News and Analysis
Uber Pledges to Fight California Contractor Bill
Uber and Lyft are already losing billions of dollars, and long-term concerns about whether they will ever hit profitability have endured, making for relatively weak runs on the public market. If the companies cannot come close to profitability with cheap labor forces without benefits, having to treat drivers as employees could pose an existential threat. At the very least, it may require Uber and Lyft to slow down expansion and rein in their ambitions, suggesting that the heyday (or hallucinatory days) of Web 2.0 could be coming to a close.
5 Cannabis Payroll Platforms
Growers, dispensaries, and other businesses that operate in the legal cannabis industry are caught between federal and state regulations, which make banking and payroll a challenge. Despite marijuana being legal in many states, cannabis businesses are still on shaky ground at the federal level, and banks in particular are skittish about partnering with the industry. Without solid banking partners, local cannabis businesses can have trouble keeping up on payroll. So what’s the solution?
Rather than waiting for Congress to make a decision on potential regulations that would shield banks from federal punishment for maintaining accounts for cannabis businesses, more dispensaries and growers are moving toward using web-based cannabis payroll platforms designed specifically for their industry.
Hyperlocal Social Firm Nextdoor Closes $170M Round, Adds Meeker to Board
The company seems well positioned to address the ills of social network and platforms plagued by negative user-generated content in general these days. That’s because it actually verifies the identities of its users and puts people in touch who live near each other in the physical world, definitely not eliminating all risk but limiting the chance that people use digital anonymity to harass each other without repercussions.
Commentary
Report: Solid Opportunity to Sell Marketing and Data Management Services to Local Merchants
As local merchants increasingly shift their marketing spending to digital tactics, they’re becoming more sophisticated in how they manage those programs. Street Fight’s latest analysis of its local small business survey shows a much higher adoption rate of digital dashboards and the like compared with previous research.
SMB Content Marketing: Avoid the Backward Approach
Whether a business is local or not, content drives the bulk of digital marketing. A successful content marketing campaign involves topics that resonate with the intended audience, creates buzz on social media and attracts high quality links. Yet, the approach that many people take to content marketing is backward.
Get Ready for The New SMB Software Market
The SMB market is less homogenous than the consumer market, which makes it difficult to reach and serve the majority of customers with a single software product. Luckily for SMB, that won’t always be the case. Now is the time to get ready for a new SMB software market that will experience more growth than enterprise or consumer.
Latest Posts
FiveStars Digs Deeper Into Customer Data to Get Beyond ‘Loyalty’
FiveStars co-founder and CEO Victor Ho, who will be a speaker at Street Fight Summit West next week, caught up with us recently to talk about the efficiency of retention marketing, the shift from daily deals to digital loyalty programs, and what analyzing the trove of SMB consumer data can potentially yield.
7 Automated Customer Service Solutions for Merchants
Savvy business owners are looking for ways they can use hyperlocal technology to manage the increasing number of customer requests, issues, and even complaints, without taking time away from the hundreds of other tasks they juggle on a daily basis. Here are seven examples of platforms that can help businesses react nimbly and effectively.
Street Fight Daily: Instagram Apes Facebook’s Ad Biz, Uber’s Leasing Expansion
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Salesforce Buys Demandware for $2.8 Billion, Taking a Big Step Into E-Commerce… Instagram’s Ad Business Starting to Look More and More Like Facebook’s… Inside Uber’s Auto-Lease Machine, Where Almost Anyone Can Get a Car…
DoorDash CEO: Opportunity in Local Delivery Is ‘Vast’
“The core thesis … is to build a new type of logistics company where we’re using software that makes a lot of decisions previously made by humans,” said DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, who will be a keynote speaker at Street Fight Summit West. We spoke with him about scoring funding in a cooling investment market and the future of delivery as the company’s primary service.
Sponsored Post: Infographic—How SMBs Need to Do Local Marketing
There is no better way for a local business to get its digital marketing in place than through a full understanding of key tools; by linking up with a digital agency; and focusing efforts on one channel that delivers powerful results. For the past four weeks in this space, LocalVox has delivered those insights and hands-on tactics, plus resources to provide SMBs a clear path to getting started and succeeding…
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