News and Analysis
Pared Expands to DC, Connecting Gig Economy Workers with Restaurants
Pared, the platform matching restaurant and hospitality workers with businesses in need of staff to cover shifts, is expanding to DC. Pared is already live in New York and San Francisco, and it plans to expand to Philadelphia, Boston, and other locations in 2020.
The San Francisco-headquartered startup claims its service offers a prime deal for workers and businesses alike. It says it offers hospitality and food service workers higher wages and flexibility while offering businesses a ready workforce amid perennially high turnover in the industry.
Google Revises Policy Asking Users for Permission to Listen to Their Assistant Recordings
The fact that this was an open practice that at least some consumers simply did not understand they were either opting into or automatically participating in points to calls for greater transparency and regulation. Google says it “fell short” of its “high standards” on the issue, but legislation like Europe’s GDPR, CCPA, and legislation in some 10 other US states indicates those standards may be imposed on tech companies by government agencies going forward.
5 Privacy-Focused Mapping Solutions
Mainstream navigation apps like Google Maps and Waze seem to dominate the marketplace, but consumers who are interested in maintaining as much online privacy as possible have options to choose from, too.
Innovative mapping and navigation companies are launching new platforms with user privacy in mind. Framing themselves as the “private” alternative to general use navigation apps, these platforms collect minimal personal data from users and often work without tracking user locations.
Here are five examples of privacy-focused mapping platforms.
Commentary
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.
Charting Google’s Shifting Priorities in the New Local Search Survey
For many years, Physical Address in City of Search was the most important ranking factor, but it has now been overtaken by Proximity of Address to the Point of Search (Searcher-Business Distance). As such, the canonical local search use case has become a mobile user searching for a business nearby his or her current location.
Latest Posts
Moz CEO: Establishing Attribution Is About Building Businesses’ Trust
A lot of local marketing companies are operating in the shadow of prior practices and companies that created a lot of distrust in the market, says Moz CEO Sarah Bird, who will be a speaker at Street Fight Summit West next week: “Part of the vision of online-to-offline attribution is to overcome that snake oil effect and build trust so you can point to data.”
Lee Enterprises and Okanjo Team Up to Match Ads to News ‘Sentiment’
Up until now, most digital ad targeting has focused on marrying the right ad with the individual user. But that kind of targeting can be hit or miss. This new partnership will try and connect the right kind of ad messages to the right editorial content across Lee’s 20 million monthly visitors.
Street Fight Daily: Uber Closes $3.5 Billion Round, Mary Meeker’s 2016 ‘Internet Trends’
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5 Billion Cash Infusion… 7 Key Data Points from Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends Report… Facebook Says Its New Tech Can Understand Text With ‘Near-Human’ Accuracy…
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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