News and Analysis
New Hires at TripAdvisor, Rio SEO, Snap
Every two or three weeks, guest columnist Geoff Michener rounds up some of the latest hires and openings in local and digital marketing. This week’s roundup also includes openings at Instagram, ThriveHive, and LoopMe.
GroupM Details the State of Digital Marketing’s Hottest Medium: Video
For marketers looking to capitalize on the video boom, Street Fight has the latest from GroupM’s second annual State of Video report. The highlights include continued difficulties with measurement, emerging options to target effectively across channels, a look at Amazon and Facebook’s quest for domination, and social video’s fallibility and how brands can overcome it.
Standard Cognition Democratizes the Cashierless Model, Providing Solution for Traditional Stores
Standard Cognition offers a product called Standard Checkout that retrofits cashier-based grocery stores into cashierless systems. Unlike the new cashierless Amazon Go, Standard Cognition is not a grocery chain itself, but instead a solution for chains that compete with Amazon Go, co-founder and COO Michael Suswal told Street Fight.
Commentary
What the Rise of Slack and HipChat Mean for Small Business
On the surface these messaging app seem to offer businesses better internal communication. In reality their value is rooted in real-time, contextual streams of business data within an environment that invites collaboration. That’s a fancy way of saying these are chat apps with loads of integrations…
Can Home Services Really Be Uber-ed?
Homeowners don’t “Uber” a $15,000 window replacement job. They don’t contract for a new sunroom on their mobile phone. And they don’t sign on for a $30,000 kitchen remodel without spending hours of real time with a designer and salesperson…
Where Does Local Search Fit in a World of Apps?
Where is Google’s place in a world where the browser is no longer the front door? On the desktop, trillions of web pages compel an index and a friendly entry point. But an app-heavy mobile environment — already siloed into neat little buckets — doesn’t beg for a core search engine…
Latest Posts
How Local Papers Could Out-Maneuver ‘Ubers’ in the Digital Space
Papers could convert their “subscribers” into “members” who get special treatment with access to a digital page called “Rapid City Central” (or somesuch), which would serve up information that makes the community a better place to live and work, or not, based on reliable data and community feedback…
Street Fight Daily: Google Maps Chief Replaced, Walgreens’ Mobile Strategy
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… One of Google’s Most Influential Execs Was Replaced as the Head of Google Maps and is Biding his Time (Business Insider)… Retale, The App That Puts Weekly Store Circulars On Your Smartphone, Raises $12 Million (TechCrunch)… Once Left For Dead, is Foursquare Coming Back? (San Francisco Business Times)…
New Verve CEO: Mobile/Location Combo Will Continue to Increase in Importance
Last month, Verve Mobile, one of the earliest local-mobile marketing firms, parted ways with its long-time CEO Tom MacIssac. We caught up with the company’s new chief executive, Nada Stirratt, to talk about where she sees the industry headed.
LBMA Podcast: Twitter Invests in Swirl, Gannett Taps Gravy
On the show: Viewswagen wants to sell ads in Uber and Lyft; Density brings local establishment crowd numbers to mobile; Voatz hopes to bring the vote to the voters; Leap Transit makes taking the bus the destination; Air Orchard and Ant Man innovate on billboard advertising…
Street Fight Daily: McDonald’s Beacon Strategy, Yelp Stock Plummets
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… McDonald’s Beacon Strategy Pushes In-Store Conversion Rate To 20% (Mobile Marketer)… Analysts Lower Price Targets as Yelp Stock Tumbles (MarketWatch)… Leaked Lyft Document Reveals a Costly Battle With Uber (Bloomberg)…
Street Culture: Booker CEO on Interviewing for Fit and Creating Company Values
“When I interview, I’m interviewing for fit. Skills and competency and willingness to learn, those all come after fit,” McCarter said.
Street Fight Daily: Facebook’s 40M SMBs, Secret Shuts Down
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Says There Are Now 40M Active Small Business Pages (TechCrunch)… A Founder of Secret, the Anonymous Social App, Is Shutting It Down (New York Times)… Retailers Too Focused on ‘Hyped’ Tools (RetailDive)…
Yelp Learns the Hard Way: Small Talk Matters When Selling to SMBs
Yelp is off to a rocky start in 2015. Sluggish user growth and a botched sales reorganizations led to a massive sell-off Wednesday evening.
GrubHub CEO Thinks Data — Not Content — Is the Future of Restaurant Discovery
Investors sold off shares of GrubHub Thursday on slimmer profits, but the rest of the metrics look solid. Meanwhile, CEO Matt Maloney says the company wants to put its data about hundreds of millions of orders to work to help pick your next meal.
The Secret to Nextdoor’s Billion-Dollar Valuation: Friction
By making the on-boarding process more difficult, Nextdoor was able to ensure the local social network had a quality that was much more important, says Dan Clancy, VP of product and engineering.
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AI Won’t Fix Advertising – It May Scale Its Chaotic Nature