Street Fight Daily: Instagram Adds Tags for Shopping, Twitter Boosts Chatbot Game for Brands

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

Instagram Tests Product Tagging Feature to See If It Can Drive Purchases (AdExchanger)
Facebook-owned Instagram hopes its platform can drive market research and shopping. Yesterday the company said it will let brands tag products in in-feed images.

Report: In-Store Shoppers Disengage From Social Apps (Street Fight)
Retailers and brands are pouring billions of dollars into social strategies designed to influence the way shoppers interact with merchandise inside physical stores, but a new study by inMarket indicates that marketers focused too sharply on social media apps may be missing the mark.

Twitter Offers Brands Customer Service Chatbots to Use in Direct Messages (AdWeek)
To better help brands converse with users and offer customer support, Twitter is launching two new products that will help answer basic questions and address complaints. The features announced today let companies partner with nearly a dozen third-party services to build automated-message systems specific to each brand.

5 Ways Brands Are Using Wearables to Create Unique Marketing Moments (Street Fight)
More than 250 million wearables are predicted to be in use by 2018. This presents an incredible opportunity for marketers looking to reach consumers not just based on their locations, but also based on their activity levels and personal interests. Here are five strategies that brand marketers are using.

IBM Acquires Dialogue-Based Shopper Platform (MediaPost)
Giving a boost to its retail and shopper-marketing practice, IBM has acquired the Expert Personal Shopper (XPS) division of Fluid, a firm focused on digital customer experiences. The acquisition includes the XPS solution, a dialogue-based product recommendation platform developed by Fluid that applies the power of IBM Watson to personalize the customer experience and improve product discovery. 

5 Mobile Commerce Predictions for 2017 (eMarketer)
In 2017, eMarketer projects, the share of US mcommerce sales that come from smartphones will grow to 65%—up from 58% this year. Bigger screen sizes, mobile-optimized experiences and faster connectivity are among the many reasons why smartphones are gaining share over tablets.

Racial Discrimination Suit Against AirBnB Shut Down by Federal Judge (New York Times)
Airbnb on Tuesday avoided a potential class-action lawsuit by customers who accused hosts of racial discrimination when a federal judge ruled that the company’s arbitration policy prohibited its users from suing.

Publishers Use Their Newsletters As Labs for New Offerings (Digiday)
The email newsletter has gone from being an afterthought for publishers to a platform unto itself. Today, the newsletter is a petri dish, where audience-development teams tinker with audience segments, trying to figure out what their most engaged readers care most about before investing in more similar content.

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Joe Zappa is the Managing Editor of Street Fight. He has spearheaded the newsroom's editorial operations since 2018. Joe is an ad/martech veteran who has covered the space since 2015. You can contact him at [email protected]