Street Fight Daily: Facebook Messages Businesses, Amazon’s Angie’s List Killer
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Do Facebook Users Really Want To Chat With Businesses? (Fortune)
There are now 600 million people using Facebook’s chat application, Messenger, each month. At its F8 developers conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, the social network sought to bring a new member into the conversation: businesses.
How Google Could Transform the $20 Billion Local Television Market (Street Fight)
Todd Wasserman: Most of the ads played on television are the same whether you live in Mississippi or New York. But with little fanfare earlier this week, Google made some overtures to the $20 billion local TV market that may bring it into the modern age.
Amazon’s On-Demand Services Marketplace Launches Monday (TechCrunch)
Amazon’s Angie’s List competitor has been rebranded as “Amazon Home Services” ahead of a larger launch happening Monday, sources familiar with the plans tell TechCrunch. The site has also recently expanded to include a much larger number of categories of services as well as additional cities around the U.S.
#LDS15 VIDEO: How Big Data is Transforming Small Business (Street Fight)
In a panel at Street Fight’s Local Data Summit in Denver earlier this month, several SMB-focused companies discussed how they approach helping small and medium-sized businesses analyze and use their own data.
Google Launches Major Push To Get Local Businesses Online, Improve Data (Search Engine Land)
Google is introducing a program it’s calling Let’s Put Our Cities on the Map. This new portal is not unlike Facebook’s Blueprint and Learn How sites launched this week. It offers resources to business owners (and potential partners) to help them get online or correct and complete their online presences.
Sponsored Post: Category Granularity — Where Per-Per-Call Campaigns Perform Best (Street Fight)
When it comes to running pay-per-call marketing campaigns, taking the time to select the most appropriate business categories is crucial for identifying high-quality leads and maximizing return on investment. In many cases, the more granular the category level, the higher the expected conversion rates in a PPC campaign.
ShopKeep Buys Payment Revolution, Adds Payment Processing To Its Point Of Sale Solution (TechCrunch)
ShopKeep — the NYC-based mobile payments startup founded by a Brooklyn wine shop owner to help other merchants improve their services with iPad-based payment apps and analytics — has acquired another startup, Payment Revolution, and will now offer payment processing as part of its point-of-sale platform.
Facebook Launches a Mobile Ad Exchange on Top of LiveRail (Recode)
Facebook announced a number of expected updates to its ad product LiveRail at its F8 developer conference Wednesday, including the use of Facebook user data, instead of just Web cookies, to help advertisers target users outside of Facebook.
How Online Retailers Are Creating Immersive Brand Experiences in the Real World (AdAge)
The store of the future, in a world where a tap of a smartphone will soon set in motion a near real-time delivery by a drone, must become a marketing channel. This is a reflection of the core of its e-commerce model: A strong customer-centric approach that mines data in order to provide personalized experiences.
Full FTC Report Reveals More of Google’s Dirty Tricks Against TripAdvisor and Others (Skift)
Internal emails and the findings of a Federal Trade Commission staff report on its antitrust investigation of Google show how Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Amazon resisted Google’s “unlawful” practice of stealing their reviews and other content.
No Easy Answers to Ranking Well in Local Search (LocalU)
In addition to the 200+ ranking factors in Google’s organic algorithm, we must also consider dozens and dozens of additional ranking factors that come in to play for Local Search rankings. There is simply no way anyone can take a look at your website and your local presence and solve this highly complex problem for you.
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