The Usability Gap: Designing the Right Products for SMBs

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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.

Location Data About Legal Cannabis Reveals Shifts in Consumer Behavior

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Another 4/20 is upon us and as cannabis patrons prepare to celebrate, the marketing world is still trying to figure out how best to reach legal consumers of marijuana. Foursquare released data earlier this week that illustrates a few trends among legal cannabis consumers.

Street Fight Daily: Marketers Eye Apple’s Snap Clone, Retail and VR

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Marketers Have Begun Eyeing Clips, Apple’s New Camera App… The Realities of Virtual Reality and Retail… Facebook Messenger Bots Work in Groups Now — Just Don’t Expect Them to Chat…

Could Chipotle Have Saved Millions of Dollars By Taking Online Reviews More Seriously?

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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.

7 Startups Decamp to the ‘Smartest Place in the World’ to Rethink Mobility

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When machines around us communicate asynchronously in a meaningful way — in the service of the consumer — we’re likely to see some astounding outcomes. While the machines might not be chit-chatting with one another about the weather too soon, in Singapore it’s all being tried.

Street Fight Daily: Amazon Patents On-Demand Manufacturing Warehouses, Facebook’s Big F8 Reveals

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon Awarded Patent for On-Demand Clothing Manufacturing Warehouse… Everything Facebook Announced at F8 2017… Malls Deploy Technology to Lure — and Keep — Shoppers…

A Look at Google’s ‘Quality Rater Guidelines’ Over Time: How to Put Information Into Action

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Google is vague on a lot of things, but every now and then we get a glimpse into what the search giant values and deems important — as we do in the recently updated Quality Rater Guidelines.

TownNews’s ‘iQ Engage’ Sorts Through Signals to Help Publishers Keep Users Reading

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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.

Street Fight Daily: Facebook at 10, Spotify Expands ‘Branded Moments’

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Marketers Still Struggle with Measurement, Attribution… Brands Can Now Target Spotify Playlists Ads Based on the Time of Day… Uber Confirms Ford Veteran Marakby is Leaving After One Year…

Frustration With Digital Marketing Vendors Boils Over for One SMB

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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

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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

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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 Culture: Why Telecommuting Makes Sense for Many Tech Startups

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“If you have the right team, the right employees, then they don’t have to be there physically,” says Kristen Stiles, co-founder and CEO of babysitter-finding app Sitter.me. “If you don’t trust your employees to work at home, you shouldn’t have hired them in the first place.”

How Brands Can Find the ‘Advertisable Moments’ They’re Missing

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Advertisable moments exist in a range of digital and physical contexts beyond TV sets and even beyond desktop browsers — and if a brand wants to capitalize on all available moments (especially those proverbial micro-moments) it has to look for ad opportunities in unexpected places.

Street Fight Daily: Google Uses Image Search for Retail, Instagram’s Snap Clone Surpasses Snap in Users

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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…

Yext Shares Up Sharply in Initial Day of Trading, Portending Well for Local

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Yext’s shares jumped nearly 22% in the company’s initial day of trading, with the price rising as high as $14.25 per share before settling to $13.41 at close. The strong opening was a hopeful message from Wall Street for the local marketing industry, which has been looking to Yext’s IPO as a bellwether.

Are We on the Brink of a Retail Revolution?

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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.

What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Fake News’

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“Fake news” is actually about stories written to win clicks (and potentially do harm). Losing the focus on this accurate definition to spin and political jockeying creates a challenge for the business of marketers, advertisers, and publishers.

Street Fight Daily: Yext Set to Raise $115.5M in Today’s IPO, Snap Offers Brick-and-Mortar Attribution

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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

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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.