Commentary
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…
Local Media Companies Need to Evolve — And Do It Fast
Local media’s traditional big-man-on-campus chest-thumping doesn’t mean the same thing in digital that it does in the analog world. In fact, it’s downright laughable. So what do we do when we hit the wall, when we regularly miss revenue targets, when long term projections keep slipping more and more? So what do we do when we keep hiring more ad reps, only to discover that our revenue-per-rep begins to fall, when the evidence is undeniable that we’ve hit that wall? Here are five recommendations.
Why SMB Marketing Services Won’t Save Newspapers’ Bottom Line
Most newspapers aren’t building new and innovative tools to provide SMB services. Instead they are white labeling offerings from other providers or are connecting their audiences to an existing service. Over time, SMB tools are going to become a commodity. When someone who is still in high school can offer exactly what you are offering, you’re in trouble. With the high cost structures and overhead that newspapers have, being in a commodity business (where margins get pushed lower and lower) won’t prove lucrative in the end…
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LBMA Podcast: Mobiquity’s ‘Smart’ Malls, Bing Improves Mobile Targeting
Top stories of the week include: Tinder match-making for dogs; The Traces launches an app; Shazam releases their Resonate platform; The Ninja Sphere for your connected home; Westpac adds augmented reality to banking; Track Toronto tracks the lyrics of the city; Drop closes a small round; Timex has a new non-smartphone connected watch…
Street Fight Daily: Mobile Ad Revenue Hits $19B, Food Delivery Roll-Up
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… IAB: Search And Display Fuel $19.3B In Worldwide Mobile Ad Revenue (AdExchanger)… Delivery Hero Joins The $1B Valuation Club As It Gobbles Rival (TechCrunch)… Yahoo Dusts Off E-Commerce Service to Juice Revenue (Wall Street Journal)…
Report: Mobile Context and Location Services Market to Reach $43.3 Billion by 2019
The mobile context and location services market is set to reach $43.3 billion by 2019, according to a new report. That’s up from an estimated $12.2 billion in 2014. The report also found that by 2019, more than two-thirds of revenues will be driven through highly targeted and contextually aware ad-supported apps…
How Santa Barbara’s Noozhawk Zeroes In on News and Profits
In the increasingly tough world of community journalism — where both readers and advertisers can be fickle and local advertising markets like Santa Barbara are crowded with competitors — Noozhawk succeeds because it’s not in the news business, but “the business of news.” Here, founder Bill Macfadyen explains what that means…
Street Fight Daily: Pinterest Eyes Small Business, More Fuel For Taxi Wars
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Pinterest Expands Self-Serve Promoted Pins Platform To More Businesses (TechCrunch)… More Fuel for Taxi Wars: GetTaxi Raises $25 Million (Financial Times)… The Government’s Upping Its Phone-Tracking Game (Voice of San Diego)…
Study: Facebook Is Most Effective Social Media Site for Small Business
A new study from G/O Digital, the digital marketing wing of Gannett, finds that consumers tend to use Facebook for product research more than any other social media outlet. The study found that 68% of respondents prefer checking reviews of Facebook, compared to 11% on Twitter and 12% on Pinterest.
6 Real-World CRM Tools for Merchants
Retailers with brick-and-mortar stores are struggling to compete with e-commerce giants like Amazon, but the fight will never be fair as long as online-only outposts have access to superior tools for managing their customer relationships and offering personalized product recommendations. Here are six real-world CRM tools that retailers are using to level the playing field…
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…
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