Study: National Brands Miss 86% of Local Feedback
National brands miss 86% of the local consumer feedback published through social networks, according to a new study by VenueLabs, which provides local analytics for large companies. The numbers reflect the marked growth in consumer interaction with national brands at a local level, and the increasing opportunity for hyperlocal companies to build services to help enterprise access the opportunity…
6 Marketplace Platforms for Local Buyers
Limited-time promotions are an effective way to generate immediate customer demand, but what happens once the hype is over and the deal is complete? To counteract their one-and-done reputations and give merchants a way to extend their promotions, a number of hyperlocal companies are developing local marketplace platforms with more opportunities for long-tail marketing…
Openings & New Hires at Groupon, Street Fight, PaperG, AOL & more
More folks on the move: PaperG hires Brooke Frederick away from Bizo; Weather Channel poaches from Digital Broadcasting Group; SoundCloud brings on a Nokia executive and the job openings abound, including a plum sales position at Street Fight. Also: good opportunities for product managers and sales execs at Groupon, AOL, Oracle, Signpost and more. Plus: juicy insider tips on who’s looking to make the jump!…
Study: 82% of SMBs Use Facebook for Marketing, 25% Use Twitter
“Facebook remains the dominant platform because it simply has more active users than any other social network,” Mark Schmulen, general manager of social media at Constant Contact, told Street Fight. “It effectively offers marketers the biggest potential reach to engage with customers. In addition, Facebook is a more mature marketing platform, offering marketers highly targeted advertising products and customizable brand pages that enable them to run promotions like sweepstakes, coupons, and user-generated contests.”
PODCAST: This Week in Location-Based Marketing — PubNub
In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan discuss whether Foursquare can make the switch from check-ins to discovery; Apple is awarded a patent for augmented reality on top of live video; Volkswagon makes driving more social; and Microsoft is testing yet another option for mobile payments. Plus special guest, Todd Greene, co-founder and CEO of PubNub on the emergence of real-time apps.
Street Fight Daily: Google Expands Local Delivery, Hiring in Hyperlocal
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Google Starts Testing Google Shopping Express In SF, With Free Delivery From Target, Walgreens, Staples And More (TechCrunch)… Apple Hiring ‘Ground Truth’ Managers To Improve Maps (Search Engine Land)… Did Poor Collaboration Lead To The Termination Of NYU’s Blog With The New York Times? (NYU Local)…
A Year After Its SXSW Moment, Highlight Keeps Working to Connect People Nearby
Paul Davison’s location-based startup Highlight has had a strange trajectory. It was the darling of South by Southwest in 2012, then soon lost its sheen for a variety of reasons, prompting a series of “What Happened to Highlight?” posts around the time of this year’s Austin event. Street Fight recently caught up with Davison to talk about retrenching, the definition of fun, and his very real belief that using Highlight can change the world around us.
PublicStuff Gets Answers for Local Citizens, Even in Chinese
Local publishers have long served their communities by shining a light on municipal issues until the folks at City Hall take notice and fill in those dangerous potholes. But in the past few years we’ve also seen several startups pop up that want to make an even more direct connection between citizens’ complaints and government action…
Street Fight Daily: Desktop Local Search Drops, Print YP Death Watch
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Search On Smartphones Up 26 Percent, On Tablets Up 19 Percent In 2012 (Search Engine Land)… Annual Print YP Death Watch (Blumenthals)… The Yext Big Thing (Crain’s New York Business)…
DNAinfo’s NYC Schools Guide Shows Off ‘Network Effect’
The neighborhood-centric news site has created a guide that lets users zoom in and out so they can get the nitty-gritty about specific schools and compare it to other schools throughout New York City. The way the design uses dots and arrows to retrieve many pages of articles is a singular achievement in user-friendliness…
Pricing Engine Pools Data to Help VSBs Spend Wisely
With legacy local media companies starting to scale marketing services products, startups now have an increasingly viable channel to manage and distribute marketing products for very small businesses (VSBs). Pricing Engine has built a paid search and display manager that uses collective knowledge to help the smallest businesses effectively buy ads online…
Street Fight Daily: Yelp Quantifies Its Value for SMBs, Identifying Anonymous Location
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Yelp Announces A New ‘Revenue Estimator’ For Small Businesses (TechCrunch)… Why the Collision of Big Data and Privacy Will Require a New Realpolitik (Paid Content)… How Indoor Location Could Find Its Way into Apple Services (GigaOm)…
Local Retail Won’t Disappear — Mobile Will Transform the In-Store Experience
“The changes in the next five years in retail will be more profound and transformational than the last 100 years in retail have been because largely because of mobile,” said Cyriac Roeding, CEO of Shopkick. “I don’t think people will go [to stores] because they need something. I don’t even think they’ll go because they want something. I think they’ll go because they want to feel better.”
6 Tools for Creating Performance-Based Offers
As pure-play daily deals sites struggle to remain attractive to local merchants, a new model for offers is beginning to emerge. Rather than giving blanket discounts on general merchandise — a hallmark of the original Groupon deals — brand advertisers are increasingly opting to use performance-based offers as a way to drive traffic without necessarily hurting the bottom line. Here are six tools that merchants can use to create performance-based marketing offers…
Street Fight Daily: Apple Buys WifiSLAM, NYU’s Hyperlocal Finds New Home
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.… Apple Acquires Indoor Location Company WifiSLAM (Wall Street Journal)… Changing Trains: The Local East Village, NYU’s hyperlocal blog, Moves from The New York Times to New York Magazine (Nieman Lab)… Local Search Service Roamz Shifts Again – Now “Local Measure,” Startup Brings Geo-Based Data To Businesses (& Gets Them To Pay) (TechCrunch)…
PODCAST: This Week in Location-Based Marketing — Ping Mobile
In this week’s episode, hosts Rob Woodbridge and Asif Khan discuss LinkedIn’s rumored acquisition of the Pulse News Reader. Meanwhile Posse saddles up and moves to the U.S.; the earth’s magnetic field may hold the key to indoor location; and Quri gives brands a little leverage. Plus special guest Shuli Lowy from Ping Mobile on SMS marketing…
Can Local Media Find New Opportunities by Catering to Brands?
“Journalism is Dead, Long Live Journalism” is the theme of a conference I’ll be attending this week in Denver. And the name isn’t a surprising one — there’s been a lot of angst lately about the emerging business models for digital journalism. Futility can be difficult, but it also can bring sea change. With that in mind, here are a few of the ideas I’ll likely be discussing with folks at the conference.