News and Analysis
Yelp Launches Request a Call to Connect Local Service Providers and Customers
Yelp announced this morning Request a Call, a feature that will allow customers to easily submit a request for a call to local service providers. The feature represents Yelp’s acknowledgement that there is still too much friction in the local services customer experience and that listings and review sites can help.
Commentary
It’s Neural Matching: Google Explains the November Ranking Shakeup
A tweet on Monday from Google search liaison Danny Sullivan provides an explanation for the rankings shakeup that has perplexed the local search community since the beginning of November. Google began using neural matching to generate local search results.
Local search has just undertaken a huge evolutionary step. No longer are local results being matched to user queries solely on the basis of identifiable ranking factors, such as proximity to searcher, keywords in business names, primary category of the listing, review count, and so on. That isn’t to say such factors are now unimportant, but they have been augmented by a broader and more general sense of relevance delivered by neural matching.
Carriers, It’s Time to Weld the Lid Shut on Customers’ Data
Personalization and privacy seem inherently at odds. After all, media companies such as Facebook act like vacuum hoses for data – collecting much more than they need. That’s problematic in a world where data breaches dominate headlines nearly every week. However, where Facebook and others go low, mobile carriers can go high. In fact, mobile carriers that aim to be media companies have a huge opportunity to respect privacy while providing great personalization in their original content.
So, how can carriers take this high road — that is, deliver personalized content experiences without storing consumers’ personal information? By focusing on the device itself – leveraging local storage and client-side execution (rather than requiring server interaction) to help carriers deliver a personalized experience that is incredibly safe. This allows carriers to implement the industry-changing trend of device-centric discovery (DCD), which makes it easy for subscribers to find news/sports/entertainment/games without having to wade through multiple apps and searches. With DCD, carriers can create personalized content experiences that don’t expose subscribers’ personal data to external privacy risks, and in the process, become mobile media leaders.
LBMA Vidcast: PayPal to Acquire Honey; Apple Teams with PlayNetwork
On this week’s Location-Based Marketing Association podcast: Mobivity launching omnichannel offer platform with Subway, Apple teaming with PlayNetwork for retail music, PayPal to acquire Honey for $4B, Tesco’s One Stop launches AR game, JCPenney opening new store with barbershop and styling, and CVS + Weather Channel team-up on AI flu predictions.
Latest Posts
Cheetah Digital Acquires Stellar Loyalty
The acquisition combines a comprehensive suite of digital marketing tools from Cheetah Digital with the loyalty expertise and huge repository of data commanded by Stellar, according to the release, allowing the pair to provide brands with a more powerful, all-in-one B2C marketing platform.
Google Updates Search to Recommend Local Events Based on User Interests
Google is bringing the personalization zeitgeist to local event recommendations. The company reported on its blog Thursday that it is releasing a series of new features that will make it easier for users to find essential information about events of interest to them right on search engine result pages.
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