News and Analysis

Street Fight Daily: Amazon Launches UPS & FedEx Rival, P&G Cracks the Code on Marketing

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Amazon to Launch Delivery Service for Businesses, Challenging UPS and FedEx… Drawbridge Partners with mParticle to Help Brands Deliver Personalized Experiences… Liftoff Dating App Report Shows Cold Seasons’ User Behavior and Geographic Trends…

Drawbridge Partners with mParticle to Help Brands Deliver Personalized Experiences

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“Brands don’t want to engage with devices, they want to engage with consumers,” wrote Brian Ferrario, VP of Marketing at Drawbridge. “Devices don’t buy stuff, grow affinity with brands, or help amplify brand messages. People do.”

With 66 Franchises, TAPinto Is Ready to Expand Up and Down Coast

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TAPinto has grown into a network of 71 hyperlocal news sites, 66 of them operated by independent franchisees and five owned by CEO Mike Shapiro. Most of the sites are in North and Central New Jersey and five are in New York City suburbs in the Westchester area north of the city.

Commentary

What Motivates Yelp’s Power Users?

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In an effort to dig a little deeper into what motivates Elite Squad-ers and other active Yelp users — beyond the free beer and crudités — Street Fight spoke with three power users who approach the service with differing goals in mind, but all of whom view Yelp as an integral part of their decision-making process.

Why Facebook Killed ‘Deals’

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Mark Zuckerberg has said that Facebook operates on the premise that “everything is more fun when it’s social.” In his mind, things like music, photos, events and even simple thoughts, were inherently more enjoyable when shared with others. It’s precisely for this reason that I believe the company killed its Deals service…

Placing Facebook’s New Location Plans

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Almost exactly a year ago, Facebook Places launched with much fanfare and the requisite “______ Killer” claims. In this case, the proposed victim was Foursquare, having pioneered the check-in feature that was now central to Facebook’s new LBS play…

Latest Posts

5 Tools For Analyzing Location Data from Social Media

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The volume of data available through social media overwhelms marketers of all sizes, including large brands with hundreds of outposts. Whereas it might be possible for a merchant with a single location to manually monitor the tweets, reviews, and photos being posted about his business each day, that kind of personal attention to detail is virtually impossible for larger brands. Here are five examples of platforms that marketers can use to make sense of the location-specific data coming from social media.

Street Fight Daily: Square’s Ecommerce Push, Waze Data In Google Maps

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologySquare’s Quiet E-Commerce Threat (BusinessWeek)… Waze Data Is Starting To Show Up In Google Maps (BuzzFeed)… Selling By Groupon Insiders, Like Big News, Is On Way (USAToday)…

Is Groupon’s Deal Marketplace Undermining Merchants?

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It has been my understanding that the purpose of daily deals is purely customer acquisition — to bring in new customers, not to target your existing ones. With the new marketplace focus, however, it seems as though this is no longer the case. I recently did a search for some of Groupon’s top NYC marketplace offers and I found that the company seems to be cannibalizing the local businesses’ existing customers by using Google AdWords to bid on nearly every Marketplace deal’s local business name…

Why Fixing Local Marketing Means Making Tech Disappear

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Today, the local web — the network of technologies that help business and consumer interact locally — is far too opaque. Amid the rush to innovate and revolutionize the way we buy or sell goods locally, the industry has amassed a muddled soup of software that’s marked more by it’s complexity than its capability. If the last decade was about building the technologies that bring our local experiences online, the next ten years will focus on making those technologies go away…

LBMA Podcast: NeoPost Acquires DMTI, ByteLight’s Series A

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On the show: Superpedestrian works to commercialize the Copenhagen Wheel; Square is up against the patent wall; privacy’s voice gets stronger with the Future of Privacy Forum and Chuck Schumer; iZettle let’s you pay the homeless with your credit card; and location-based CPR assistance arrives…

Street Fight Daily: Groupon’s Big Redesign, Local Ad Tech Moves Outdoors

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyGroupon Builds New Website, Eyeing Marketplace Growth (USAToday)… Vistar And Verve Link DOOH, Mobile Screens, Create Location-Based Programmatic Platform (MediaPost)… Square Market Is Attracting Sellers That Have Never Taken A Reader Payment (GigaOm)…

Hyperlocals and Scale: How a ‘No-No’ Can Be Turned Into a Win-Win

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“Local doesn’t scale” is the mantra of many independent community news sites. Based on the recent wrenching experiences of some major corporate hyperlocal networks, that may be the case on some level. But what about the view from other end of the telescope — of advertisers everywhere seeking to target consumers down to the neighborhood level?

How Hyperlocal Publishers Can Strengthen Relationships With Advertisers

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One of the key takeaways from the Street Fight Summit in New York was that the future of local lies in partnerships. Forging relationships with local businesses is absolutely necessary for any hyperlocal publisher hoping for long-term success. The question that remains is how, exactly, publishers should go about strengthening the relationships they’ve built with small business advertisers and other organizations in their communities…

Street Fight Daily: Intuit Acquires Scheduling Software, Facebook’s Mobile Tipping Point

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technologyNo More No Shows: Intuit Acquires Online Appointment Scheduler Full Slate (VentureBeat)… Facebook’s Mobile Tipping Point: 48% Of Daily Users Are Now Mobile-Only (TechCrunch)… Why The $110 Billion Gift Card Industry Must Die (ReadWrite)…

Do Small Businesses Really Need a Website?

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The website is the richest online repository of compelling information about a business, but it probably isn’t its primary means of attracting customers. Rather, customers who find you via Google Maps or Facebook may need to refer to your website in the event a third party search doesn’t provide enough information to make a buying decision. The website serves as a last stage effort to win business that hasn’t already been secured via local search…