News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Adds Services to Marketplace, Sketchy Google Knowledge Panel Practices

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Marketplace Launches New Services Feature in Partnership with On-Demand Startups… A Fifth of Amazon Merchants Sell More Than $1 Million a Year, Double Last Year’s Share… How the Washington Post Is Building Its Tech Platform, Arc…

Heard on the Street, Episode 4: Growing the SMB Pie with Ilir Sela

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What are the nuances and tactical imperatives of selling pizza locally? For one, it compels a highly verticalized approach: It’s all about focus and specialization on the sector’s unique operational challenges, according to Slice Founder and CEO Ilir Sela, our latest guest on Heard on the Street.

How Savvy Restaurateurs Make the Most of Online Ordering

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“What increasingly separates top-performing restaurants from the pack is their ability to transform insights from data into strategies to grow,” says Liam Oliver, director of products for Valassis Local Solutions. “Savvy restaurateurs drive incremental revenue by designing promotions that raise the average order value.”

Commentary

Why Local Media Companies Must Practice ‘Self-Cannibalism’

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Instead of protecting our products, we should look instead to protecting our customers, their experiences, and our relationships with them. Never begin a discussion about the future with a focus on our products or services. What does the customer want and need, even if our existing products are not a part of the answer? The world is changing and it begins with empowered consumers…

How Does Yelp Make Money and Where Is It Going Next?

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Yelp combines the nimble and engineering-driven product focus of a Foursquare or Facebook, with the direct SMB sales of a YP. It’s a powerful combo that few companies have, and few people talk about in blogospheric proclamations of category killers…

Local Search Is Becoming a Mobile Experience With a Social Layer

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One of the more surprising revelations from a recent comScore study is that Facebook is now the #2 mobile app for local search, behind Google Maps. This puts it ahead of Mapquest, Bing, and Apple Maps. Yelp isn’t even in the top five. Are people really using Facebook for local search? This may seem counter-intuitive to some, but consider that Facebook is by far the most popular mobile app in the world…

Latest Posts

Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Gets Into Mobile Payments, Pandora’s Local Revenue

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyGet Paid: GoDaddy Links With PayPal, Dwolla, Stripe For A Mobile & Web Payment Service (TechCrunch)… Pandora: More Than Half Our Revs Will Be Local In A Few Years (Marketing Land)… Taking Another Plunge into Digital News (USA Today)…

Local’s Sleeping Giants; A Tale of Two Keynotes

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We’re at the height of keynote season, and in the past month Apple, Amazon and Google, have all carted out their wares. Local was understated at each, but below the surface were huge implications…

Google Hooks Up with Aisle411 to Map Stores

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The company will partner with Walgreens to test an in-store service that helps shoppers navigate store aisles. Throughout the shopping experience, shoppers can be introduced to personalized coupons and other promotional offers, as well as rewards that can be accrued just by browsing…

Street Fight Daily: Tech Helps Small Business, Inside Uber’s War Machine

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyStartups’ Modern Tools Help Small Merchants Compete (New York Times)… Inside Uber’s Political War Machine (DailyBeast)… Airbnb CEO: Cities Are Becoming Villages (Atlantic)…

LBMA Podcast: Glympse, Blippar, and Esri

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Top stories of the week feature McDonalds Canada, Pinterest, Food Network, Lowe’s, Naziha Mestaoui, Match.com, Amazon, Oman, Kraft, and Wal-Mart.

Foursquare

Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Charges Fees, Intuit’s M&A Machine

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyFoursquare Will Start Charging the Heaviest Users of its Places Database (TheNextWeb)… With Its M&A Train Rolling, Intuit Looks to Prove the Big Company Can be a Good Home for Small Firms (Pando)… Apps Now Account for Half of All Digital Media Time (MarketingLand)…

Despite Many New Local News Sites, ‘Media Deserts’ Are a Stubborn Reality

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More than 120 newspapers have shut down in the U.S. since 2008. Surviving papers have been forced to cut their local news budgets in the implosion of old media ad revenue. Hundreds of digital community news sites have been launched in the meantime, but journalist and educator Dr. Michelle Ferrier from the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University says that millions of Americans have ended up in a “media desert.”

Is the U.K. Moving Ahead of the U.S. in Location Targeting?

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If the American Revolution were fought based on technological powerhouses alone, we’d win in a heartbeat. Yet some advertisers in the U.K. are pulling off the sorts of campaigns that we only dream of here. It’s easy to chalk that up to the comparatively small size of the market, but that’s selling ourselves short. There’s no good reason that we can’t roll out the same location-based ad tech that has proven so successful in the U.K…

Street Fight Daily: Amazon Plans Grubhub Competitor, Google Moves to the Car

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyAmazon Is Quietly Launching A Local Takeout Service To Rival Seamless And DeliveryHero (TechCrunch)… Google Moves to the Car with Android Auto (Recode)… Uber: The Great Disruptor of Pizza Delivery? (Fortune)…

How Retailers Can Bridge the Gap With Beacons

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Using beacons, content can be delivered to a consumers’ mobile device that augments the shopping experience and bolsters the relevancy of the merchant’s real-time communications based on the consumer’s location and real-time behavior. As a result, the messaging can be perceived by the consumer less as “marketing” and more as “helpful.”