News and Analysis
Street Culture: Pointy’s Collaborative Culture Grows Without Written Values
In one year, digital search company Pointy has grown from 13 to about 30 employees, moved into a new office, and seen significant growth in its product, which allows retailers to publishes their inventories online, attracting potential customers nearby. What hasn’t changed much is the company’s culture, says co-founder Mark Cummins.
Street Fight Daily: Buyers Lag on Mobile Programmatic, The Turn to Video Goes Multichannel
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… When It Comes to Mobile Programmatic, Buyers Are Behind… B2B Marketers Turn to Shorter Videos Across Many Channels to Engage Millennial Buyers… A Year After Amazon Devoured Whole Foods, Rivals Pursue Countermoves…
Commentary
How Local Search Looks to the Rest of Us
It seems like many recent conversations, webinars, articles, and studies have pointed to the same conclusion: local search as an industry is insufficiently aware of how its products are actually used by consumers and small businesses. Many of the solutions put forward by consumer-facing local publishers and by business-facing services overestimate our appetite for new products and the amount of time and energy we want to spend using online tools…
Local Media’s Data-Driven Future
New value creation is the purpose of media companies today, whether small or big. I genuinely feel sorry for those who believe there is a future in practicing content creation alone. Last week, I called for a strategic makeover. We need a new strategic plan that positions us as more than “just” a media company and behind which our employees can throw their energy. So here are ten things that I view as tactically supporting such a strategy…
Customization Failure: Why Hyperlocal Hasn’t Scaled (Yet)
Most customization that attempts to deliver hyperlocal, or even just local results, falls short. The problem is that they (and we) don’t have much more or better local content and advertising to output than we did in the days before social media and smartphones. A tool is built to operate on a national scale, but the landscape of finding the local information is messy and chaotic, lacking structured data, or consistent geographic coverage…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Amazon Guns for Square, Uber and Lyft’s Street Fight
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon Takes Shopping Offline With a New Mobile Credit Card Reader (Wired)… Accusations Fly Between Uber and Lyft (New York Times)… Yahoo Acquires ‘Pandora For Places’ App Zofari (TheNextWeb)…
ReachLocal CEO: Company Got ‘Distracted By Shiny Things’
After a turbulent twelve months, which saw two founders depart and its stock price plummet, ReachLocal appears to be working on a comeback. Sharon Rowlands, the turn-around expert who took the helm as chief executive four months ago, remains as critical as anyone, but she believes that the company is on track to get things moving in the right direction in 2015…
Services Join Products in Goodzer’s Local Marketing Platform
Goodzer has been making it easy for consumers to find products in local stores since launching in 2011. Soon the company will be doing the same with services. Last month Goodzer announced that it is adding “enhanced local services content” to its database of more than 2.5 billion products. The addition expands the company’s number of locations from 500,000 to 2.5 million…
Street Fight Daily: Square Adds Booking Service, Lyft Drives Uber Competition
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…Square Continues to Diversify With Launch of Booking Service (Fortune)… Lyft Drives Uber Competition With False-Order Allegations (Bloomberg)… Online Meal Delivery Firm Foodpanda Raises $60 Million (Recode)…
It’s Official: The Newspaper Industry Has Given Up on Newspapers
In the past couple of weeks, three of the major legacy media companies announced they were splitting their companies into separate-but-unequal broadcast and print ventures. The decisions by Gannett, E.W. Scripps and Tribune to divide their once “synergistic business models” into separate and very distinct businesses indicate that we are now at the beginning of the end-of-the-end for this industry…
6 Marketing Strategies for National Retailers Managing Local Outlets
National retailers have access to expertise, money, and boatloads of data-driven marketing tools, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve got it all figured out when it comes to local marketing. One-quarter of national brands say they’re unable to track ROI at the local level, and 33.8% aren’t even investing in local marketing. Here are six strategies that national brands should consider…
Street Fight Daily: BuzzFeed Raises $50M, Senator Warns of Wearables
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… 50 Million New Reasons BuzzFeed Wants to Take Its Content Far Beyond Lists (New York Times)… Senator Warns Fitbit Is A ‘Privacy Nightmare’ And Could Be ‘Tracking’ Your Movements (Business Insider)… Apple iPhone Privacy Changes Lead to Layoffs at Retail Tracking Startup Nomi (Recode)…
How Innovation in Payments Can Drive Local Marketing
The changes in payments that Seth Priebatsch foresaw three years ago are certainly underway, but it remains more of a revolution than an evolution. Street Fight caught up with the LevelUp CEO recently to talk about why he thinks transaction data is the foundation of the next big wave of innovation in the marketing industry…
Street Fight Daily: Twitter Eyes SMBs, 7-Eleven Creates Venture Arm
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Twitter Learns From Facebook by Revamping Its Advertising Fees for Small Business (Wall Street Journal)… Oh Thank Heaven, Even 7-Eleven Has a Venture Capital Arm (Recode)… What Foursquare’s Looming Data Mean to Advertisers (AdAge)….
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