5 Business Intelligence Platforms for Hyperlocals

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One of the fastest ways for hyperlocal marketers and sales teams to improve their success rates when pitching to SMBs is by identifying businesses most likely to be receptive to their offerings. A number of recently introduced business intelligence platforms can make that process a little bit easier and help marketers leverage online data to pinpoint businesses that are new and thriving…

Street Fight Daily: Groupon Acquires MashLogic, EveryBlock Could Be Sold

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Groupon Acqui-Hires MashLogic, Will Shutter Britely Plugin This weekend (PandoDaily)… EveryBlock Could Still Be Sold, Says Schiller, After Abrupt Closing of Hyperlocal Pioneer (Poynter)… After Acquiring 15 Groupon Clones, CrowdSavings Finds a Buyer for Itself (AllThingsD)…

Tagwhat Expands to Aggregate Offers by Location

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Tagwhat, the maker of an app that focuses on location-based content (from articles to video and audio about a given place), recently announced its entry into the business end of location services with new features that help users find offers from nearby merchants. The service now will pull time- and place-sensitive deals directly from Facebook (and other social networks), displaying them next to to the place-related content already provided users…

How to Scale Local and Stay Entrepreneurial

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The Alternative Press, which quickly grew to 15 sites in suburban New Jersey (three wholly owned and the rest licensees), is now hoping to replicate that success by growing into a network of 100-plus sites. That’s almost twice as big as the footprint of corporate pure play Daily Voice and in the same league as networks operated by the Chicago Tribune (TribLocal) and Denver Post (YourHub)…

After Boom and Bust, How Will the Discount Economy Evolve?

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The discount industry experienced 2012 as a major turning point. In the past 12 months, the deal provider landscape shook out even more, with the consolidation of many deals sites and the decline of some industry giants. Given the changed landscape, here are a few predictions about where the local offer and voucher space is heading…

Street Fight Daily: Stoppelman Makes a Buck, Local’s Top Ten

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.Yelp CEO Takes $1 Salary (CNET)… The World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Local (TechCrunch)… Why Daily Deals Aren’t All Bad (No, Really)  (PandoDaily)…

Patch Misses 2012 Revenue Target

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AOL’s network of hyperlocal sites missed the $40 million to $50 million revenue target that the company had set for last year, a miss that CEO Tim Armstrong attributed to disruption from superstorm Sandy in the fourth quarter during a Friday earnings call. The company remains committed to achieving run-rate profitability for Patch by the end of this year…

PODCAST: This Week in Location-Based Marketing — Urban Airship

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In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan bring you stories about new photo polling app Voto; 42Floors, the AirBnB for office rentals; LivingSocial’s painful year; Pepsi’s next generation vending machine and the mobile food market starts to sizzle (sorry!); plus, Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship…

Street Fight Daily: eBay’s Resurgence, Redbeacon Founder’s New Venture

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.eBay is Back! (Fortune)… Redbeacon Founder Launches MyTime, A Booking And Ecommerce Platform For Local Services And Open Appointments (TechCrunch)… Why Credit Card Companies Need Some Madison Avenue Style (ReadWrite)…

EveryBlock Was Experiment in Data Journalism That Fell Short

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When it was launched in 2007 by digital wunderkind Adrian Holovaty, EveryBlock was hailed as one sure part of hyperlocal’s future. As a result of Holovaty’s coding, the site was able to tease out for publication petabytes of government-collected data that otherwise might not ever see the light of day. EveryBlock was a pioneer in collecting, sorting, and filtering data. But it hadn’t progressed to turning its digital buckets of information into knowledge. Its vaunted coding, which located every overturned garbage can, couldn’t do that…

NBCU Shutters Pioneering Hyperlocal Network EveryBlock

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EveryBlock’s original goal was to collect as much local data as possible, sort and filter it, and then present it to its audience. EveryBlock’s president, Brian Addison, who was hired by NBC in mid-2011, changed all that. In announcing the closure, Vivian Schiller, a senior vice president at NBC News, said, “The decision to shut down the site was difficult. But in the end, we didn’t see a strategic fit for EveryBlock within the portfolio.” Read more…

Study: 14.7 Million People Engaged ‘Locally’ with Retail Brands in Q4

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A new report by the Location-Based Marketing Association and local analytics company Venuelabs looks at the amount and quality of “local” consumer interactions. As local activities like reviewing, checking in, or posting a photo become ubiquitous across platforms, the volume of location-specific (versus brand-specific) digital engagement with brick-and-mortar businesses has exploded…

Big Data and Local Search: The Netflix Precedent

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We’ve entered an era when product decisions can be made not by analysis of demographics or user testing but by extremely fine-tuned measurements of current user activities. For local search, the question becomes just how many of our passive online activities can be converted into data points to be examined for purposes of marketing and product development?

Case Study: Bakery Relies on Hyperlocal Press, Yelp for New Customers

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When Donna Lawson first opened the doors at Stuffed Cakes, she ran a series of daily deal promotions through CBS Local and Urban Dealight to spread the word about her Seattle-based bakery. Now two years later, Lawson relies primarily on press mentions on hyperlocal sites like the West Seattle Blog, as well as positive reviews on Yelp, to get new customers coming through the door…

Street Fight Daily: Aol Under Armstrong, Big Moves in Online Delivery

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.At AOL Under Tim Armstrong, the Only Constant Is Change (AdAge)… Made To Order: Big Moves In Online Food Delivery (ReadWrite)… Report: Geo-Aware, Geofenced Ads Outperform Other LoMo Targeting (Screenwerk)…

Yelp Hits 100 Million Uniques as Users Shift to Mobile

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Yelp reported mixed earnings on Wednesday as wider than expected losses tempered strong revenue growth in the fourth quarter. The reviews site brought in $41.2 million during the quarter, taking its annual revenue to $137.6 million for 2012. The overwhelming majority of its revenue growth came on the backs of local advertisers as brand spending remained flat…

Channeling Starbucks, FiveStars Seeks Loyalty in the Form of a Gift Card

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The Mountain View, Calif., company is launching a new gift card product aimed at helping businesses transform new customers into returning customers through its POS-integrated loyalty platform. The company has piloted a co-branded gift card with a handful of small retail chains since December, and plans to open the feature to its smaller merchants with the release…

Why Mom-and-Pops Will No Longer Pay for ‘Social Media Management’

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The social media hype bubble has burst, and most very small businesses have not realized their ROI in social media. They’re not willing to pay my company — or anyone else — hundreds of dollars a month to market their company on Facebook or Twitter. Instead they are diverting those dollars to pay per click options, SEO, optimizing their websites for conversion and mobile, or targeted local media advertising…

Survey ‘Paywalls’ May Not Be as Good as They Sound for Local Media

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While surveys may be a good source of revenue, it’s not a long-term solution for local news sites:There is an inherent supply-and-demand issue — not very different from the one that arises with online display ads. As more and more publishers adopt Google Consumer Surveys, Google can begin dropping its publisher payout because it has enough supply…

Street Fight Daily: Gannett Paywall Pays Off, AOL Sunsets Hipster.com

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.The Case for Paywalls: Gannett Gains While Digital First Experiments (Poynter)… More Change At AOL: Photosharing App Hipster.com Is Shutting Down (TechCrunch)… PayPal Destroys Google Wallet, MasterCard, Square, and Visa in Digital Wallet Study (VentureBeat)…