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...

Building a successful local sales force takes more than just placing bodies in coverage areas. To be truly effective, salespeople must create strong ties in their target community through outreach. These ties create an authenticity that is invaluable when it comes to establishing a lasting local presence...

It's not just about where users are spatially, or what device they're on. It's a function of where they are in the proverbial purchase funnel — the increasingly convoluted path between offline and offline worlds that leads from awareness to purchase. "The boundaries between the physical and digital world have disappeared, says WHERE's Walt Doyle, "and the purchase funnel has become a purchase pretzel."

Building relationships with consumers is all about trust — and trust is exactly what consumers lack when it comes to most mobile transactions: “Without strong user privacy controls, mobile payments may turn your cell phone into a magnet for telemarketing, spam, and online behavioral advertising,” CDT's Harley Geiger writes...

Even forward-thinkers who speak about "commerce," or "local commerce," or even "e-commerce" as the next stage in digital marketing are abstracting too quickly: the industry-sparking innovation here is the use of commerce to drive customer acquisition by bringing the point of sale to the moment of impression...

Brian Timpone, the founder and CEO of Journatic, is a destroyer. And that’s a good thing because community journalism needs entrepreneurs who will clean out the stubbornly resistant vestiges of 20th century “best practices." Too much of community journalism is built on an outdated model where one reporter is the Ptolemaic center of the news-gathering universe....

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...

Social networks have become increasingly relevant in the local search space for consumers. Social’s impact on local search is far from limited to searches performed on local networks, though. It’s also impacting traditional search results, rankings and relevance. Here are three local-social tactics that need to be included in every national brand’s digital strategy...

When building social discovery apps, the bottom line is transparency. Users need to maintain control over their data, privacy settings and the ability to define their likes, dislikes and other preferences...