Street Fight Daily: E-Commerce’s Toll on SMB Retail and Delivery, Digitizing Local Marketing

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

How E-Commerce Disrupts Small-Town Delivery Services and Retailers (Wall Street Journal)
Vince Bledsoe, a United Parcel Service delivery man in the remote town of Magnum, Oklahoma, remembers the exact moment he knew that e-commerce had changed the way rural America shops. He was taping up a package a few months ago to one of the town’s 3,000 residents and noticed it contained a bottle of bleach. “It wasn’t lavender [scented] or anything,” he recalls. “It was just a bottle of plain Clorox.” (Subscription required.)

Digitizing Traditional Marketing Methods to Compete in Local Search (Search Engine Land)
Lydia Jorden: Here are several techniques to digitize traditional marketing in a way that allows your brand to connect with its traditional audience while maintaining competitive local SERP positioning.

As Google Pushes for Users to Stay On Its Platform, What Are the Effects for Local Search? (Street Fight)
Mihm and Blumenthal: “Obviously Google still controls a fair bit of the searcher’s pre-purchase mindshare, and they obviously want to retain that role,” writes Mike Blumenthal. “They are also fighting like crazy to be relevant in a world where 50% (and growing) of users’ total digital media time is spent in Apps.”

Most Consumers Now Want to Use Messaging to Interact With Businesses (TechCrunch)
A new study from Twilio looks at how consumers want to use tech to talk to businesses and brands. While consumers overall prefer messaging over face-to-face interactions with businesses (and millennials even more so), businesses haven’t quite caught up to this new world yet.

Sulky New Media Still Clings to Old Media for Cash (Bloomberg)
Molla and Ovide: We wrote a few months ago about how many of the prominent digital news and entertainment newcomers including BuzzFeed and Vice Media are backed or owned by some of the old media dinosaurs they’re trying to usurp. Since then, old media has continued to dip into the new media pool.

Street Fight Launches 2nd Annual ‘State of Hyperlocal’ Executive Survey (Street Fight)
In last year’s State of Hyperlocal report, over half of our survey respondents said they were investing in mobile. Respondents also deemed their own company’s brand awareness as their biggest challenge, even more than proving ROI to customers. What investments will make sense in 2017? With your help, we’ll find out, and present the results at our upcoming Street Fight Summit NYC next month…

More Sophisticated Tech Helps Marketers Establish Attribution, Shift Spending Effectively (eMarketer)
Algorithmic attribution, a more software-driven approach to marketing attribution, is leaving behind traditional “last-touch” and “first-touch” attribution models in favor of sophisticated computer-generated statistical models that help companies better optimize media spending and consumer targeting.

How What’s App and Better User Data May Improve Advertising (AdExchanger)
The push behind this update to WhatsApp’s privacy policy not only enables Facebook to serve more relevant ads but also could, in the future, allow for targeted and contextual-based advertising in WhatsApp. Putting the power of messaging app data to work could help the industry deliver “pull” advertising — advertising at its best — within a self-contained, do-it-all platform.

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