Street Fight Daily: Life After Patch, What Really Happened at LivingSocial?
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
What Really Happened at LivingSocial? (Fortune)
“I don’t think the real story here is the details of the financing,” Sam Hamadeh, CEO at research firm PrivCO, told Fortune. “It’s what’s going to happen to the little guys, all of the merchants who are really the company’s unsecured creditors, if LivingSocial goes bankrupt. You’ll see that we were right in six or nine months.”
Case Study: Restaurant Chain Uses Mobile Loyalty Program to Target Nearby Customers (Street Fight)
At 54th Street Grill & Bar, a regional chain with 19 locations in Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, and Texas, marketing director Kelly Reid used a mobile loyalty platform called Front Flip to send discounted offers to consumers who’d visited businesses within a five-mile-radius of any 54th Street locations without checking-in at one of her restaurants, and had managers ask those customers why they hadn’t come in before. Here’s more about what she learned.
Life After Patch.com: A Newspaper Editor Returns To Newsprint (The Awl)
“The news from New York — where all the MBAs who run Patch live — was that everything was ‘really exciting,’ all the time,” a former Patch editor told the Awl in a wide ranging interview. “Then the MBAs realized that [producing quality content] actually takes more manpower than they were able to afford.”
5 Ways SMBs Can Find Success With Social Media Marketing (Street Fight)
A debate has been brewing on Street Fight over whether small business owners should be spending money on social media, and its general overall importance as a marketing strategy. We figured it might be worth it to check in with a few social media marketing companies to get their latest and best tips and insights for SMB success in social media.
The Newsonomics of The Boston Globe Sale (Nieman Journalism Lab)
Ken Doctor: With the unsurprising news that The New York Times Company is trying, once again, to part with The Boston Globe, we see the start of a wave of likely change in metro newspaper ownership across the United States. Make more room for the great metro sell-off of 2013.
Visa Debuts New Mobile Payments And NFC Partner Program For Merchants And Developers, Ready (TechCrunch)
Credit card company Visa is ramping up its partner program to help integrate its payments technologies in mobile devices and platforms. The new initiative, called the Visa Ready Partner Program, aims to help mobile device manufacturers, technology partners, mobile network operators, and others gain access to Visa IP, licenses and more.
Belly Up to the Bar: Startup Looks Ahead (Crain’s Chicago Business)
Belly just added its 1 millionth customer, but it’s just getting started, says CEO Logan LaHive. He wants Belly to become more than just a digital punch card for small businesses. To do it, the company expects to more than double its staff to 250 from 100 and raise more venture capital.
Groupon: Piper Ups Rating; Sees Promise In International Markets (Forbes)
Gene Munster: We believe the [Groupon’s] upcoming quarter and guidance will showcase improving international business trends following two quarters of sequential decreases, while we expect that [North American] trends will remain strong based upon our Groupon re-buy survey, which saw 64% of customers planning to buy another Groupon in the next six months.
Apple, Google, Facebook, and OpenStreetMap: The Top 5 Changes to Expect from Maps in 2013 (Venture Beat)
From Apple unveiling and then apologizing for Apple Maps, to the emergence of the collaborative and crowdsourced OpenStreetMap, for those fascinated by digital mapping technologies, 2012 was a critical point in time. And with location-based services powered by map data expected to reach 1.4 billion users by 2014, you can bet the innovation and competition we witnessed will continue in 2013.
PODCAST: This Week in Location-Based Marketing — Talkbits, Moves (Street Fight)
In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan look at Talkbits — this generation’s version of the CB radio. Meanwhile, Weve wastes no time and starts working with Virgin Records; big quick-serve restaurants Olive Garden and Applebee’s get into the location marketing game; Yahoo! destroys (er, acqui-hires) Alike; and a glimpse of the future of the insurance industry from Spain. Plus, Sampo Karjalainen, founder of Moves stops by, and our resource of the week shows the power of big data.
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