Street Fight Daily: Startups Put Feet On The Street, The End of Local Advertising

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology

smalltownDigital Start-Ups Face Unexpected Gauntlet of Door-to-Door Sales (Medium)
Local urban problems and the needs of small businesses are increasingly becoming inspiration for start-ups, and selling door-to-door — that icon of 1950s entrepreneurialism — is back with a new, digital face. Putting on a show for investors is one thing; facing off with an endless stream of bartenders and cash-register attendants over the shop counter is an entirely different proposition. Yet that’s exactly where many members of the newest crop of innovators are winding up as they try to bootstrap their billion-dollar ideas, one customer at a time.

How Facebook’s Rumored News Product Could Hurt Local Sites (Street Fight)
Matt Sokoloff: News websites dodged a bullet when Facebook didn’t announce a rumored RSS or news-in-your-news-feed product yesterday. If Facebook actually got serious about these plans, news websites could expect an even larger portion of their site’s traffic to be directed through the social network — and their brands could be endangered.

Why Advertising Dollars Are Shifting to Online Promotions (Second Street Lab)
Gordon Borrell: In 2007, local business started spending more on promotions and “owned media” — marketing channels that they control — than on classic advertising. And as the economy started to recover, they began spending a lot more. Promotions budgets, once relegated to things like coupons, windshield flyers and contests,  swelled to include things like website development, deal-of-the-day programs, loyalty clubs, and an array of techno-tasks that pushed SMBs into that vast digital cocktail party called social media.

Openings & New Hires at Square, Patch, LocalVox, Facebook and More (Street Fight)
Kelly Benish: Every two weeks, Search Influence’s Kelly Benish — who knows practically everyone in hyperlocal — covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. Moves this edition include the closing of LivingSocial’s office in Seattle, a and exiting CTO at AOL’s Patch, and job openings at Yelp, Appstack, Google, and more.

Urban Airship’s Wallet Studio Helps Firms Create and Manage Apple Passbook and Google Wallet Cards(TheNextWeb)
Urban Airship, a specialist in delivering push notifications, location-based mobile marketing and building cards for Apple’s Passbook app, launched a cross-platform digital wallet solution today called Wallet Studio. The tool set enables businesses to easily create, launch and manage campaigns that integrate with Passbook and Google Wallet.

VIDEO: Why Brands Are Warming to Hyperlocal (Street Fight)
For large brands, the upside of local is often shrouded in operational headaches, and overshadowed by the complexities of coordinating a decentralized, and often chaotic, campaign. Thanks to the rapid adoption of mobile devices and new innovations among vendors however, brands’ attitude to local are starting to change.

Maps & Metros: Surviving And Thriving In Local Search (SearchEngineLand)
It’s extremely challenging right now to recommend new “advanced” SEO methods for local search within Google . Things in Google have been in flux, transitioning from the old Google Places to Google+ Local pages, and changes have been unpredictable and frequent. The local algorithms haven’t seemed to have had a whole lot of additions, necessarily, or as much as the key parts have perhaps had some weighting changes, resulting in relatively minor juggling of ranking factors, often in fairly marginal degrees.

How Saga Bypassed GPS to Log Your Life Without Killing Your Battery (GigaOm)
Seattle startup A.R.O. has figured out a way to do life logging with its Saga app without killing your phone’s battery. In fact, it uses less than 1 percent of it.

LevelUp’s Sales Deal with Heartland Payment: A Discussion with Heartland’s Sarah Owen (Local Onliner)
As traditional local media players begin to lose some of their prominence, the search for alternative local sales channels has become increasingly important. The first significant sales deal with a processor channel started with a pilot program last October between LevelUp, the Boston-based transaction marketing/loyalty company, and Heartland Payment Systems, which works with 250,000 merchants and is the fifth largest payment processing company.

Babberly Launches Hyperlocal Mobile Ad Platform (MediaPost)
Joining a crowded field of location-based social start-ups, Babberly this week is rolling out a “hyperlocal” mobile ad platform to connect merchants with current and potential customers in real-time. CEO Bobby Marhamat describes Babberly an “on-trend ‘local goes social’ solution.”

LBMA Podcast: The ‘SoLoMo Movement’ and the Power of Context (Street Fight)
In this week’s episode, Google wins the battle for Waze; Pandora thinks like an upstart and buys a radio station; iOS7 gets into location-based app recommendations; Coca-Cola partners with Spotify for PlaceLists. The resource of the week is “Contagious” by Jonah Berger, plus special guest Paul Mabray, founder of VinTank.

Get Street Fight Daily in your inbox! Subscribe to our newsletter.

Tags: