Facebook Nearby and the Mobilization of Local
At long last, Facebook has made a serious move in the local space, and Nearby now recommends local businesses based on your friends’ likes and check-ins as well as your proximity to general business listings. I can’t think of a better or a more timely summation of what’s happened in local search during the past year…
Is Facebook Local’s Waking Giant?
“Google is the best advertising product in the history of the world… because it’s like advertising at a store,” Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget said recently. “Facebook, meanwhile, is like advertising at a party.” But despite Google’s user-side advantages here, Facebook could have an edge in SMB engagement…
How Press Association Ad Networks Can Help Newspapers Compete Online
One would think that the Internet would help ad networks from state press and newspaper associations operate with even greater efficiency, but these groups are only in the early stages online. Still they are well-positioned to help increase CPMs and provide a way for newspapers to ensure that their ad inventory is always sold at a set value…
Information Wants to Be Free, but Local Data Is Currency
The sizable overlap between consumer-generated information and enterprise control is experienced every day in the world of local search.Though few local search companies could exist without licensed data, once that data gets inside their walls, it becomes a foundation upon which consumer-generated data adds value to a service…
Local TV Stations: The Sleeping Beasts in Hyperlocal News
Resting on the laurels of legacy profits only gets you so far. Just ask newspaper publishers. When you really take a good look at the local television business, it’s clear this is an industry waiting to be disrupted — and when that happens, outlets that haven’t invested sufficiently in digital won’t have much to hold onto…
How SMBs Can Take Advantage of Apple’s Passbook
Apple’s most recent app innovation, Passbook, allows users to aggregate coupons, gift card information, special offers and purchased deals in one convenient location. The app’s promise to drive retail business is so strong that more than 40 major brands and retailers including Macy’s, Barnes & Noble, LivingSocial, Fandango, and Starbucks have either launched or integrated their app with Passbook. But how can local businesses use this new marketing tool?
How Important Is an Exit Strategy for Hyperlocal News Startups?
“I don’t know a single startup business outside the indie news space that doesn’t articulate its exit strategy up front,” said Rusty Coats, who has created curricula for community news trainings in the Block by Block and Investigative News Network (INN) communities. “That sets the path for growth and helps set benchmarks for success.”
Can Businesses Use Hyperlocal to Leverage Customers’ Politics?
There has been significant coverage about the differences in Democrats and Republicans, but to date there hasn’t been any analysis on real world activities associated with political affiliation. From grocery stores to restaurants, from retailers to gas stations, voting Democrat or Republican plays a part in which establishments we step foot in and which ones we don’t…
A Quick Guide to SMB Success on Mobile
Less than 5 percent of local businesses have a website optimized for mobile devices. In some cases, a company’s site isn’t even “findable” through searches on mobile devices. Worse, consumers, when they do find the local business’s website, can only see a desktop-specific version. Here are a few tips to help demystify mobile for business owners and help them get started right away…
How Mobile’s Demographic Shift Impacts Local
It seems that young people in the 18-24 demographic spend, on average, more time on mobile devices today than they do watching television. It also appears that mobile usage is far ahead of “playing games and computer use for leisure.” What does this mean for the future of local search and local media? I would say it’s not unlike the lessons the Republican Party was forced to confront in the aftermath of its recent election defeat…
Mobile-Local Shopping Comes Into Focus
Customers are getting poached right under retailers’ noses by Amazon and the rest of the showrooming brigade. So what are retailers doing to combat these challenges as we enter the biggest shopping season in the biggest year of local retail transformation since the invention of the department store? The results so far are mixed…
Black Friday’s Local Opportunity: Taking Preprints Digital
Publishers across the country give thanks for the fantastic single copy sales they get on Thanksgiving due to the bundle of preprint circulars that come with the paper ahead of Black Friday. But for quite some time people inside and outside of the newspaper industry have been discussing the fact that the preprint business is declining — and might go away altogether…
Google’s Local Offerings Have Gotten Too Complicated
The extended Google+ Local rollout has been more troublesome than most. Usually when Google has experimented with social services in the past, such as Google Buzz and Google Wave, it has done so in a tangential way that does not threaten core functionality. With Google+, the gamble is to make social the center of all search activity, and yet the full realization of a social context for Google’s local search tools has yet to appear…
Daily Deals vs. Happy Hours: The Impact of Internal Marketing Promos
To get a sense of how happy hour compares to daily deals, Copilot Labs analyzed the point of sale data from a restaurant that has consistently run both happy hour and daily deals for more than a year and half. From April 2011 to October 2012 this business ran three deals and has had an active deal and happy hour every month…
SMBs on Mobile: Questions of Analytics and Performance
The proliferation of mobile apps for local continues, with all major local search players maintaining their own apps, and Apple’s App Store currently returning 347 results for the phrase “local search.” With all of this attention, the time is not far away when businesses will begin to get concerned about the presence, accuracy, and effectiveness of their listings on mobile apps. I’d love to see a service that aims at comprehensive analysis of SMB presence across the “app space” for Android and Apple…
The Localization of the Enterprise
Organizations are decentralizing and adapting to consumer hardware cycles by storing data in the cloud and utilizing software services without deployments. Tech capability dictated by employees is a seismic shift that will forever change the world of technology. We’re going to see a similar shift in marketing: the localization of the enterprise…