Street Fight Daily: Kayak to Debut Restaurant Search, How Brands Can Use Chatbots Effectively

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Chef in hotel or restaurant kitchen cooking, only hands.

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Kayak to Launch Restaurants, Tours, and Activities Comparison-Shopping Features (Skift)
Kayak is poised to debut new metasearch products for restaurants, tours, and activities. Its restaurant search would also come with the ability to make online dining reservations, with sister company OpenTable participating at launch.

Can Brands Turn Real-Time Facebook Messenger Chats into Meaningful Engagements? (Mobile Marketer)
“The fact that automated messages will be structured to help customers engage in very specific ways – for example, make a reservation at a restaurant, track an out-of-stock retail item – is definitely beneficial to brands,” said Jeff Piazza, co-founder and UX director at Behavior Design. “The true value of the chatbot will surface when it can perform like a trustworthy ambassador for a brand.”

The Rise of Text Messages as a Political Ad Medium (Street Fight)
Dan Slavin: The 2016 election will be remembered for many things, but for marketers it will be the emergence of text messages as a medium. Text messaging has become an essential tool in running a political campaign and every candidate now uses SMS/MMS to get the word out.

Ride-Hailing Start-Ups Compete in ‘Uber for Children’ Niche (New York Times)
Within the popular ride-hailing services market, entrepreneurs are going after a niche: providing rides for children. These start-ups are nibbling at the industry’s fringes, where Uber and Lyft don’t go. Although they are still testing the waters, the sector is already becoming competitive. It’s part of a bigger trend of ride-hailing: services finding ways to capture very specific segments.

Case Study: Fashion Retailer Boosts Engagement with Data-Driven Initiatives (Street Fight)
Customer acquisition has never been a problem for the team at fashion consignment retailer 2nd Time Around. But generating the type of data that’s necessary to get a complete picture of customers had been a challenge, according to CEO Kristin Kohler Burrows.

Ad Tech Trade Organization to Tackle Issues of Location Data and Consumer Privacy (GeoMarketing)
PlaceIQ is joining the 100-member Network Advertising Initiative, the ad tech industry’s self-regulatory trade group, as the use of mobile location information increasingly powers a greater array of ad targeting. Can the group head off government rules covering the use of geo-targeting and beacons?

Some Online Bargains May Only Look Like One (New York Times)
The world of internet “discounts” is a bizarre one, with retailers and brands asserting that you’re getting a stupendous deal because someone somewhere else — exactly where is never explained — is being charged much more. The root of some of these so-called discounts is a phenomenon known as list price, a largely fictitious concept adopted by retailers to compel customers into pushing the buy button.

The Location Data from Just Two of Your Apps Is Enough to Identify You (BuzzFeed)
A new report from Columbia University and Google found that geotagged posts on just two social media apps was enough to link various accounts held by the same person. The study shows that metadata left in apps can be so distinctive that people could be identified from just a few data points within a single data set.

Everything the Tech World Says About Marketing Is Wrong (TechCrunch)
Samuel Scott: Digital marketers have fallen into an echo chamber of meaningless buzzwords. Too many tech marketers are basing their work on faulty premises, hurting our profession and flooding the Internet with spammy “content.”

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