Street Fight Daily: Google Kills Offers, Foursquare Reveals Revenues

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyGoogle Shuts Down Self Serve Offers Product (Blumenthals)… Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, Rebuffing Sale Offers, Says Revenues Grew 500% in Q1 2014, 600% In 2013 (TechCrunch)… Short-term Profit Taking vs. Long-term Value Creation: The Future of PayPal (LinkedIn)…

Case Study: Restaurant Chain Uses Loyalty Data to Improve Customer Experience

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If sales of a particular menu item seem slow this month, then Lucas Clarke is curious to know why that is. The director of marketing at MAD Greens, a Colorado-based chain of restaurants that specializes in seasonal salads and sandwiches, Clarke uses the data from his company’s card-linked mobile loyalty program to learn about sales trends in real-time…

Street Fight Daily: Andreessen Bearish on Local News, Google Bets on Location-based Gaming

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.Marc Andreessen: The ‘Problem with Local News is Most People Don’t Care’ (Poynter)… Google: Location-based Gaming as Popular as Virtual Reality in 10 Years (Polygon)… Will Facebook Build a Stand-Alone Local Search App? (Screenwerk)…

Street Fight Daily: Patch Lays Off Hundreds, Amazon Bets on Real-World Payments

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.New Owner of Patch Lays Off Hundreds (New York Times)… Amazon to Offer Kindle Checkout System to Physical Retailers (Wall Street Journal)… Facebook Officially A Mobile Ad Firm With 53% Of Ad Revenue Now Coming From Its 945M Mobile Users (TechCrunch)…

Street Fight Daily: Apple Positions For Payments, Mobile-Local Ad Revenue Grows

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.Don’t Count NFC Out of Apple’s Mobile Payment Plans Just Yet (GigaOm)… Location-Based Mobile Ads Forecast To Hit $10.8B In 2017 (MediaPost)… Shopkick Starts 100-Store iBeacon Trial For American Eagle, Biggest Apparel Rollout Yet (TechCrunch)…

Borrell Report Details Legacy Media’s Struggles in the Digital World

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The good news is that “three-fourths of all advertising dollars this year will go to analog media – despite a decade of maligning by digiterati.” The bad news is that by 2018, pure plays “will sap all their growth.” In this Q&A, CEO Gordon Borrell explains the upside-down numbers…

Street Fight Daily: AOL Unloads Patch, Handybook Buys Exec

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.…. AOL Unloads Most of Patch Local-News Site (Wall Street Journal)… Handybook Buys Exec in a Deal for the On-Demand World (New York Times)… Jack Dorsey Says The Receipt Is Untapped “Canvas” And “Publishing Medium” (BuzzFeed)…

Hyperlocal M&A in 2014 — Here’s What the Big Acquirers Are Looking For

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YP’s acquisition of Sense Networks earlier this week comes as M&A activity in the local technology continues to increase, with the market seeing the number of large, double digit deals increase in 2013. Here’s a quick look at several major players who may currently be in the hunt for locally focused acquisitions and what they might be looking for.

Street Fight Daily: YP Buys Sense Networks, Taskrabbit Delivers Cold Medicine

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.YP, a Mobile Search Firm, Buys Sense Networks (New York Times)… Walgreens Taps TaskRabbit to Deliver Cold Medicine to Shut-Ins (Mashable)… Facebook WiFi Comes to Some Netgear Routers, Allowing Small Businesses to Offer Free WiFi access (The Next Web)…

How Community News Sites Can Get the Most Out of Facebook

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To get specific about how publishers can maximize their presence on the biggest social media platform, I went to Jake Batsell, who is writing a forthcoming book on audience engagement. Here’s what he told me, based on more than a hundred interviews and visits to many old and new media community news operations…

Street Fight’s 10 Most Popular Stories From 2013

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On this last day of 2013, here’s a look back at some of the Street Fight stories that really piqued your interest this year (at least as far as page views go). We’re grateful for all of your support this past year, and we look forward to bringing you more great content, research, and events about sustainable hyperlocal business models in 2014…

Mobile Local Media: The State of the Union

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The end of the year is upon us and that means top ten lists, year-in-reviews, and predictions galore. Sort of in that spirit but a slightly different format, I’ve been organizing the way I look at the mobile local world into a few buckets. So as this month’s column, here’s my state of the union in mobile local media…

What Programmatic Buying Means for the Small Business Market

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Search has dominated digital spend for years, overshadowing a display market that has struggled to overcome surging inventory and lackluster targeting capabilities. But that’s starting to change. Street Fight caught up with Acquisio co-founder Marc Poirier to discuss how the growth of programmatic buying, and the emergence of Facebook Exchange, may make the display market more appealing for small businesses in the coming years…

Study Finds That Facebook Ads May Bolster Paid Search Performance

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A new study from Kenshoo finds that advertising on Facebook may bolster the performance of existing paid search marketing campaigns. The research, funded partly by Facebook, found that users who saw an ad on Facebook and then made a purchase via a paid search link spent nearly a quarter more than those who were not exposed to the same ad…

Street Fight Daily: PayPal Nabs Uber Deal, Facebook Revises SMB Count

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyPayPal Nabs Uber Partnership in Pursuit of Mobile Marketplaces (Bloomberg Businessweek)… Facebook Expands Its Definition Of Small Business Pages, Says It Now Has 25M Of Them (TechCrunch)… Digital First Media Will Add Paywalls At Most Of Its Daily Newspapers (GigaOm)…

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Tests New Ratings, Google Brings Search Offline

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyFacebook Tests Out A New Star-Rating System That Could Hurt Yelp (Business Insider)… Google Brings Local Search To Digital Displays Across London (MarketingLand)… Yelp’s New Home Illustrates The Company’s Success (Forbes)…

Street Fight Daily: Intuit Acquires Scheduling Software, Facebook’s Mobile Tipping Point

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyNo More No Shows: Intuit Acquires Online Appointment Scheduler Full Slate (VentureBeat)… Facebook’s Mobile Tipping Point: 48% Of Daily Users Are Now Mobile-Only (TechCrunch)… Why The $110 Billion Gift Card Industry Must Die (ReadWrite)…

Do Small Businesses Really Need a Website?

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The website is the richest online repository of compelling information about a business, but it probably isn’t its primary means of attracting customers. Rather, customers who find you via Google Maps or Facebook may need to refer to your website in the event a third party search doesn’t provide enough information to make a buying decision. The website serves as a last stage effort to win business that hasn’t already been secured via local search…

Here’s What Twitter Needs To Do To Win Over Local Businesses

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As Twitter hits the road to sell its stock to the public, the company’s monetization plans will take center stage. For Twitter’s stock to perform, the company will have to focus on growing its active user base, monetize its international users, grow mobile offerings and make money off initiatives like #music and Vine. But it will also have to crack one of the great white whales of consumer tech: the local market…

Chart: The Local Marketing Landscape

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The shift from print to digital is old news, but what’s shaking up the industry is the introduction of cloud-based business management systems — for everything from payments and point-of-sale to schedule — into the marketing mix. Marketers can write algorithms to connect supply and demand, automating the way businesses and consumers interact locally. Yelp meets Booker. Facebook meets OpenTable. These combinations will bring together consumer data from every stage of the purchase funnel, automate marketing plans and messaging, and reduce implementation and sales costs for both marketers and solutions providers…