News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Investments in Search Will Diversify, Inside Uber’s Social Strategy
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Search Spend to Diversify, Spreading Among Platforms Beyond Google… Uber Relies on Automation to Keep Its Paid Social Strategy Humming… Getting Detailed Insights Is Top Challenge for Programmatic Marketers…
Commentary
When Tools Become Channels: Rethinking Local Promotion Distribution
Promotional commerce between small businesses and local consumers is undergoing a massive reconstruction. In the process, media channels are being forced to proactively adapt or wither into irrelevance. Media channels no longer enjoy the spoils of having critical mass in consumer reach and limited competition…
Local Stores Become Showrooms for Online Buying
“Showrooming” refers to the act of using local stores as showrooms for more price-competitive online purchases. Retailers can get on the right side of this trend by beating Amazon at its own data-centric game. That means launching apps — or working with those that aggregate retail feeds, such as Milo — through which personal recommendations and incentives are offered to in-store buyers…
As Facebook Readies IPO, Local Strategy Is in Focus
Considering that 70% of small businesses already use Facebook as a promotional tool through Pages, the company has a serious leg up on the competition. Transitioning these users into paying customers means cutting into Google’s massive market share of local ad spend, and potentially replacing the search giant as the de facto marketing tool for local businesses online…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Raises Another $35M, eBay’s Strategy for Offline Commerce
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.…. Foursquare Raises a $35 Million Round and Adds DFJ’s Schuler to the Board (AllThingsD)… EBay’s Strategy for Taking On Amazon (New York Times)… Nextdoor Talks Growth, Now Being Used In One In Six Neighborhoods In The US (TechCrunch)…
Why Small Local Sites *Must* Have Multiple Revenue Streams
“If there is a ‘model’ for community news, it’s finding the right mix of diverse revenue streams that are best suited to the particular conditions of a news organization’s local market and journalistic mission,” says Jake Batsell of NewsBiz. “But that diversity of revenue is critical, because news outlets depending on a single stream of income are leaving themselves vulnerable…”
Case Study: Caribou Coffee Amps Up Holiday Sales With Mobile Gift Cards
In an effort to enhance Caribou Coffee’s mobile marketing capabilities, and spur a boost in gift card sales during the important holiday shopping season, vice president of marketing Michele Vig launched an eGift card initiative in early November. Now, customers who purchase eGift cards online can send their gifts to friends via email. Recipients can then redeem their gifts by showing their smartphones to a cashier or printing the gift card at home and handing over a paper printout…
Street Fight Daily: Moovit Raises $28M, Local’s Next IPO
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Moovit Raises A $28M Sequoia-led Funding Round For Its Public Transit Service (PandoDaily)… Local Heroes: The Public Companies of Tomorrow (AllThingsD)… Hey Uber, Lyft Is Growing Faster Than You (TechCrunch)…
Geo-Unicorns: Will Local Spawn More Billion-Dollar Startups?
At the Street Fight Summit in New York a couple of months ago, I moderated a panel that looked at the “Billion-Dollar Opportunities in Hyperlocal.” Our thesis in putting the panel together was that the personalization made possible by location-based technologies was still in its early stages of evolution, and that the “geo-web” will be spawning many of the billion-dollar exits that later-stage VCs crave…
JiWire Partners With Datalogix to Ramp Up Mobile Targeting and ROI
“Where people spend their time and where they spend their money are two very powerful signals for understanding audiences in the context of their daily lives,” JiWire President David Staas told Street Fight. “Our partnership enables marketers to leverage the power of mobile targeting, measurement and insights across hundreds of rich audience segments.”
In-Store Tracking — Privacy Intrusion or Communications Problem?
As the web continues to expand beyond the desktop, it is infusing itself into the parts of our lives which we’ve traditionally viewed as offline and out of reach, creating an uneasiness among consumers. The question for the technology community is whether users’ fears represent a material resistance by a weary market or natural lag between their concern and the recognition of the value of location tracking which these services will eventually produce…
Beyond Likes: Win Hearts with Emotional Marketing