Hyperlocal Investment Report Debuts Stock Index, Sees Dip in Valuations
Hyperlocal stock performance was largely on an upward trend July, according to the Hyperlocal Stock Index which debuts in the latest issue of Street Fight’s monthly investment newsletter. The greatest gains were made by DexOne, ReachLocal and AOL, while Groupon and Facebook suffered staggering losses, and Angie’s List failed to reverse its downward trend.
Identifying the Most Important ROI Metrics in the Redemption Loop
If daily deals and offers are to establish long-term relationships with merchants and marketers, they can deliver the best ROI by identifying those metrics that will deliver not just immediate results, but more importantly, lasting customer relationships. The first step is to weed out the metrics that include “serial bargain hunters.”
Street Fight Daily: ‘Daily Deals’ Profit, Yelp Surges
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Report: Most Daily Deals Now Profitable for SMBs, but Not Restaurants (Screenwerk)… Yelp Rises on Speculation of Smaller iPad (Bloomberg)… Community-Powered Traffic Navigation App Waze Hits 20 Million Users, Doubles Up in 6 Months (The Next Web)…
Street Fight Daily: Foursquare’s Revamp, Loyalty Programs
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology...
Foursquare Looks to Shift From Gaming Novelty to Essential Tool (Adweek)…
Hyperlocal Journalism Fosters a Greater Sense of Community Among Readers (Guardian)…
Media Companies Poised for Deals Growth (NetNewsCheck)…
Deals Site Privy Launches, Giving Merchants More Control
The Boston-based deals start-up is hoping to change the way small businesses use daily deals by giving them more control over distribution and promotion. The company allows SMBs to create and manage their offers, and helps them market through the business’s online networks — to Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and visitors to their website. ..
2011 Local Commerce M&A Saw Most Activity in Daily Deals
2011 was an intensely active year for the local marketing and commerce M&A market, with 186 transactions logged — up 40% from 2010. Many major companies that have local components to their business (led by Groupon, Google, LivingSocial and eBay) are making important strategic moves in the space to solidify their products…
8 Scheduling Tools For Managing Deal Customers
When running a daily deal, some merchants can expect hundreds — if not thousands — of calls and emails from new clients. In an effort to combat this problem and free up phone lines, a number of vendors offer online scheduling tools that reduce the heavy lifting for small business owners. Here are eight popular scheduling systems being used by SMBs to properly manage the influx of deal customers.
Case Study: A Michigan Yoga Studio’s Tips For Managing Deal Customers
When Eric Paskel ran his first Groupon promotion in January 2011, he knew it was going to be big. What he hadn’t expected, however, was to get hit with 3,000 new clients by 11 a.m. on the day his deal premiered. In the year since then, the owner of Yoga Shelter has sold approximately 15,000 daily deal coupons. But no longer with Groupon…
6 CRM Tools for Better Daily Deal Customer Retention
Merchants who go into their promotions with systems in place to manage and track the influx of new customers report significantly higher levels of satisfaction. Here are six popular CRM tools that can help track redemptions, collect email addresses, analyze revenue data, and drive repeat sales long after their promotions have ended.
Local Quotables: Moyal, Mims, Tolles, Lessin and more…
As the first week of 2012 commences, everyone is speculating about what will happen this year in the hyperlocal industry. Jonathan Moyal sees Lucky Ant helping communities play a bigger role in local business. Jeremy Mims predicts growth for Groupon and Michelle Jones hopes to create an alternative to Yelp. Also, Sam Lessin describes how Facebook’s check-in with timelines is an entirely new kind of LBS and more.
Could Siri Make Hyperlocal Hypervocal?
The audible realm in my mind is a better communications medium for brain processing than the symbolic realm — which is The domain of text-based or even much video advertising. Only the very best ads cross over into true pattern recognition where our minds shine. Sounds, however, are something we are far better wired for than words. Which is why Pandora has done extremely well with its advertising response rates as compared to other forms of online media.
Will Data Define Deals 2.0?
Industry data has become a commodity in the young, explosive deals space, with aggregators like Yipit selling reports on industry trends. For the most part, the data is publicly available. Aggregators use bots to scrape hundreds of deals sites, indexing the thousands of deals distributed each day across vertical, geography, and, until recently, number of deals sold…
Daily Deals Biz: A Race to Own Local, Not Coupons?
I think we may be witnessing a race to see who can capture the consumer on his own time and his own turf — and his preferred context — with content (and deals) of specific interest to him a few moments before he realizes he wanted it. The daily deals are just a foot in the door to the broader hyperlocal market. Whatever territory and mindshare the likes of Patch have, Goup-Social wants. All this will be chewed on in my panel session at the Street Fight Summit tomorrow, October 25, with Jonty Kelt, CEO of Group Commerce, Chad Billmyer, CEO of Dealbird, and Perry Evans, CEO of Closely.
Street Fight Daily: 10.03.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Loopt has been allowed its first patent, and it could be a big one. In layman’s terms, the patent describes using your location to display relevant ads and offers on top of a map, as an interstitial, or as a text ad — another claim also discusses displaying where your friends are on the same map. (TechCrunch)…
A basic contradiction at the heart of the daily deals industry on the Internet has become apparent. Consumers have been told: You will never pay full price again. The merchants were hearing: You are going to get new customers who will stick around and pay full price. Disappointment was inevitable. (New York Times)…
Case Study: Portland Salon Uses Scoutmob to Increase Exposure, Not Financial Risk
As a new business owner in Portland, Ore., Robin Carlisle has relied heavily on local press and word-of-mouth to promote her salon, Holiday Hair Studio. She initially shied away from daily deal promotions out of fear that an influx of customers would overwhelm her studio, located inside a vintage trailer. She ultimately decided to give Scoutmob a try this past July, in part because the company was new to Portland . Carlisle felt confident that she would be able to use the promotion for exposure without taking on more financial risk than she could handle…
Tippr Launches Affiliate Network: ‘AdSense for Deals’
Group-buying service Tippr has announced the launch of an affiliate network program this morning to supplement the company’s featured white-label product. Publishers who use Powered by Tippr software to host daily deals will be able to syndicate these offers across a network of affiliate sites — including major aggregators like Yipit and Yahoo Deals as well as over 1,000 hyperlocal and vertical niche publications…
TownHog Deal Speaks Volumes About VC-Backed Deal Startups
BuyWithMe has been looking to scale to catch up with Groupon and LivingSocial, and this is its sixth acquisition this year. TownHog, which has a strong footprint in the Bay Area, where it was started, is a nice feather in their cap.
But TownHog was backed by some serious hitters. As TechCrunch noted, “The company…was backed by a host of star investors (Jawed Karim of YouTube fame and Kevin Hartz of Xoom / Eventbrite to name but a few)…”
The Five Fundamentals of Deals Success for Local Media Companies
Many local media companies have not structured their daily deals programs appropriately or put the necessary resources behind them. While there is no silver bullet to guaranteed deals success, we have used our experience working with more than 400 local media companies to develop a model that breaks down the five most important factors to creating a successful deals program…