Street Fight Daily: Local Merchants Unfazed by Facebook Controversy, Consumers Apprehensive on Voice
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Most Local Merchants Unfazed by Facebook Controversies, Though Some Signs of Trouble (Street Fight)
By now, consequences of the negative aura surrounding Facebook’s role in customer info abuse, fake news, and Russian political meddling should have started to take hold. Yet over half of local merchants we polled said they would continue to use Facebook as they had previously, and only one in five said they may use it less. NYT: Facebook gave device makers deep access to user data.
70% of Consumers Have Never Used Voice Assistants to Search for Products (MediaPost)
Consumers are skeptical of voice assistant shopping apps, which probably explains why the majority of Americans have not yet used voice search or voice assistants to shop. And more than half don’t trust the best-known providers—Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft—to get it right.
Report: Brands Abandoning Social Media Measurement (Street Fight)
The rise of tools like IoT and chatbots, along with reliable channels like email, have cut into the diminished albeit still powerful role of social along the customer journey, explains Mark Smith, president and CEO of Kitewheel.
Apple Can Succeed in Ads Without Sharing Data (AdExchanger)
Allison Schiff: Apple isn’t likely to change its stance on privacy to make a few bucks on advertising services, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. One way for advertisers to stay on the right side of history and of GDPR is to focus more on contextual advertising and search than behavioral targeting.
Microsoft’s GitHub Deal Marks Latest Shift from Windows (Wired)
There’s more than money on the line in Microsoft’s planned $7.5 billion all-stock acquisition of code-hosting and collaboration site GitHub. If Microsoft screws this one up, it risks losing the considerable goodwill it’s built with developers in recent years. Axios: Why the GitHub acquisition matters
Google Is Experimenting with Different Forms for Posts (Search Engine Land)
In the past week, we’ve seen three different variations of layouts and functionality around how these Google Posts are displayed when a Google local knowledge panel is returned in the Google search results.
BlueVine Raises $60 Million to Give Small Businesses Access to Working Capital (VentureBeat)
BlueVine, a fintech startup that serves up financing facilities for small businesses, has raised $60 million in a series E round of funding led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Silicon Valley Bank and existing investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners and 83North.
YouTube TV’s Digital Channels Experiment With Different Ad Loads While They Still Can (Digiday)
YouTube isn’t paying digital video networks a carriage fee to be on YouTube TV. That may change next year, when YouTube has told the networks it would revisit the carriage fee question. But in the interim, those networks are still getting value from their linear channels.
