Street Fight Daily: Facebook Tests New Ratings, Google Brings Search Offline
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Facebook Tests Out A New Star-Rating System That Could Hurt Yelp (Business Insider)… Google Brings Local Search To Digital Displays Across London (MarketingLand)… Yelp’s New Home Illustrates The Company’s Success (Forbes)…
Street Fight Publishes 2nd Annual ‘Local Merchant’ Research Report
Street Fight’s “2013 Report on the State of the Local Merchant,” gets up close and personal with dozens of local merchants who shared their desires, disenchantments, successes, and failures in hyperlocal marketing. In a Street Fight survey, 40% of respondents said that “ability to drive new customers” was the No. 1 reason to spend local marketing dollars. Second most important factor was “ensure the right people are being targeted”…
Explainer: How Local Data Startups Are Building Analytics for the Real World
There’s been a lot of excitement around in-store analytics recently as venture funding has begun to pour into the space. But the trend is one part of a much larger technological effort to quantify consumer activity in the real-world, bringing the same measurement about where we go, when we go there, and where we came from that Google Analytics and Comscore brought to the web years ago…
Revenue a Key Focus for ‘The Brooklyn Game’ Founder
In his much-quoted report for the FCC, Steve Waldman said that while hyperlocal news sites “do not make much money, they do not need to, because they function more as civic organizations than businesses, relying on volunteer efforts rather than cash.” But Waldman recently told us that The Brooklyn Game, for all its considerable civic presence, is, preeminently, a revenue-driven business where there are no slam dunks…
Street Fight Daily: Square Explores IPO, Google Tests Real-World Tracking
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Square Exploring 2014 IPO With Banks (Wall Street Journal)… Google Takes Its Tracking Into The Real World (Digiday)… The Cost Of Winning: Tim Armstrong, Patch, And The Struggle To Save AOL (Business Insider)…
Street Fight Daily: OpenTable Bets On Mobile, ReachLocal President Resigns
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… OpenTable Bets On Mobile App To Drive Revenue (Reuters)… More Exec Changes at ReachLocal (LocalOnliner)… Will ZIP-Level Targeting Help Twitter Gain New SMB Advertisers (Screenwerk)…
Winding Down Investment In Patch, AOL Writes Off Millions
AOL revenues fell sharply in the third quarter due to large writeoffs related to the continued challenges at the company’s hyperlocal news network Patch. During an earnings call Tuesday, the company said it took a $19 million charge due to recent restructuring costs at the hyperlocal media division as well as a $25 million charge related to non-cash asset impairment, or decrease in the valuation, of the project…
Groupon Defends Branded Keyword Practice
A spokesperson for Groupon yesterday defended the company’s practice of buying branded keywords to promote discounts run for clients, telling Street Fight that most clients wants as much reach as possible. Some in the local marketing industry have criticized the practice lately, arguing that the deals company may be cannibalizing merchants’ potential sales by promoting discounts to users who were already looking for the business while diverting customers away from the merchant’s existing site…
Constant Contact Rolls Out Digital Coupons for SMBs
Email marketing giant Constant Contact has rolled out a new coupon feature as part of its growing online marketing tools platform. The new service makes it possible for small businesses to offer discounts based on a given set of criteria such as increasing revenue and attracting long-term customers, within a single integrated resource…
Street Fight Daily: Square’s Ecommerce Push, Waze Data In Google Maps
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Square’s Quiet E-Commerce Threat (BusinessWeek)… Waze Data Is Starting To Show Up In Google Maps (BuzzFeed)… Selling By Groupon Insiders, Like Big News, Is On Way (USAToday)…
Why Fixing Local Marketing Means Making Tech Disappear
Today, the local web — the network of technologies that help business and consumer interact locally — is far too opaque. Amid the rush to innovate and revolutionize the way we buy or sell goods locally, the industry has amassed a muddled soup of software that’s marked more by it’s complexity than its capability. If the last decade was about building the technologies that bring our local experiences online, the next ten years will focus on making those technologies go away…
LBMA Podcast: NeoPost Acquires DMTI, ByteLight’s Series A
On the show: Superpedestrian works to commercialize the Copenhagen Wheel; Square is up against the patent wall; privacy’s voice gets stronger with the Future of Privacy Forum and Chuck Schumer; iZettle let’s you pay the homeless with your credit card; and location-based CPR assistance arrives…
Street Fight Daily: Groupon’s Big Redesign, Local Ad Tech Moves Outdoors
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Groupon Builds New Website, Eyeing Marketplace Growth (USAToday)… Vistar And Verve Link DOOH, Mobile Screens, Create Location-Based Programmatic Platform (MediaPost)… Square Market Is Attracting Sellers That Have Never Taken A Reader Payment (GigaOm)…
Hyperlocals and Scale: How a ‘No-No’ Can Be Turned Into a Win-Win
“Local doesn’t scale” is the mantra of many independent community news sites. Based on the recent wrenching experiences of some major corporate hyperlocal networks, that may be the case on some level. But what about the view from other end of the telescope — of advertisers everywhere seeking to target consumers down to the neighborhood level?
How Hyperlocal Publishers Can Strengthen Relationships With Advertisers
One of the key takeaways from the Street Fight Summit in New York was that the future of local lies in partnerships. Forging relationships with local businesses is absolutely necessary for any hyperlocal publisher hoping for long-term success. The question that remains is how, exactly, publishers should go about strengthening the relationships they’ve built with small business advertisers and other organizations in their communities…