News and Analysis
Cousins Subs Leverages Social, Marketing Tech to Stay Local
Look at the menu board at Cousins Subs, and you’ll immediately notice how important local is to the restaurant’s brand. But the commitment extends beyond the Wisconsin cheddar cheese featured among the Midwest chain’s list of local ingredients—it goes all the way back to how the brand chooses to represent itself on social channels.
Commentary
What Reviews Sites Need to Do to Prepare for Facebook’s Graph Search
It’s well known that reviews, ratings, and recommendations are a major factor in driving consumer decisions. Sourcing friends or people you know to provide advice holds even more weight when it comes to personalization and has an added benefit of trust. This is what makes the concept of Facebook’s new Graph Search so powerful…
Efficiently Selling to SMBs: Finding Paths of Less Resistance
We’re entering a more fertile environment for what I’ll call the SMB advertising “Trojan Horse.” Local companies start by targeting SMBs’ CRM systems, payroll, back office management, reputation management and payment processing. From there, local advertising can be unveiled as a “one-stop-shop” upsell…
Why the Commoditization of Local Information Is an Opportunity for Journalism
Some have seen the shift of local information — from something that was unique to newspapers to a commodity that is available from a variety of sources — as the end to local news. But I actually think it presents a great opportunity for journalists to do what they do best: put information into context and tell us why it matters…
Latest Posts
The Commerce Graph: Some Thoughts on the Future of Physical Exchange
The “Commerce Graph” is a new framework we have developed to think about the future of physical exchange. The model offers an alternative to the dominant narrative about the commerce landscape that frames digital networks as an adversary of physical exchange — a force that will inevitably drive us to buy and sell nearly everything virtually…
Street Fight Daily: Amazon Plans Local Marketplace, RadioShack’s Losses Deepen
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon Plans Local Services Marketplace This Year (Reuters)… RadioShack Draws on Credit Line as Losses Deepen (Wall Street Journal)… Google to Buy Skybox Imaging for $500 Million (New York Times)…
Placed Raises $10M to Help Mobile Advertisers Ditch Clicks
A hedge fund has led a $10 million series B investment in Placed, a location analytics firm that uses Nielsen-like panels to help advertisers measure the effectiveness of advertising in the physical world. The funding highlights the growing demand by stakeholders in the mobile marketing industry to move beyond the click-through-rate by measuring the performance of digital advertising offline…
Mobile’s Increasingly Strong Influence in Consumer Purchase Decisions
The third annual installment of the xAd/Telmetrics Mobile Path-to-Purchase study shows that mobile is a powerful force throughout the consumer purchase cycle. Consumers are spending more research time on their mobile devices than on their PCs, and more than one-third of mobile users use their devices exclusively to research purchases…
Street Fight Daily: GoDaddy Files for IPO, Amex Partners With Uber
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… GoDaddy Files for IPO (Wall Street Journal)… Uber and Amex Partner on In-App Loyalty Program (Recode)… Head of PayPal to Join Facebook (New York Times)…
JiWire Rebrands as NinthDecimal to Focus on Data Business
JiWire has rebranded as NinthDecimal as it looks to compete in an increasingly crowded mobile advertising technology sector by highlighting its data business. The move underscores the importance of consumer data in the way advertisers buy audiences online, and subsequent decline of media as the currency of online advertising…
7 Analytics Tools to Track Local Campaigns
Gut feelings and instinct can only take business owners so far. To determine the actual value of local campaigns, marketers need access to raw data. Unfortunately, obtaining this information — and then using it to compare two or more hyperlocal platforms in a head-to-head setting — isn’t always as straightforward as it seems. Here are seven platforms that businesses can use to measure the effectiveness of their local campaigns…
Street Fight: Uber Raises $1.2B, Apple Acquires Local Search Engine
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Uber Gets an Uber-Valuation (Wall Street Journal)… Apple Acquires Spotsetter, A Social Search Engine For Places (TechCrunch)… Jim Brady Plans News Org in Philly Called Brother.ly (Poynter)…
Up Close and Personal: Ex-Patcher Tells How He Went Independent
Michael Dinan was senior regional editor for Patch in suburban Connecticut when he — along with hundreds of other editorial staffers — was terminated in January as part of Aol’s deal to sell most of the community news network to Hale Global. After the blow fell, he turned around and set up the independent site New Canaanite within days — and expanded it to a collaborative network in suburban Connecticut shortly thereafter…
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