Two key reasons why consumers shop local is immediacy of purchase and physical confirmation of product, (i.e. making sure a shoe fits). Fab and Etsy can't ship their products to you for delivery this afternoon — and it's tedious for a consumer to filter product offerings based on retail location. That leaves room for hyperlocal retail directories like GatherLA.com , which curates designers in Los Angeles for discovery by local consumers...

Turnhere, founded in 2005, leveraged the video marketing wave by working with resale partners like Yelp and Citysearch to help SMBs create one-minute video sales pieces. According to the company's CEO, Turnhere could boast a compelling capture rate, over 80% of inquiries for this short SMB video would result in a transaction. So with high close rates embedded in the business model, why pivot?

Block Avenue launched last week with an offering that gives locals the opportunity to grade their neighborhoods, blocks and businesses down to the building level. Users assign grades from A to F on specific blocks and for businesses, which are displayed on maps to show the destination spots (A's) as well as danger zones (F's)...

Plum District, the daily deals site for moms, is just the latest to find that building a national sales force to woo small business marketing dollars is no easy task. In fact, the difficulty remains a barrier to profitability for all kinds of SMB-focused businesses — from Angie's List to Groupon to Patch...

A number of new hyperlocal apps have popped up recently to facilitate neighbors' conversations with one other, but I see three major hurdles to the adoption of these localized services. Local networks require critical mass, they require ringleaders, and they require neighbors who are willing to share online with people near enough to stalk them...

The future of local advertising will likely be the gradual discontinuation of blatant or intrusive media ads, replaced by social media and business generated content marketing. The argument about what constitutes bad advertising will slowly become moot...

Although often associated with breaking news distribution, Twitter is more than a broadcast channel; it can facilitate the local B2B, B2C and C2C communication required for a truly active online bulletin board. The shared economy will work most efficiently with a communal media infrastructure that facilitates the messaging required to match transactional participants...

Rebelmouse, the creation of Paul Berry, ex-CTO of the Huffington Post, is a publishing platform that curates articles from the tweets, retweets and links from Twitter and Facebook accounts and displays them in the now popular Pinterest-tile format. The new platform validates how easy it is to leverage social media for publishing...

Most small businesses are still stuck in the Golden Age of Advertising, and don't understand the concepts behind this marketing sea change. They see a brand new industry full of hundreds of startup companies babbling about seemingly identical solutions to a marketing methodology they can't quite grasp. Here are three simple concepts SMBs need to understand about social marketing...

The consumer decision now becomes: do I spend my precious hour driving and dickering at the store, or do I spend $20 for somebody else to do this for me? As crowdsourced delivery services gain acceptance, it's not hard to imagine big brands like Apple Store, Home Depot or any restaurant chain leveraging delivery as a competitive advantage...