Commentary
Google’s Local Offerings Have Gotten Too Complicated
The extended Google+ Local rollout has been more troublesome than most. Usually when Google has experimented with social services in the past, such as Google Buzz and Google Wave, it has done so in a tangential way that does not threaten core functionality. With Google+, the gamble is to make social the center of all search activity, and yet the full realization of a social context for Google’s local search tools has yet to appear…
Daily Deals vs. Happy Hours: The Impact of Internal Marketing Promos
To get a sense of how happy hour compares to daily deals, Copilot Labs analyzed the point of sale data from a restaurant that has consistently run both happy hour and daily deals for more than a year and half. From April 2011 to October 2012 this business ran three deals and has had an active deal and happy hour every month…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Instagram Tests Facebook Places, GOP Hails Uber
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Instagram Testing Facebook Places Integration to Replace Foursquare (Fast Company)… GOP Hails App-Based Taxi Service Uber, Says Regulations Stifle It (Wall Street Journal)… Cloud POS Startup Vend Raises $20M From Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures And Square Peg Capital (TechCrunch)…
5 Local Marketplaces for Childcare Services
What Taskrabbit has done for household errands, Uber has done for transportation, and ZocDoc has done for local physician services, a handful of hyperlocal vendors are aiming to now do for childcare. By harnessing the power of social recommendations and connecting parents with babysitters in their own communities, local marketplaces for childcare services are harnessing technology to facilitate online networking within physical communities…
A New Way to Think About Local: Last Mile Advertising
While advertisers today seek to take advantage of an increasingly fragmented media environment, those focused on local advertising have different challenges and opportunities in that they are in closer proximity to the point of purchase. Even with the tremendous growth of online shopping and e-commerce, two-thirds of all local purchases are still taking place in-person at brick-and-mortar locations…
Street Fight Daily: GrubHub Prices IPO, Flurry Tracks Users Offline
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… GrubHub Sets Price Range for I.P.O. (New York Times)… Flurry Launches Service to Track Mobile App Users, Offline (AdAge)… China Set to Cap Transfers Using Mobile-Payment Services (Wall Street Journal)…
With Partnerships, YP’s Consumer Product Takes a Back Seat
Last week, YP announced a deal with Yelp in which the Yellow Pages spin-off will sell Yelp’s core advertising product to the company’s small business clients. For YP, and its owner Cerberus Capital, the agreement is the culmination of a deeper strategic push and a tacit acknowledgment that its role as leading consumer brand, which defined its print past, might be waning…
5 Tools to Collect Customer Data Using Checkout Technology
Ecommerce retailers have always had a leg up on brick-and-mortar businesses when it comes to collecting data about their customers’ shopping behaviors and buying habits, but now a group of hyperlocal vendors is providing offline merchants with similar sets of tools. These vendors are using data from a merchant’s POS system to build detailed customer profiles, even in an offline environment…
Street Fight Daily: Sprint Eyes Small Business, PayPal Tracks In-Store Visits
Probabilistic Device Matching Isn’t Perfect — But It Works
The use of probabilistic matching or statistical IDs to link multiple devices to an individual is often dismissed based on dubious accuracy. It’s true that the practice will never be 100% accurate, but even taking the conservative estimate at the lower end of this range, probabilistic matching enables marketers to scale their mobile advertising campaigns with reasonable expectations of performance…
Discovering Common Ground Among ‘Indie’ and Corporate Hyperlocal Sites
The digital Grand Canyon that has divided independent and corporate hyperlocal news sites is not looking so immense lately. The “indies” and the corporates are still kicking up a lot of dust in their community-by-community competition. But these rivals are changing their operations and strategies in ways that make them look more alike than different…
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
The Road Ahead: What Autonomous Cars Teach Us About Marketing Automation