News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Thumbtack Brings AI to Local Services, Amazon Go Model to Expand
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… How Thumbtack Creates Work By Giving the Yellow Pages an AI Twist… Amazon Plans to Open As Many As Six More Amazon Go Stores This Year… Twitter Tightened Up the Requirements for Its Amplify Publisher Program…
Commentary
How to Market to Local Moms
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…
Public Radio Gears Up for Hyperlocal News Innovation
Federal, private and individual donors are all supporting myriad local and hyperlocal reporting experiments based at radio stations. The results of these initiatives have been mixed. Better and more replicable models are needed for cross-platform storytelling, participatory reporting that brings in a broader range of perspectives, and narrative forms that more closely reflect the shifting media consumption and sharing habits of younger users…
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: Intuit’s Next Steps, Bing Integrates TripAdvisor Tools
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Intuit CEO Talks Plan To Grow Company (ZDNet)… Bing Integrates TripAdvisor Tools, Content Into Search Results (SearchEngineLand)… How Life360 Overcame Creepiness To Replace The Most Common Text Message You Send (PandoDaily)…
The Changing Economics of Dialing for Local Data
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
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
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
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Pinterest 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
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
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
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Intuit 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?
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
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…
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