Creating a “Local Service Layer” — To Build or To Buy?

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The question of “buy or build” is everywhere in technology, and for something as important as brand integrity, it is paramount to making the right choice. Marketers can use cloud software to empower local affiliates to evangelize the brand in a controlled environment while using data to localize messaging in an automated way…

6 Tools SMBs Without Websites Can Use to Sell Online

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Understanding that many SMBs don’t have a business website, a number of hyperlocal vendors have introduced platforms that give merchants a way to participate in e-commerce and sell their wares online. Here are six examples of tools that merchants can try…

Street Fight Daily: Yik Yak Raises $62M, Square Accepts Apple Pay

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Messaging App Yik Yak Tipped For $62M Funding A Year After Launch (Guardian)… Apple Pay Could Be Coming To Small Businesses, Thanks To Square (Gizmodo)… Investors: Damn Ubergate and Full Speed Ahead With Mega-Funding (Recode)…

Study: 1 in 10 Mobile Ad Impressions in Retail Leads to a Store Visit

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xAd released a report this week detailing some new findings about the way mobile ads influence store visits in the auto, retail and restaurant industry. The results show the increasing importance of connecting online mobile activities to offline conversions and store visitation.

Openings and New Hires at LoyalBlocks, Showroom Logic and JUICE Mobile

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Every two weeks, Kelly Benish — who knows practically everyone in hyperlocal — covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week’s edition, new jobs and hires at Colony Logic, Marquette Group, Skyhook, and more…

LBMA Podcast: Facebook Challenges Yelp and Foursquare

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On the show: Connected Glass by Rebecca Minkoff; The world’s smallest GPS chip; Pay with your face; Coupons.com on your Samsung phone; and SocialRadar acquires Gridskippr. Our special guest is Rob Cameron, Chief Product and Marketing Office at Moneris…

Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Renews IPO Push, Amazon Eyes Hotels

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…GoDaddy Seeks Nearly $4.5b IPO Valuation, Talks Diversifying (New York Post)… Amazon to Get Into Hotel Booking With Launch of Travel Site (Skift)… Leaked Internal Uber Deck Reveals Staggering Revenue And Growth Metrics (Business Insider)…

Best Practices in the Cloud-Based “Local Service Layer” for National-to-Local

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Thanks to evolving tech tools, national marketers are in a powerful position to harness their web of data to deepen their relationships with consumers via their local agents. Best practices set a baseline of data, create a parent-child structure, monitor performance — and iterate, iterate, iterate…

Brooklyn Site’s Loyalty Pitch Tries to Answer: ‘How Many Customers Did You Bring Me?’

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A soon-to-be launched section in Bushwick Daily — called Village — will seek to build more and deeper connections between residents and merchants of Bushwick. The centerpiece of Village is an in-house loyalty program where users will get a bonus when they make their first purchase. If they become a frequent customer, they get another bonus and a Foursquare-type badge…

What Do The Internet and Your Commute Have In Common? A Lot More Than You Think.

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A handful of ex-engineers from Google and a specialist from Stanford want to take their learning from playing traffic cop on the web to solve the congestion problems plaguing some of the world’s business cities. Their insights into managing congestion at Urban Engines could have valuable lessons for managing local commerce…

Street Fight Daily: Senator Probes Uber, Apple Maps Adds Partners

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Senator Questions Uber on Privacy Practices (New York Times)… Apple Maps Announces New Business Listings Data Partners (Mac Rumors)… Reviewers Mostly Positive, 67% on Yelp Are Either 4 or 5 Stars (Screenwerk)…

Case Study: MEDIATA Sees 20% Campaign Lift Through Skyhook Partnership

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In an effort to reduce wasted spend, MEDIATA partnered with leading location network Skyhook, testing its Hyperlocal IP feature. Skyhook has differentiated itself from other IP positioning providers by taking an empirical approach to location. Rather than inferring IP address positions using network topology—a notoriously inefficient and inaccurate method used by many competing firms—Skyhook takes advantage of their global database of ground-truth locations, which have been assigned to IP addresses…

How Small Business Software Could Produce The Next Hundred Billion Dollar Company

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A resurgent business software sector has started to use cloud computing to bring cheaper, simpler accounting, point-of-sale and even marketing software to brick-and-mortar businesses. With their advances, the era of entrepreneurship has come to the real world…

How Personalization And Security Will Coexist in Local Commerce

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The evolution of mobile technology has been very exciting to observe, especially in the local commerce space. As I covered in my last piece we are finally starting to see things come to life with the ability to pay for everyday products and services using mobile devices. But overall one has to ask if this […]

Street Fight Daily: New York’s Ad Network, Adobe Bets on Location

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyAds Will Fund New York City’s Plan For World’s Fastest Municipal Wi-Fi Network (AdAge)… Adobe All-In with Location-Based Marketing (CIO Today)… Restaurant Discovery Service Zomato Raises Further $60M (TechCrunch)…

Target Flips the Switch on New In-Store Navigation Features

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“We want to build mobile experiences that Target guests will love,” Alan Wizemann, VP of product and mobile for Target.com told Street Fight. “We believe the new shopping lists and maps make it easier than ever to shop Target. … We’ve got a lot more mobile innovation to come…”

Why Brand Names Matter Less and Less on Main Street

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The “brand era” that gave rise to some of the tentpoles of the American economy may soon come to an end. The web, now reachable wherever and whenever through smartphones, can help consumers answer many of the questions that brand once answered…

Did Apple Just Transform Pay-Per-Call (Without Anyone Noticing)?

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OSX Yosemite’s “Continuity” feature has received surprisingly little media attention in general and zero coverage for its implications for call monetization. But it could be a glimpse into the sector’s future.

Street Fight Daily: Uber’s Smear Tactics, Groupon Buys (Other) Swarm

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyUber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists (BuzzFeed)… Groupon Acquires In-Store Analytics And Marketing Startup Swarm Mobile (TechCrunch)… U.S. Mobile Payments Market to Boom by 2019, Research Firm Says (New York Times)…

Pay-Per-Call’s Role in Improving Marketing ROI

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Call-generation company Soleo in conjunction with Street Fight Insights released a white paper today about pay-per-call and how it improves marketing ROI by deploying advertising budgets more effectively. The paper, “Pay-Per-Call’s Role in Improving Marketing ROI” covers insights into creating an effective pay-per-call campaign; sourcing and deploying effective research and analytics; and using data to better manage a campaign once launched, as well as how to evaluate potential solutions providers…