Commentary
Phone Leads for Local Businesses: The Unsexy Cousin of the Click
We’re seeing tech and media worlds finally come around to what we’ve been saying for years: phone calls are what businesses want. That’s especially true in high-value categories like professional services, autos, travel and insurance. Clicks and impressions, despite a sexier image, aren’t as valued in lots of cases…
Is Newspapers’ Falling Knife Finally Starting to Rise?
Wall Street thinks the long-term decline of newspaper revenues may be near bottom as print losses are close to being outweighed by consumer and digital revenue increases. With Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos buying into the industry as a long-term play, the broader financial markets are following suit. The newspaper industry is getting some of its most positive signs in years…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: On-Demand’s Labor Problem, Square Drops Free
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Handy Sued For Being a Hellscape of Labor Code Violations (ValleyWag)… Square Eschews Free, Starts $29 Pre-Orders For Chip-Based Card Readers (TechCrunch)… HomeAway Integrates Gogobot, Uber and Instacart Into Mobile Services (Skift)…
Interconnectivity and the Mobile Mind Shift
We hear a lot these days about the massive transition in consumer attention from desktop to mobile devices. That transition is an undeniable reality, but it would be a mistake to assume that it’s just about mobile devices themselves. What the smartphone has done is to enable a change in mental attitude when it comes to the use and consumption of online services…
VIDEO: Hyperlocal Media 2.0 — Events and Email?
The sale of AOL’s local media network, Patch, earlier this year marked something of an end to a lot of the optimism that once surrounded hyperlocal media. As local media veteran Jim Brady says, the category entered the “huddle for warmth” phase of its lifecycle. But a more optimistic tone has begun to return to the industry…
Street Fight Daily: Facebook Redesigns Places, Local News Searching for Answers
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Takes a Big Step Toward Competing in Local Search (Local Search Insider)… Is There Hope for Local News? (Atlantic)… Groupon Kicks Off First Analyst Day Amid Pivot to E-Commerce Site (AdAge)…
StockUp Presents the Latest Take on the Local Inventory Dilemma
The three month-old startup has spent a year in stealth building a community around an app that allows users to scan barcodes and add product and pricing information manually to its database. Andy Ellwood, a former Gowalla and Waze executive who joined as chief revenue officer in January, says the company now has information about over half a million products in its database…
The Local Service Layer: How National-to-Local Succeeds
In developing a national-to-local strategy, brands need to consider these two key resources: people and data. Employees, affiliates and other local evangelists offer an immense resource for promoting a brand to local consumers. At the same time, a deluge of local information is now available to allow brands to tailor messaging programmatically. In the first of a series sponsored by Surefire Social, we delve into the emergence of a way to harness data and empower agents on the ground…
5 Tips for the Aspiring Hyperlocal Publisher
Although the business — and consumption — of journalism continues to evolve, its health certainly seems much more robust than it was five years ago. This is particularly true at a hyperlocal level. Yet at the same time some constants remain. In particular, issues around funding — and sustainability — continue to remain one of the sector’s biggest challenges…
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Beyond Search: AI Visibility the New Growth Lever for MULO Brands