News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Facebook Expected to Bring Bidding to In-App Ads, Barriers to Online-Offline Attribution

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Offers Brands In-App Ads… Performance Pricing Pitfalls: The Truth About Offline-Visit Data for Advertisers… TGI Friday’s AI-Powered Marketing Drives $150 Million…

Report: Brands Abandoning Social Media Measurement

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The rise of tools like IoT and chatbots, along with reliable channels like email, have cut into the diminished albeit still powerful role of social along the customer journey, explains Mark Smith, president and CEO of Kitewheel.

Street Fight Daily: Local Merchants Unfazed by Facebook Controversy, Consumers Apprehensive on Voice

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Most Local Merchants Unfazed by Facebook Controversies, Though Some Signs of Trouble… Report: Brands Abandoning Social Media Measurement… Microsoft’s GitHub Deal Marks Latest Shift from Windows…

Commentary

How Consumer Messaging Is Going From ‘Push’ to ‘Pull’

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The biggest battle coming in the world of marketing is a 180-degree shift in the routing of commerce-related messages. Today, we call them “advertisements,” one-directional messages FROM somebody with something to sell TO somebody who may potentially be a buyer. Tomorrow, the messages will come FROM those wishing to buy TO those with something to sell…

The Local Marketer’s Guide to Facebook

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What steps should local marketers take to maximize the value of their Facebook presence? First, marketers should claim location pages and optimize their presence for Graph Search. Second devise a complementary content strategy for corporate brand pages. Local marketers should also consider using Facebook ads to supplement organic pages content…

On the Web (Especially in Local), Personal Branding Is Everything

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Where media companies see themselves as unique, the Web sees, well, sameness. The pureplay companies have found ways to exploit that, while local companies — especially media — dismiss all that effort as irrelevant. To be a brand in the network is to behave unlike a brand and instead like a person. This is the secret to a strategic move into a world of connected human beings…

Latest Posts

8 Strategies for Reaching Out to Online Influencers

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Rather than sitting idly by while influencers dictate what’s being said about their businesses on social media and review websites, merchants are beginning to reach out to these social media users on a personal basis. Here are eight strategies that marketers should consider when reaching out to influencers online…

Street Fight Daily: ZocDoc Raising $152M, FAA Bans Delivery Drones

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyZocDoc Raising $152 million at $1.6 Billion Valuation (Fortune)… FAA Bans The Use Of Drones To Deliver Packages (TechCrunch)… RelayRides’ Altered Future Points To A Ride Sharing World Dominated By Lyft And Uber, Not Zipcar (Forbes)…

Shopkeep Founder: Micros/Oracle Deal Won’t Help SMBs

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With its acquisition of Micros, Oracle is affirming its commitment to making, selling, and continually repairing outdated technology that has far outlived its usefulness. This approach, while wasteful, works for big companies with million-dollar IT budgets — but small businesses neither want nor need technology that sits in a room and takes up space…

At Indochino, A Retail Model Built to Order

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When the founders of Indochino, a startup that sells custom suits online, began to drum up strategies to enter brick-and-mortar retail, they found some surprising fat in the model: the store itself. What they came up with in response is an ephemeral alternative to offline selling that draws on some of the flexibility of ecommerce while retaining the experience of a physical presence…

5 Self-Serve Solutions for Creating Location-Targeted Mobile Offers

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Locally-targeted mobile ads are expected to reach $4.5 billion in the U.S. this year — an increase of $1.6 billion in the last year alone. As merchants search for creative ways to take advantage of location-targeted advertising, many are turning toward self-serve solutions for creating location-based mobile promotions…

Street Fight Daily: McDonald’s Orders Ahead, Oracle Puts Micros On Menu

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyMcDonald’s Is Secretly Testing Its Own Order-Ahead And Payments App(BusinessInsider)… Oracle Puts Micros on Menu as Restaurants Eat Up Software (Bloomberg)… Google Is Getting Into Domains. Should GoDaddy Worry? (Mashable)…

No, the Amazon Smartphone Isn’t Going to Kill Retail

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The in-store experience provides tremendous benefits to shoppers, and the Amazon Fire phone further illustrates the opportunity to use innovative mobile solutions to improve and influence the shopping experience…

LION-Borrell Revenue Survey Unravels

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A revenue benchmarking partnership between the Local Independent Online News publishers association and Borrell Associates is coming apart because too few of LION’s publishers want to share their information with the the local media research company…

Is ‘Efficiency’ at Odds with Your Local Sales Force?

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With the economy on the uptick, businesses in local should have more wiggle-room in how they choose to increase efficiency. Whereas fear may have motivated them to move towards labor cuts in the past, now they should feel the freedom to invest in long-term solutions…

Street Fight Daily: Oracle Poised To Buy Micros, Ad Spending Jumps In Q1

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technologyOracle Poised to Seal $5 Billion Deal for Micros Systems (Wall Street Journal)… Ad Spending Jumps in First Quarter, Fueled by Olympics and Early Political Ads (AdAge)… Uber Plays Hardball With Early Shareholders (Fortune)…