News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Square Embraces Sales and Moves Beyond SMBs, The Staying Power of Email
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… As It Grows, Square Deploys Sales Force to Acquire SMB Customers & Bigger Brands… Selling to Multi-Location Brands: Building on Omnipresent Email… Microsoft Acquires AI Company to Make Cortana and Bots Sound More Human…
Openings and New Hires at Verve, Yelp, Star Tribune
Every few weeks, Geoff Michener takes stock of some of the latest hires and openings in hyperlocal marketing, tech, and media. This edition includes openings and new hires at Digital Remedy, Shoptiques, adMarketplace, and Motista.
Raise Report: JumpCrew, Gamalon, Tailor Brands Score New Funding
Every two or three weeks, we round up some of the biggest fundraises taking place in hyperlocal marketing, commerce, and tech. This week’s edition includes funding for Good Eggs, MemSQL, Auth0, and Dashdash.
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
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…
LBMA Podcast: Banjo’s Raise, Wearable Experiments, One Llama
Top stories of the week include Mahana, Locoslab, Yelp & Yahoo!, Emotient, UTEC, Apple, HP & Aurasma. The Mobile Minute with Chuck Martin recaps some highlights from SXSW and the resource of the week demystifies the second screen in North America…
Street Fight Daily: Yelp Partners With YP, Airbnb’s $10B Valuation
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Yelp, YP Partner in Local Advertising Deal (SearchEngineLand)… New Capital Could Raise Airbnb Value To $10 Billion (New York Times)… The Newsonomics of Selling Cars.com (Nieman Journalism Lab)…
Finding the Right Point of Contact At: A Franchise Organization
Crafting the perfect pitch is only part of the challenge. For hyperlocal vendors trying to generate traction in a crowded marketplace, being able to locate the best point of contact at each of the individual companies being pitched is an incredibly important part of the sales process. Here are four strategies for finding the right person to pitch at a franchise organization, from hyperlocal executives who’ve had success…
What Real-Time Computing Means for Local Commerce
Earlier this month, SAP, the german business software giant, announced that it plans to put a version of its real-time analytics software Hana online. The computing platform is one of a number of new analytics products that use so-called in-memory processing — a reference to a computer’s temporary, or working memory — to rapidly analyze vast amounts of data in an instant, allowing businesses to draw insights and make decisions in a matter of milliseconds…
Street Fight Daily: Mobile Search Explodes, Facebook Ends the Free Ride
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… In 2013 Mobile Search Exploded but the Dollars Haven’t Followed Suit (Yet) (Pando)… Facebook Is Ending the Free Ride (ValleyWag)… Foursquare CEO: Google and Yelp are ‘Incredibly Broken’ (VentureBeat)…
Case Study: Ace Hardware Uses Mobile Tools to Drive Shoppers In-Store
National hardware chain Ace Hardware recently debuted a new mobile iPhone application, meant to enhance the shopping experience and encourage customers to complete their transaction at local Ace Hardware locations…
Is Facebook Paper the Wake-up Call Publishers Need?
Media companies and publishers need to take a page from Facebook and other fast-moving digital properties. These digital entities are giving readers what they want while using what they know about users to “make a killing” with ads. Publishers who were virtually sidelined by these digital powerhouse companies can now get back in the game by adopting a Zuckerberg move: creating the right conditions and culture…
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Why MULOs Need a Localized Unstructured Citation Strategy