Ad retargeting damages the economics of hyperlocal networks hoping to make any real ad revenues selling to larger buyers. These same buyers can - and increasingly do - use retargeting to get the same Internet users at a fraction of the cost. This is another example of how hyperlocal actually scales down better than it scales up...

Transaction processing will become only a moderately profitable business. Where the big POS guys will make money is in value-added marketing services. Square has already started to add in loyalty programs. It’s only a matter of time before digital loyalty card startups start to tap into the POS APIs to enable tight integration between their loyalty efforts and the POS vendors...

The acquisition means that hyperlocal marketing has arrived in terms of market and investor recognition — and that hyperlocal marketing is something that will likely be baked deep into existing SMB products such as QuickBooks. Consider this move to be the precursor of a comprehensive SMB dashboard incorporating cash flows, balance sheets, text and tweets...

Where Facebook starts to get spooky powerful is in its capability to deliver local ads to a Facebook Connect network that will be personalized and reflect the actions, comments, likes and dislikes of your friends. This will tap into a recognizable social graph as Facebook seeks to do – and it could turn into an extremely lucrative, higher CPC line of business for Mark Zuckerberg and his team...

Foursquare has an engagement problem driven by the fact that users don't view the application as communications platform. Two-way communications have become more important as overall engagement in social media has risen. A check-in, by default, is a one-way communication and not a conversation...

Having watched the successful construction of communities brick-by-brick in politics, in meals, and in high-tech around topics of interest, I know that the power of simply sitting down with a small group to learn their views can result in powerful changes and truly viral sharing of genuine user generated content of the highest quality...

In the next few months, Twitter plans on rolling out tools to help local merchants buy tweets. Many local merchants that are already Twitter savvy are already tweeting deals and messages to their followers and responding to comments — so the obvious question is, will they pay for what they are getting for free? And how can Twitter add additional value for local merchants bombarded by marketing tools claiming to solve their problems.

The decision by Klout to team up with Gilt Groupe to award discounts to shoppers based on their Klout scores makes a lot of sense. Local merchants know that influential customers can drive a whole lot more sales than average customers...

An old sawhorse of the punditocracy is that one of the reasons hyperlocal is taking off so slowly in terms of advertising revenues is due to the digital noobieness of local merchants. Journalists love to trot out stories reminding the world that X-percent of mom-and-pop shops still don’t even have a Web site. But are these peeps really trapped in the dark ages?

From the get-go, Yelp was 100% citizen journalism, for better or for worse. There were editors, sure, but professional journalists were not tasked with generating content. The crowd was left to self-organize and submit copy. Imagine, if you can for a minute, a Chicago News Cooperative founded completely on the citizen journalism ethos. No professional reporters. Only editors and guides. The trajectory could be quite interesting...