News and Analysis

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.

Some of London’s Top Retailers Call for a Sales Tax on ‘Largely Online’ Rivals

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Under the banner of The New West End Company, the several-hundred-strong collective of some of the U.K. capital’s top retailers is lobbying for a 1% sales tax on primarily online retailers to parallel the property-linked taxes they already pay.

Commentary

Marketing to the ‘Happy’ Majority of SMBs

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The local search industry needs to offer more responsive solutions for the average small business owner. The industry can’t simply drive more leads — it has to drive more, better-qualified, and better-paying leads at profit margins that incentivize buy-in from a business consumer that demands all or nothing. Only by catering to the “disconnected and contented majority” can the industry push itself to the highest standard of usability and convenience…

5 Things SMBs Can Do to Optimize for Mobile Search

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Recent data from Google found that 94% of smartphone users have searched for local information, 70% have called a business after searching, 66% visited in person, and 90% of these users acted within 24 hours. So what do SMBs need to do to ensure they’ll get calls from potential customers who are searching on mobile?

Geo-Intent: Going to Where the Puck Will Be

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So what can make a business geo-disruptive? Beyond location awareness, it is far more important to know where a person is headed and his needs and wants at the destination. Let’s call this “geo-intent.” For the geo and mobile world to move towards its promise, web designers should be focusing more on creating engaged, opt-in behavior, and gaining robust information on geointent. With better information on geo-intent, solutions can be well targeted, and privacy concerns are more likely to fade…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: Radius Raises $55M, Square’s New Register

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyRadius Raises $54.7 Million to Improve Sales Leads Using Big Data (Wall Street Journal)… Square Is Making a Register That Takes Bitcoin and Apple Pay (Wired)… Hotels Use Online Reviews as Blueprint for Renovations (New York Times)…

Ecommerce Companies Finding Success in Brick-and-Mortar

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The move into physical retail has become a fashionable choice within New York’s growing ecommerce industry. Now, these firms are finding that industry watchers may have overstated the economic advantages of an online-only sales model particularly as new technologies allow retailers to reduce the footprint needed to generate sufficient revenue.

Report: Online and Digital Ads to Reach 25% of Local Media Revenues in 2015

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Total local media revenues are expected to reach $139.3 billion next year, up from $137 billion this year, for a 1.6% growth rate, with digital and online advertising surpassing the one-quarter mark for the first time, according to BIA/Kelsey’s 2015 U.S. Local Media Forecast. “Mobile and social are growing faster than imagined,” said Mark Fratrik, the company’s chief economist…

Street Fight Daily: Samsung Teams With PayPal, Amazon Loses Local Commerce Exec

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologySamsung is Teaming With Paypal for Mobile Payments on a Watch (GigaOm)… Amazon Loses Key Payments Product Leader to Microsoft (Recode)… More Than Half of US Consumers Don’t Want to Friend a Brand Online (Wall Street Journal)…

Silicon Valley Looks to Put a Cloud Over Main Street

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If you listened to folks in Silicon Valley, it seems like there’s never been a better time to run a small business. The data suggests otherwise. But as marketing automation spreads, SMBs are poised to become stiffer competition…

Eaze Sees Local Opportunity in Medical Marijuana On-Demand

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Like other on-demand services, Eaze lets users easily order a specific strain and quantity of marijuana, finds the nearest deliveryperson with that specific strain in stock, and then tracks the delivery in real-time to get an accurate ETA. Eaze says it can deliver marijuana in San Francisco in roughly 10 minutes….

LBMA Podcast: Apple’s Big Event, TalkLocal Rebrands

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On the show: Into the Storm’s augmented reality street sign; Unicef’s Digital Drum Project; Budweiser brings beer to your Facebook friends; WhatsApp and Skype add location sharing; Twitter brings buying to your stream; iScent thinks we want to smell our emails; T-Mobile becomes the UnCarrier….

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Tweaks Algorithm, Airbnb Shuffles Amid IPO Speculation

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyFacebook Updates Its Algorithm (Yet) Again. (GigaOm)… Airbnb Finance Chief Swain Departs Amid IPO Speculation (Bloomberg)… The End Is Near For Panoramio, Google To Migrate Photos To Google Maps Views (VentureBeat)…

‘Legacies’ Open Door to ‘Pure Plays’ With Local Media Consortium

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The Local Media Consortium has grown to 50 publishers, whose products include 800 newspapers and 200 broadcast stations across the U.S. Here, Rusty Coats, executive director, talks about where LMC is after its first year and where it’s headed…

The Value of Measuring the Immeasurable In-Store Customer Experience

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Consumer purchasing behavior is shifting from stores to online and retailers are seeing less shopper foot traffic into physical stores. Here are five ways brick-and-mortar retailers can utilize passive shopper behavior information in-store and across the enterprise to increase sales…