westchester shoot-out; and more:

PODCAST: This Week in Location-Based Marketing — Fondu CEO & More

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In this episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan discuss Home Depot’s campaign with Pandora, Rogers entering the daily deals business in Canada, MojoStreet, and Schemer. This week’s special guest is Gauri Manglik, CEO of Fondu…

Street Fight Daily: 12.16.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...

Consumers Not Turning to Social Media Sites for Local Business Info (Mashable)…

With Factual, 1 API Now Unlocks Data for 55 Million Places (GigaOm)…

Patch Salesperson Says Company Is Quietly Letting People Go (Business Insider)…

LocalResponse Doubles Staff, Opens Midwest Office

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The advertising platform, which enables brands to engage with users around check-ins, is bulking up on personnel and expanding to Chicago in order to focus on Midwest sales.The company also announced that it will be expanding its platform reach in Q1 of 2012 by adding a display ad product as well as by offering larger brands and agencies a self-serve version of its service as a SaaS tool…

Westchester’s Hyperlocal News Market Is a Four-Sided Shootout

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Prestigious, affluent Westchester County, just north of New York City, is on the verge of becoming a hyperlocal version of the Gunfight at OK Corral – squared. Within months, four major-media companies will be competing community by community for dominance in this prized media market…

Street Fight Daily: 12.15.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

EBay’s PayPal Counts on Its 103 Million Users to Target Groupon (Bloomberg BusinessWeek)…

Examiner.com Will Provide Content For CBS Local Digital Media (PaidContent)…

NBC Maps the 2012 Election Campaign Trail With Foursquare (Mashable)…

Web Freedom Groups Call on Publishers to Oppose SOPA

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation, and other online groups are calling on hyperlocal news publishers and other online developers to oppose the “Stop Online Piracy Act” in advance of tomorrow’s markup session on the bill before the House Judiciary Committee…

Aggregating Information From the Urban Landscape, Business by Business

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Street Fight recently caught up with with CityMaps co-founder and president Aaron Rudenstine to learn more about how the service differentiates itself from classic mapping sites, and why aggregating traditional place information against the social graph is so valuable.

Street Fight Daily: 12.14.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...

TaskRabbit Picks Up $17.8M — And a Vote of Confidence for the Do-It-For-Me Economy (Betabeat)…

How Fast Is Local Ad Market Growing? Depends How You Define ‘Local’ (PaidContent)…

Digital Giants Closing in on Local Media (Reflections of a Newsosaur)…

The Great Indoors: The Future of Indoor Location & Advertising

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The “shopping experience” is something retailers have been perfecting for decades. Product placement and drive aisle concepts are designed to entice consumers and draw them to the best deals that will keep them coming back. But, what if we could take these concepts a step further with location-based marketing?

PlaceIQ Announces 4.2 Million in Funding

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PlaceIQ, the hyperlocal data company that builds audience profiles for 100-meter tiles across major metropolitan centers, has raised $4.2 million dollars in series A funding. The Boulder-based company will also be relocating to New York, in order to be closer to “customers, partners, and the general ecosystem”…

Case Study: CKE’s Own Check-In App Lends Accountability and Control

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How does a restaurant group with 3,000 locations spread across 43 states manage a robust location-based rewards program without sacrificing functionality or flexibility? For Brad Rosenberg, manager of digital strategy and marketing for CKE Restaurants — which owns the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s fast-food chains — the answer was to build a mobile app that could work across multiple point-of-sale systems and still provide the accountability that individual franchise owners require…

Street Fight Daily: 12.13.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...

Gowalla Went For $3M In Facebook Shares, And Many Investors Were Cool With That (TechCrunch)

When It Comes to Mobile Devices, Focus Will Be on Location, Location, Location (Washington Post)

Guardian’s n0tice Will Pay Citizen Moderators (ReadWriteWeb)

Is New Anti-Piracy Bill Less of a Threat to Hyperlocals?

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A new alternative anti-piracy bill being floated by two congressmen holds less risk for hyperlocal news publishers, because it does not give a rights owners an immediate, fast solution to blacklist a site…

What Works in One Local Market Won’t Necessarily Work in Another

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I’ve learned, sometimes through epic failures, what works in Tracy (a suburb of Sacramento, Calif.) won’t work in Tampa. However, I’ve also learned, through epic victories, that when you harness the power of 200+ communities for a common goal great things can happen. Here are a few bits of wisdom I’ve picked up along the way.

Street Fight Daily: 12.12.11

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...

AOL’s Patch Gets a Little Less Hyperlocal (Ad Age)…
The Gowalla-Facebook Deal Didn’t ‘Screw Over’ Gowalla’s Investors (Business Insider)…
How Can Local Businesses Structure More Effective Daily Deals? (TechCrunch)…

The Capitulation of a Social-Mobile High-Flyer

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Two years ago it would have been hard to imagine Gowalla selling for anything less than a pretty penny. But a couple things have happened since then to devalue mobile apps. First, the location-based gamification juggernaut has not developed as quickly as some had predicted. Second, the competition for mindshare on handsets has magnified as many more eye-popping apps vie for attention. It’s a real street fight out there in the land of mobile apps and we will likely see more casualties, even among worthy players like Gowalla.