Commentary
Hyperlocal in 2012: More Consolidation and Scale, Less ‘Free’
What it comes down to is that hyperlocal companies like Foursquare and Groupon, despite their “hyperlocal” raison d’etre, need scale to bring an effective proposition to merchants and big brands. Scale helps, even if that just means a larger audience within a metro area or even a single neighborhood…
Doubling Down on SinglePlatform
Your average small business owner has a limited marketing budget and precious little time to spend on their online presence — those that do have the resources want to see short term, tangible returns on their investment. SinglePlatform, a one-stop shop for restaurants to build a digital presence, may have an inside track on finessing this elusive small business relationship…
What Works in One Local Market Won’t Necessarily Work in Another
I’ve learned, sometimes through epic failures, what works in Tracy (a suburb of Sacramento, Calif.) won’t work in Tampa. However, I’ve also learned, through epic victories, that when you harness the power of 200+ communities for a common goal great things can happen. Here are a few bits of wisdom I’ve picked up along the way.
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Yext’s New ‘Pages’ and the Future of One-Stop Solutions for Small Businesses
The first large-scale technology company that can service small businesses in all of the following four industries will have the best opportunity to be the next leading hyperlocal superstar: 1) Website building, 2) email/loyalty marketing, 3) hyperlocal technology and 4) Online advertising, promotion and deal solutions…
6 Strategies For Helping SMBs Understand the Importance of Mobile
According to a Manta survey, 67% of small business owners don’t expect mobile to impact them this holiday season. Only 8% of the 1,003 SMBs surveyed said they expect mobile to drive shoppers to their brick-and-mortar locations. This presents a challenge for hyperlocal vendors looking to sell their mobile products and services, however it’s something that can be overcome through a combination of education and original thinking…
Street Fight Daily: Apple Expands iBeacon, The Hack That Saved Foursuare
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Apple Launching iBeacons To Guide Store Visitors (Associated Press)… The Brilliant Hack That Brought Foursquare Back From the Dead (Wired)… Twitter’s Dorsey Vies With SoftBank’s Son for Japan Shops (Bloomberg)…
Street Fight Daily: Foursquare’s Redesigned App, HomeJoy Raises $38M
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology.… Foursquare 7.0 Brings Passive Location Technology To All (GigaOm)… Homejoy Raises $38M As It Looks To Expand Beyond Home Cleaning (TechCrunch)… EBay, PayPal Pinpoint Stores For Mobile Shopping (USA Today)…
New Borrell SMB Report: ‘The Deer Have the Guns’
The 903 small business owners surveyed in a new study from Borrell Associates said they expected to spend only 12% of their digital advertising budgets in 2013 on banner advertising, sponsorships, and classifieds. Meanwhile they expected to spend more than half of their marketing budgets on owned channels, investing heavily in managing their website (35%), running email marketing campaigns (13%), and social media (14)%.
Watch Out Intuit — Booker Guns For Demandforce With New CRM Tools
Eight months after raising a massive Series A round, Booker is making its push into a new, and potentially massive, market: CRM. Today, the New York-based company, which began selling booking and business management software to service businesses, rolled out Promote, a Demandforce-like product that allows businesses to tie email messaging and social media campaigns to the goings-on of their business…
Buttry Sees Progress for Digital First’s ‘New Model’ for Community News
Steve Buttry, the digital transformation editor at Digital First Media, began his career in community newspapers more than 40 years ago in Columbus, Ohio – as a teenage carrier. In the years since, he’s been a reporter, editor, and teacher of journalists around the world. These days, Buttry’s job is to complete the “print-to-digital transformation” of two slimmed-down “legacy” news media companies, Journal Register and MediaNews Group. To find out how it’s going, I put these questions to him…
5 Keys to Making Location Work for Mobile Marketing
Smartphones generate billions of bits of location data every day, creating an unprecedented opportunity for marketers to understand and engage with local consumers at scale. In a Street Fight webinar Wednesday sponsored by YP, Patrick Dolan of the IAB joined David Petersen of Sense Networks and YP’s Luke Edson to discuss the trends that make location data a must for mobile marketing, and outline a handful of ways advertisers can use big data to unlock local relevance in their campaigns…
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