News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Square Buys Weebly, Shift to Mobile Fuels Search Spend

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Square Buying Spree Continues With Weebly Acquisition… Shift to Mobile and Eurozone Growth Fuel Search Spend on Global Scale… Google Sharply Limits DoubleClick ID Use, Citing GDPR…

Street Culture: Sitter.me CEO on Owning Mistakes and Terrible-but-Fun Team Building

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“How we view mistakes is you admit it, you learn very quickly, and then turn it around,” says Sitter.me CEO and co-founder Kristen Stiles. After quoting a client a wrong price, Stiles owned up to the error, and the company develop a new procedure to ensure similar stakes would not be made again.

Street Fight Daily: Google & Apple Boost Local AR, Foursquare’s New Location-Based Creative

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Report: Smartphones, Developer Kits Drive Local AR and Visual Search… Foursquare’s New In-House Agency Will Pump Out Location-Based Creative… Marketers Still Shy Away from Venturing Too Deep into Ad Tech…

Commentary

What Multilocation Brands Need to Do to Prepare for Facebook’s Graph Search

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National brands have invested nearly all their Facebook resources in building and supporting brand pages for the purpose of publishing content and managing customer relationships at the corporate level. But these brands don’t do business at the corporate level.They do business at the local level through large, brick-and-mortar networks. When it comes to Graph Search, these physical locations and their corresponding local Facebook pages are what really matter…

The Big Implications for Local in Facebook’s New Graph Search

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Given that Facebook is using multiple individualized cues to return search results that are customized for you, traditional SEO — already threatened by Google’s moves toward personalization — will be close to meaningless in the new context of Graph Search…

Fragmentation in the Device Landscape and What It Might Mean for Local

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We know that the great mobile shift has arrived. This does not mean the end of the laptop era entirely, as any user of processor-intensive software like Photoshop knows. But it does mean that we are using our devices in ways that have become heavily context dependent…

Latest Posts

Case Study: Toy Store Upgrades Customer Experience With mPOS System

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Managing the operations, staffing, and financials at his growing after-market Lego business has left John Masek with little time to spend dealing with the technological infrastructure necessary to run a traditional hardware point-of-sale system. Mobile POS systems with integrated rewards programs can give mom-and-pop businesses an edge against large retail chains…

Street Fight Daily: Square Orders Ahead, Airbnb Faces SF Ban

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Square’s New Way to Make Cash: An Order-Ahead Option (Recode)… Airbnb Faces Near-Ban In San Francisco (Huffington Post)… Airbnb Faces Near-Ban In San Francisco (Huffington Post)…

At Microsoft, a Renewed Push for Small Business

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Over the past year, Microsoft has managed to grow Bing’s market share — albeit, marginally — while investing in expanding its advertising presence among small business. Part of the effort is to use its search business as a springboard to bring advertising to a host of other platforms, many of which have never before been a home to ads…

6 Tools to Add Menus to Mobile Apps

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Online menus drive more traffic to restaurants than coupons and giveaways combined, with 33% of consumers in a 2014 JiWire survey saying they’re more influenced by seeing menu information in a mobile ad than special offers or the location of an establishment. Here are six tools that restaurants can use to add integrated, mobile-friendly menus to their websites and apps…

Street Fight Daily: Nokia’s New Chief, New York’s ‘Smart’ Bar Crawl

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Nokia Announces New Strategy and Chief Executive (New York Times)… New York City Bars to Use Apple’s iBeacons for App-Driven ‘Pub Crawl’ Promotion (AppleInsider)… The Decline of Newspapers Hits a Stunning Milestone (Slate)…

After AOL’s Hyperlocal Fail, Media Watchers Pin Hopes on Smaller Operations

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With a number of once-promising large-scale hyperlocal media projects laying in ruin, local media’s star has faded a bit over the past year, causing many industry watchers to frame local journalism as a pursuit defined by a social need, and burdened by an unfriendly market reality. The vision of the $150 billion market opportunity has been replaced with a social ethic — the need for small, independent operations to create self-sufficient clusters in their communities…

Report: Local Media Ad Revs Will Climb to $158.6B By 2018

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Local media ad revenues are set to increase 19% by 2018, according to new figures released by BIA/Kelsey, climbing from $133.2 billion in 2013 to $158.6 billion in 2018. The compound annual growth rate of 3.6% represents faster growth than previously expected, strengthened by political and Olympic advertising. Meanwhile, local digital media is set to continue its increase in market share, increasing from $31.7 billion (23 percent) in 2014 to $52.7 billion (33.2 percent) in 2018…

Street Fight Daily: LivingSocial Slips Further, Consumers Balk on Mobile Wallets

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… LivingSocial Sales Slip Further (Wall Street Journal)… Few Consumers Are Buying Premise of Mobile Wallets (New York Times)… Airbnb Wants to Be a Travel Agent (Wall Street Journal)…

Newspaper Companies Make Another Big Investment in a Circular Startup

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Gannett, Hearst, Belo, and others have invested another $15 million in Wanderful Media, a service that digitizes and distributes the millions of merchandizing ads that go out every weekend in local papers across the United States. The deal, which brings the startup’s total funding to over $50 million, highlights the newspaper industry’s struggle to find an answer to a depreciating revenues after technology companies have picked off many of its valuable assets…

Openings and New Hires at Thinknear, Twitter and Verizon

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Every two weeks, Search Influence’s Kelly Benish — who knows practically everyone in hyperlocal — covers some of the latest job changes taking place in this dynamic industry. In this week’s edition, new hires and jobs at Factual, Angie’s List, Local Yokel Media, Facebook, Mediative and hibu.