Commentary
How to Create a Great Vertical Directory
It’s tough for a start-up to break into the top echelon of local search players and become a one-size-fits-all solution like Google or YP. The great opportunity that exists in the space lies in serving special interests or special use cases better than anyone has before. Foursquare and Yelp are highly visible examples of this, but other very successful, vertically oriented directories exist, flying mostly under our radar…
What Do Google’s Enhanced Campaigns Mean for SMBs?
To wildly mixed reactions, Google last week announced a major redesign to its pervasive AdWords SEM platform. Known as Enhanced Campaigns, the redesign will force advertisers to run a single, converged — though conditionally governed — campaign across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices…
After Boom and Bust, How Will the Discount Economy Evolve?
The discount industry experienced 2012 as a major turning point. In the past 12 months, the deal provider landscape shook out even more, with the consolidation of many deals sites and the decline of some industry giants. Given the changed landscape, here are a few predictions about where the local offer and voucher space is heading…
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How Training Has Helped Some Community Publishers Thrive
“Getting money from local businesses is a street fight,” says Rusty Coats. “The options and alternatives seem to grow exponentially every day, and many businesses live in a fog of not knowing what to do. … That’s why I applaud these community news entrepreneurs and what they’re trying to accomplish. They are mission-driven and determined to build sustainable businesses by serving their communities.”
Report: Mobile Will Account for Half of Social Advertising Revenue by 2017
Mobile is poised to account for a majority of spending on social media advertising in the U.S. by 2017, eclipsing spending on desktop a year later, according to report from BIA/Kelsey released this morning. The research firm estimates that spending on social advertising in the U.S. will nearly triple over the next five years, swelling from $5.1 billion last year to $15 billion by 2018. In 2017, the firms expects that marketers will spend $6.7 billion — or half of all social media advertising revenues — on mobile ad formats.
Street Fight Daily: Axciom Adds Offline Data, Facebook’s Foursquare-esque Cards
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Acxiom Acquires LiveRamp to Boost Offline-to-Online Data Capability (AdAge)… Facebook is Testing Foursquare-esque Cards to Tell You More About Where You’ve Checked In (Verge)… Square’s Status? It’s Complicated (Fortune)…
Two Years After Pulling Back, Gilt City Moves Ahead
Following a retrenchment, Gilt City is growing again. Street Fight caught up with Steven Schneider, the president and general manager at the local shopping site, to talk about the evolution of local commerce, the business of curation, and the changing relationship between ecommerce and brick-and-mortar marketplaces for retailers…
Finding the Right Point of Contact At: An Agency
Breaking into the big-time and selling to a national brand usually involves going through an agency. However, locating the best point of contact at a media planning and buying agency with hundreds—if not thousands—of employees is a process that requires experience, skill, and quite a bit of patience. Here are five strategies for finding the right person to pitch in an agency setting…
3 Mobile Marketing Musts for Brick-and-Mortar Retailers
Over the past few years we’ve seen the mobile marketing industry mature, with new standards and best practices emerging to help marketers reach mobile consumers as they move throughout their day. Here are three mobile marketing strategies which have become table stakes for physical retailers…
5 Platforms That Gather In-Store Analytics from Surveillance Footage
Nearly 64% of retailers have installed some form of IP-connected video surveillance system to protect against theft. Now, a relatively new category of hyperlocal vendors are providing businesses with new ways to capitalize on the technology they already have installed. Here are five tools that retailers large and small can use to make more strategic operational decisions based on the data they gather from video surveillance cameras…
Street Fight Daily: Square Kills Wallet App, Yelp Integrates Booking Service
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Square Pulls Failed Wallet App as Troubles Mount (Wall Street Journal)… Yelp Bites Back At OpenTable, TripAdvisor And Google With Free Yelp Reservations Service (TechCrunch)… Apple Reportedly Integrating NFC Technology into iPhone 6 (MacRumors)…
For Local Commerce Startups Like Homejoy, A Choice of Whom to Disrupt
Airbnb’s recent decision to become a hospitality brand has deep implications for a growing segment of startups that have built similar digital marketplaces for a number of traditionally offline industries. Today, these startups face a similar ontological decision: should they become a consumer brand, expanding deeper into a given industry, or should they expand horizontally, working to disrupt Yelp, Google and the other more horizontal mainstays of local search and discovery…
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