Case Study: Using Foursquare to Increase Foot Traffic
How does the owner of a business with minimal signage and a hidden fourth-floor location encourage walk-in business? For Tom Elliot of Idea Greenhouse, a co-working office space for entrepreneurs and startups in Durham, New Hampshire (pop. 14,638), location-based services have been key. Elliot uses platforms like Foursquare, SCVNGR and Yelp to let people working in coffee shops know that a more attractive group workspace is available nearby.
Street Fight Daily: 08.23.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Placecast’s ShopAlerts service, which delivers retailer and merchant offers and discounts to consumers via their mobile phones, has announced its integration with mobile smartphone apps. (TechCrunch)…
With millions of Americans carrying GPS-enabled smartphones around all day, mobile marketers dream of using their locations to serve them targeted ads. But recent studies show that consumers and advertisers aren’t yet ready for location-based advertising to take over our touchscreens. (Poynter)…
Paycloud Brings Merchant Loyalty Cards to Your Phone
Earlier this month, Sparkbase launched its new mobile rewards application Paycloud, which allows small and medium-sized merchants to offer and track mobile loyalty programs to customers in the vicinity of their shop. The company’s CEO Doug Hardman talks about scaling local merchant acquisition and why the company’s recent move into the mobile wallet space may have a year or two headstart on the competition…
Street Fight Daily: 08.22.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Imagine if Groupon starts instructing its sales force to start focusing on opportunities other than restaurants, spas, massages and pilates classes. Theoretically, the company could leverage its enormous international subscriber base to venture into offering deals for groceries, household items and other goods regularly purchased offline. (TechCrunch)…
“Patch is AOL’s last, best chance to build a growth engine,” writes Maxwell Wessel. “Investors shouldn’t be calling for AOL to back off the business. They should be calling for AOL to double down — not by increasing Patch’s $150M+ yearly cash burn, but by increasing commitment. ” (Harvard Business Review Blog)…
Bloomspot’s Guarantee Shows the Future of Daily Deals
A week ago daily-deal service Bloomspot dropped the interesting announcement that it would roll out a “performance-based business model that takes responsibility for the profitability of its merchant partners.” The company will guarantee profitable spending levels from customers. Our post on the Bloomspot news gave a nod to the long-term implications of this announcement. My two cents: This is a clear signal that the daily deals business will quickly morph into something else and that the balance of power has shifted to the merchants…
Patch and Profitability
Deep-ish into a story about AOL’s growth this week. The Wall Street Journal tucked this tasty nugget of information: AOL is spending about $160 million a year on Patch, which equates to about $150,000 to run each individual Patch site annually, according to an analyst’s estimate.
It begs the obvious question of whether AOL will–or even can–make a profit from this enterprise…
Street Fight Daily: 08.19.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare announced new features on Thursday that allow check-ins at events, like concerts or movies, instead of just the places where those events are happening. The company said the new features will simply formalize the existing behavior of its users. (New York Times)…
Groupon has not only faced questions about its controversial accounting practices, but is now also having to respond to questions from members of Congress about its privacy policies. (AllThingsD)…
Denver Post Unveils ‘New’ YourHub. But Is It New Enough?
Six years ago YourHub was major media’s first big foray into hyperlocal. It was the answer to newspapers desperately looking to replace shrinking print revenues with digital gold. But digital gold, like the real stuff, is not easy to find. What happened in Denver is a sobering case study about metro newspapers and hyperlocal publishing.
Case Study: Connecticut Pub Casts a Wide Net With Patch Ads
Like many entrepreneurs, Daneen Grabe, owner of Little Pub restaurant, has little time to research all the advertising platforms that are available in her town of Ridgefield, Conn. She now spends most of her marketing budget on ads in six local Patch sites, in the hopes of attracting some of the hyperlocal news network’s most plugged-in readers. Here’s why.
Street Fight Daily: 08.18.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
According to a new report from location-based media company JiWire, 53% of the “on-the-go” U.S. audience is willing to exchange their location in exchange for more relevant content and better information, including mobile deals. (TechCrunch)…
Groupon is running seriously low on cash. The company is not broke, by any means. It can also presumably raise additional capital in the private markets if its IPO gets further delayed. But Groupon’s cash cushion relative to its liabilities is small — and the gap between the two is going the wrong way fast. (Business Insider)…
Datasphere’s Cowan: Hitting the Hyperlocal ‘Sweet Spot’
Street Fight recently spoke with Gary Cowan, Datasphere’s SVP of product and marketing (who will be joining us at the Street Fight Summit in October) about the company’s content strategy, the future of the banner ad, and why his company’s sites aren’t “cookie cutter.”
Street Fight Daily: 08.17.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Mobile location service Localmind lets you use your phone to ask questions of people who are hanging out at a restaurant, bar, park or other venue. With yesterday’s update to the app, Localmind users can now send photos in response to questions, answer questions older than real time and get forwarded all questions for places they are regulars at. (ReadWriteWeb)…
Foursquare has added photos inline with checkins in an update to its iPhone application Tuesday. The new version adds color to the activity stream and refreshes the look and feel of the app. (Mashable)…
A ‘Community Service Model’ for Hyperlocal
When merchants and civic organizations produce content for local publications, they develop their brand, engage their community and, as a result, market themselves. This new hyperlocal model would serve the business, nonprofit and civic sectors by providing the free open source media they need to deliver news and promote their agendas inside the community. Call it the community service media model…
Venue, Topics, Panelists Announced for Street Fight Summit
Street Fight is proud to announce that we will be hosting our 2011 hyperlocal industry summit at 82 Mercer in New York on October 25th and 26th. The venue is in the center of Soho, in the former home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex. We’ve already confirmed a great slate of top tier guests and moderators, and now have posted a preliminary list of many of the panel and discussion topics that the conference will cover…
Street Fight Daily: 08.16.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
Foursquare has launched a new feature that allows users to create distinct lists of the places they’ve checked into or plan to visit in the future. This new functionality brings Foursquare more into the realm of user-generated recommendations long-dominated by review sites such as Yelp. (GigaOm)…
Miguel Ferrer, General Manager of AOL Latino says Patch Latino is set to be introduced this fall and is already hiring journalists in selected markets. “We are not yet commenting on the exact locations of the Patch Latino sites, but yes, they will be in Southern California.” (Portada)…
Using Geofence Data to Understand Local Consumers
With all of the locational data being logged these days, it’s becoming more and more important to have ways to contextualize and understand it all. While this kind of analysis obviously is very important in government, military and non-business environments, it is also highly relevant for merchants and advertisers focusing on hyperlocal targeting and campaign assessment…
Street Fight Daily: 08.15.11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups...
AOL is spending about $150,000 to run each individual Patch site annually, according to an analyst’s estimate. AOL first focused on building traffic to Patch sites, and just recently started ramping up ad sales. (Wall Street Journal)…
San Francisco’s KQED is embarking on a couple of partnerships pairing it with hyperlocal sites in the area: one with just-launched Huffington Post San Francisco, the other with four hyperlocal news sites as part of J-Lab’s Networked Journalism Project. (Nieman Lab)…
Ex-‘Rocky’ Editor Weighs in on YourHub
Street Fight Columnist Tom Grubisich’s recent piece about the trials and tribulations of the Denver Post’s YourHub hyperlocal network sparked plenty of debate among readers in our comments and over social media. Among those throwing the topic back and forth on our pages was John Temple, the former editor of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News, and one of those behind the original incarnation of YourHub…