Street Fight Daily: Here Helps Baidu Expand Mapping Service, Retailers Use Tech for Personalization

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

Here Partners with Baidu to Expand Its Mapping Service to Europe and Beyond (Business Insider)
Here, which already powers Baidu Maps’ desktop and mobile services in South East Asia outside of China, will now support Baidu Maps in more than 150 countries worldwide. The financial terms of the deal, which was announced on Monday, were not disclosed.

Making Sense of Amazon’s Push Deeper Into Local (Street Fight)
Clearly Amazon is positioning itself in the sales funnel aggressively, Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm. “And unlike Google their presale efforts lead directly to sales that they control.” Mihm, meanwhile, thinks Alexa might be the key puzzle piece for Amazon’s future success.

How Retailers Use Personalization — If They Do At All (eMarketer)
Personalization may be the key to nurturing customers online, but according to a report from Clearhead, polling e-commerce executives, more than a third of respondents don’t use personalization technology at all, while 56% said they use marketing technology to support their personalization efforts. 

Sponsored: Using Your Website as a Customer Engagement Tool (Street Fight)
Todd Renard: Websites remain a foundational marketing element for companies of all sizes and they are likely the “home base” for customers finding the detailed information they desire as well as the basics, like store hours, contact information, product details and links to social channels.

Surefire Social Rebrands, Acquires Franchise Marketing Firm in Hyperlocal Push (Street Fight)
Surefire Social has announced this morning that it is rebranding as Surefire Local, as it looks to more strongly emphasize its hyperlocal focus. The new name is just one of many changes at the company, which recently purchased the local marketing automation vendor Promio.

Facebook Measurement: The Walled Garden is Cracking a Window (AdExchanger)
The “metrics situation” was a learning opportunity, said Brad Smallwood, VP of marketing science at Facebook, where he leads a team tasked with client and campaign measurement, product development, partnerships and advertising research. “The takeaway for us is to focus on the concept of transparency,” Smallwood said.

3 Ways Marketers Can Meet Today’s Standards for Engaging Customers (AdWeek)
Margo Georgiadis: In my conversations at CES, marketers asked me how they should respond to consumers’ expectations for immediacy in their lives; how they can control their brand stories in a fragmented media landscape; how to deal with the enormity of data coming at them; and how they can help their organizations adapt and keep it simple.

Why Mobile Payments Will Heat Up in 2017 (Street Fight)
David Card: Street Fight’s 2017 Predictions round-up was heavy on voice search and AI, and pretty light on mobile technologies. I expect the former two to be critical hyperlocal technologies, but their payoff might take some time. Meanwhile, there’s reason to believe that mobile payments might finally gain momentum this year.

Job Marketplace Shiftgig Raises $20 Million to Connect Employers with Short-Term Workers (VentureBeat)
Founded in 2012, Shiftgig is a mobile-first platform that harnesses the burgeoning “gig economy” by letting workers choose the shifts and days they want to work — and the employer(s) they want to work for.

Omni-Channel Marketing Meets Customer Engagement (MediaPost)
Susan Frech: The silos that companies insist on organizing around are meaningless to the consumer. Omnichannel? Touchpoints? Consumers don’t think that way. To them, there are no channels; there are no boundaries. Just one brand experience. And often it’s not a good one.

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