News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Yelp Tests Offline Attribution, Gannett Bets on Local Businesses

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Yelp Tests Offline Attribution Using Guest WiFi and Email Matching… Gannett Leans Into Local to Grow Its Share of National Ad Pie… Walmart Fights a Bloody Battle Against Amazon…

6 Vendors Using AI to Facilitate Live Events

Share this:

Leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, vendors are finding ways to streamline some of the most complex operations—such as estimating the number of attendees and anticipating how many products each attendee will need—in live event organizing.

Street Fight Daily: Publishers’ Facebook Traffic Keeps Falling, Walmart’s E-Commerce Growth Flags

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… As Promised, Facebook Traffic to Publishers Declines Again… Walmart Tumbles As Flagging Online Growth Jolts Investors… Google Chrome Blocks Irksome Ads. That’s Good, Right?…

Commentary

Gilt City’s City Unlisted: Merging Commerce and Content

Share this:

Gilt City, the group-buying offshoot of luxury commerce brand Gilt Groupe, has — among other things — built its business on developing a strong editorial voice mostly through the selection and presentation of its offers. In May, however, the company launched an under-the-radar beta project called City Unlisted to experiment with an alternative approach to pairing content and commerce…

How Will the “Check-in” Behavior Evolve?

Share this:

Just as it began to wane, the attention paid to Foursquare as the darling of the geo-social world has reemerged in the wake of the app’s version 4.0.2 release. Two Foursquare execs were on hand to dive deeper into the update during the recent Street Fight Summit in New York…

How to Market to Local Moms

Share this:

As publishers of websites for suburban moms and advocates for the main street merchants trying to woo them, we spend a lot of time thinking about what matters to the maternally minded. Since women are responsible for 85% of household purchases, reaching the “Chief Household Operator” is a key objective for most local merchants. While these tips are squarely directed at local business owners, many apply to hyperlocal news and blogs as well…

Latest Posts

The Changing Economics of Dialing for Local Data

Share this:

Matrix partners, the Sand Hill Road firm that invested in startups like Hubspot and Care.com, has made a $4.2 million bet on Locality (formerly Centzy), a local search startup that uses a combination of technology and manpower to amass pricing and product information for local service businesses. The startup relies on an army of contractors to call up businesses across the U.S. and find out everything from hours of operation to product lineups and price structures…

Wonder Women Show Might at ‘Indie’ Hyperlocal Sites

Share this:

Like old media, new media has its glass ceilings. But women are consistently shattering barriers to their advancement in the digital community news space. Of the 12 top revenue-producing community news sites, eight have a female editor-publisher-owner. So what do women bring to the community news space to produce so many winners?

Case Study: Lenovo Uses Local Search Tactics to Drive In-Store Sales

Share this:

How does a brand without its own brick-and-mortar stores drive offline sales? That’s the question that Donna Bedford and Rick Medeiros have struggled with as they continue to develop Lenovo’s local search strategy. “We’re starting to think, how do we start becoming more hyperlocal? We’re a global company, so how do we develop that hyperlocal presence and really try to make sure that people clearly know who we are,” Medeiros says…

Street Fight Daily: Pinterest Pins Location, Macy’s Integrates iBeacon

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyPinterest Does Location: Not Just Pin Boards, but Now Pin Maps (AllThingsD)… Macy’s Is The First Retailer To Use Apple’s iBeacon For In-Store Presence (GigaOm)… Groupon Gets Into Coupons, Challenging RetailMeNot (USA Today)…

Finding the Balance Between Relevance and Reach in SMB Content

Share this:

It’s simple enough to say that creating great content or a great platform should be enough to bring users to your door; but if they have no idea you exist, getting the word out effectively is both a matter of reaching your intended user base and staying within the confines of an algorithmically defined concept of quality content. For small and medium-sized businesses, the challenge is to be present and available to customers and potential customers in multiple online venues in a way that conserves effort while remaining effective…

How Same-Day Delivery Can Give Brick-And-Mortar Retailers an Edge

Share this:

Over the past few months, Deliv, a same-day delivery startup, has inked a partnership with real estate giant General Growth Properties in August and nabbed $6.85 million in funding. Street Fight recently caught up with Daphne Carmeli, Deliv’s CEO, to find out what’s driving the revival in same-day delivery, how startups can compete with the big firms, and why same-day delivery is a big opportunity for brick-and-mortar retailers…

Street Fight Daily: Intuit Launches App Store, Signpost Raises $10 M

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyIntuit Launches An App Store For Business Owners To Find Software (TheNextWeb)… Signpost Raises $10M To Bring Online Marketing Tools To Small Businesses (VentureBeat)… Amazon Expanding Its Own Private Label Offering to Supermarket Goods (AllThingsD)…

Is Variable Product Pricing the Next Horizon in Local Advertising?

Share this:

Proximity-related factors enable predictive modeling around transaction probability. That can then be plugged into an equation to determine price sensitivity or elasticity on an individual level. What discount will get your attention? From there, it’s a matter of variable pricing to customers that are new, repeat, faraway, nearby on foot versus driving by at 60 mph, and so on. And that’s the key: though we have time-based variable pricing (a la airlines), proximity-based personalized pricing is the next phase.

6 Strategies for Managing the Expansion of Your Hyperlocal Business

Share this:

As the hyperlocal industry continues to flourish, more and more vendors are experiencing growing pains. Oftentimes, expansion means larger offices, more employees, and more headaches from a business management perspective. Here are six strategies for managing an expansion as an early-stage hyperlocal, from executives who’ve made their way through the trenches and lived to tell about it…

Street Fight Daily: PayPal Nabs Uber Deal, Facebook Revises SMB Count

Share this:

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyPayPal Nabs Uber Partnership in Pursuit of Mobile Marketplaces (Bloomberg Businessweek)… Facebook Expands Its Definition Of Small Business Pages, Says It Now Has 25M Of Them (TechCrunch)… Digital First Media Will Add Paywalls At Most Of Its Daily Newspapers (GigaOm)…