The Usability Gap: Designing the Right Products for SMBs
Surely small business owners belong to the class of ordinary users. Expecting them to invest the time and energy to become power users is a good way to guarantee that your user base will remain small. This realization could lead to a very different and more fruitful approach to product design for SMBs.
TownNews’s ‘iQ Engage’ Sorts Through Signals to Help Publishers Keep Users Reading
TownNews.com has come up with a way for local publishers to cut their bounce rates — and the happy result is longer sessions and more click-throughs to advertising messages. That means more monetization for publishers and, ultimately, more users-turned-into-consumers buying products and services.
Frustration With Digital Marketing Vendors Boils Over for One SMB
If it’s possible to distill the 30 million small business owners in the U.S. into a single persona, Marc Reisner strikes our columnists as a great candidate: “Marc has been disillusioned by past performance and that poor performance has understandably tarred the entire industry with the same brush.”
7 Ways That Brands Can Make Chatbot Conversations More Authentic
Chatbots are transforming the customer experience and quickly moving into new sectors — but before marketers can expect conversation-mimicking software and artificial intelligence to replace live customer service representatives, they’ll need to find ways to overcome some consumer obstacles.
Street Fight Daily: Uber Opens Up On Finances, Walmart In Talks to Buy Bonobos
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber, Lifting Financial Veil, Says Sales Growth is Outpacing Losses… Walmart is in Advanced Talks to Acquire Online Men’s Retailer Bonobos… From ‘Zombie Malls’ to Bonobos: America’s Retail Transformation…
Street Fight Daily: Google Uses Image Search for Retail, Instagram’s Snap Clone Surpasses Snap in Users
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google is Trying to Turn Image Search into a Shopping Tool… Instagram’s Snapchat Clone is Now More Popular than Snapchat… The Weather Company Opens Its Data Trove to Marketers on Outside Platforms…
Are We on the Brink of a Retail Revolution?
Revolutions often happen over short periods of time and leave death and carnage in their wake. What we are experiencing today in retail is more of an evolution — a sort of “survival of the fittest” as both local and big brand retailers either embrace shifting consumer shopping patterns or face extinction.
Street Fight Daily: Yext Set to Raise $115.5M in Today’s IPO, Snap Offers Brick-and-Mortar Attribution
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Yext is Set to Raise $115.5 Million in IPO After Final Pricing… Snap Advertisers Can Now See if Their Ads Increase Foot Traffic… Will it Blend? Oath Will Combine Disparate AOL-Yahoo Ad Tech Assets…
Disney’s Deep Dive on Personality Research, and Its Potential Implications for Brand Marketers
A division of The Walt Disney Company has been working on a method to better target marketing by learning more about consumers’ personalities. Research scientist Maarten Bos spoke to us about how consumer personality can be understood and how the information can be used to tailor ads more precisely.
Could Chipotle Have Saved Millions of Dollars By Taking Online Reviews More Seriously?
If done right, online reputation management can act as an early warning system for multi-location businesses, and can ultimately prevent long-term brand damage and reduce the risk of decreasing profits.