News and Analysis

SMB Index Declines Slightly Over the Course of a Volatile June

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June was a volatile month in the public markets, which saw the SurePath SMB Index give back 1.1%, after climbing 7.9% in May. Web.com led last month’s winners, leading the index with 31.5% growth in market cap following news of an acquisition offer.

In Case You Missed It: Facebook Axed a Post on This Founding U.S. Document Last Week

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The anniversary of its home country’s birth was not without incident for Facebook, which attracted attention for automatically striking down a post, flagged as hate speech, containing the words of the Declaration of Independence.

Google Faces Heat After Automated Threat to Shut Down a Cloud Client’s Project

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This week’s tech giant in hot water? Google, whose abuse-prevention system apparently shut down and threatened to delete a Cloud client’s project in three days due to perceived misdoing on the client’s part.

Commentary

In Search of the Checkout Pixel for Local

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Until recently, the “last mile” offline had been considered the most challenging step to solve for. But today, it’s increasingly where most of the action is happening. Consideration starts online, but picking up the sushi or the TV, or getting the bridal party fitted, occurs offline — and that involves not just more steps, but also more room for attribution. What was opaque previously is now fertile ground. The race is underway to plant flags at every step and, to make things interesting, with each flag planted consumer behavior is changing…

How Enterprise Brands Can Localize Social to Boost Relevance and Exposure

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By now, enterprise multi-location brands hopefully understand the importance of a local digital marketing strategy to ensure their many locations can easily be found online and help generate local leads. But following the lead of savvy marketers, it’s time they go further and create unique localized strategies specifically for social media. Here are a few of the most successful strategies…

Could Simple Website Builders Be the Next Hyperlocal Superstars?

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Where is the next billion-dollar opportunity in hyperlocal? You might be surprised by the likely answer. Assuming they play their cards right, simple website builders like Wix, Weebly or Squarespace — and not the traditional hyperlocal platforms — have the best shot…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Gannett Buys Rest of Cars.com, Angie’s List Struggles

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Gannett Buys the Rest of Cars.com for $1.8 Billion (Businessweek)… Why Angie’s List Is In Trouble (Time)… PayPal Taps an Outsider to Push It Into a New Era (New York Times)…

After Spinoff, ReachLocal Founders Relaunch ClubLocal as Serviz

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Late last year, ReachLocal founders Michael Kline and Zorik Gordon parted ways with the company and spun off a still-nascent local commerce project, ClubLocal, that both helped develop. Today, the long-time executives have relaunched the project as Serviz, an application that builds on many of the services core functionality….

Conference Notebook: Toyota Motors Turns to Location Targeting on Mobile

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It’s Advertising Week in New York, and that means the marketers from around the world come together to talk shop, make deals, and blow off some steam. At the Mobile Marketing Association’s 2014 SM2 Conference Tuesday, marketers from some of the nation’s largest brands talked about the evolving role of location in their marketing mix…

Street Fight Daily: News Corp Buys Move.com, Angie’s List Mulls Sale

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyRupert Murdoch Wants to Sell You Your Next Home (Time)… A Report Says Angie’s List Might Sell Itself And Now Its Stock Is Surging (Business Insider)… The Real Reason PayPal Isn’t an Apple Pay Preferred Partner (BankInnovation)…

SMBs Now Spend More Than 1/4 of Marketing Budgets on Digital Media

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A new report released by Borrell Associates paints a rosy picture for the immediate future of local marketing — as long as the industry can overcome a few barriers. The report, which drew from a survey of over 2,000 small businesses, found that they now spend more than a quarter of their budgets on digital media with robust growth in the social media and mobile advertising sectors…

At GoDaddy, CEO Blake Irving Searches for a New Domain

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Irving has an ambitious plan to turn GoDaddy into a much larger, and more profitable, company. The strategy begins with the company’s 12 million domain customers and ends with a constellation of concentric services intended to serve an increasingly entrepreneurial, and distributed, global economy…

How Y Combinator Grad Estimote Plans to Turn Beacons Into a Big Business

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When Estimote graduated from Y Combinator in July of 2013, the startup was riding one of the hottest trends in tech: beacons. By the end of the year, the company had raised $3.1 million to turn its fist-sized adhesive proximity beacons into an “operating system for the physical world.”

Street Fight Daily: eBay Spins Off PayPal, Waze Crowdsources Places

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology]EBay to Spin Off PayPal With New CEOs for Two Publicly Traded Companies (Recode)… With Places (and Your Help), Waze Mapping Gets Smarter On Android And iOS (GigaOm)… Yelp and Tripadvisor Launch Joint Campaign Against Google (Financial Times)…

Millennial SVP: A ‘Broad Evolution’ Beyond Geo-Fencing Coming in Mobile

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Street Fight recently caught up with Matt Tengler, SVP of product at Millennial Media, to talk about the way in which location figured into the company’s strategy, the impact location data could have on the broader digital advertising marketplace, and whether small business matters (yet) in mobile advertising.

Is Apple Pay Fixing a Problem Consumers Don’t Have?

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Paying with a credit card isn’t broken. So mobile payments have to offer something greater than reducing my wallet by the atomic weight of a credit card. We’re talking tangible benefits like skipping store lines, saving time, or monetary rewards. Without these benefits, I don’t see how the masses will be compelled to change such an entrenched habit…