News and Analysis
#SFSNYC: Broadly CEO: Brick-and-Mortars Need to Become Messaging Centers
Phone calls and contact forms are dead, but what about websites? Not so much, said Josh Melick, CEO of Broadly, at Street Fight’s annual summit in New York Wednesday. With this trend showing no signs of stopping, websites—especially those of local businesses—need to become messaging centers.
#SFSNYC: The Growing Power of SMB OS
Until recently, brick-and-mortar shopping relied on the digital world for advertising functions and not much else. But now, local retail has a new digital arena—the full-service operating system. Three leaders in this expanding set of technological solutions for SMBs laid out the state of the field, known as SMB OS, at Street Fight Summit in New York Wednesday.
#SFSNYC: Making Conversational Interfaces the Frontline for Customer Interaction
The development of conversational language to interact with chatbots, digital assistants, smart devices, and other machines is changing the ways consumers make use of such platforms to find the information and services they want—and this change is only going to get more important for brands and local businesses to address.
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…
Latest Posts
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…
6 Tools Publishers Can Use to Monetize Their Business Directories
directoryHyperlocal publishers are frequently on the lookout for new ways to generate revenue from their sites, and one of the most straightforward revenue diversification strategies involves launching a business directory. Here are six tools that publishers can use to monetize business directories on their hyperlocal sites…
Street Fight Daily: Airbnb Eyes Travel, Square Goes After Grubhub
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…. Airbnb Looks Beyond Flat-Sharing to Tickets and Travel (Financial Times)… Square Branches Out Into Food Ordering With New Square Order Service (TheNextWeb)… Foursquare goes Oprah: You’re a mayor and you’re a mayor (Engadget)…
Why One Investor Thinks Foursquare Has a Future in Ad Tech
Add this to the interesting-but-never-going-to-happen suggestion box for Foursquare: ditch the consumer business altogether. Nihal Mehta, a New York-based entrepreneur-turned-investor, thinks that Foursquare might find a bigger business by bailing on its local search ambition to put its algorithm to work as an attribution product for mobile advertising…
Openings and New Hires at Mono Solutions, Google, Connectivity & Cxense
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 Haystak Digital Marketing, Angie’s List, Local Yokel Media, Mediative and hibu…
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