News and Analysis
Q&A: Does Google’s Latest Product Mean Death by a Thousand Cuts for Brands
Google really left businesses hanging with the Q&A release, Mike BLumenthal tells David Mihm in their biweekly column: “We had enough engineering cycles that we could “step into the breach” of what is obviously a big brand problem. Whether it is long term or not depends on what Google can parse from the questions in terms of improving results. “
Street Fight Daily: Google Tests DIY Local-News App, Twitter Adds New Ad Tactic for Brands
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Google Is Testing a New App That Would Let Anyone Publish Local News Stories… Twitter Now Lets Advertisers Sponsor Publishers’ Moments… Morgan Stanley Says Amazon’s Red-Hot Ad Biz Not a Threat to Duopoly…
Street Culture: A Culture of Growth at PacketZoom
“Introducing [new employees] to the culture has been very important; it’s important that the people we hire are growth-oriented,” PacketZoom co-founder Chetan Ahuja says. “We want them to already be useful to the business, but their main goal is to grow and to grow with the company. They’re much more valuable that way.”
Commentary
Choosing a Data Partner for Local: What to Ask
Jeff Wood is a guest author. To submit a guest post, go here.
With all of the talk about data in our industry, I’m surprised that so few of the people I talk to in the Local space have a true data strategy — one that gives them real control over their own data and, most importantly, access to this data for decision-making.
It’s the nature of Local that a publisher loses the scale of large network buys. However, you gain the value of a centralized audience. With granular data, a site focused on the hyperlocal market can quickly understand the value of small pockets of inventory, and make educated decisions around how to package and allocate that inventory for sale across appropriate channels.
It’s amazing how many people simply don’t know who owns the data collected on their sites.
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2011: The Year the Check-in Reached Puberty
Michael Boland is a guest author. To submit a guest post, go here.
In the location wars of the past two years, one of the battle cries has been the need to continually innovate “beyond the check-in” — building things on top of the core check-in function, driven by evolving device capability and user demand (or boredom).
Companies have taken this in various directions — “checking in” to TV shows, for example. Sector leader Foursquare has dabbled in things like Superbowl check-ins.
At least week’s Where 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, California, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley talked about how the check-in grows up even as it stays focused on “the relationship between people and places.”..
Where ‘Hyperlocal’ Is a Movement, Not a Business Model
I’ll bet you £10 that “royal wedding” is the first thought that jumps to the mind of an American journalist asked about Britain today. Yet with the ever-present fixation on their profession’s future, perhaps journalists in the U.S. should look past the palaces to the real action happening at the hyperlocal level…
Latest Posts
JiWire Rolls Out Attribution Product As Mobile Ad Market Zeroes In On ROI
The conversation in the mobile advertising industry has shifted focus in recent months, moving away from targeting toward attribution and measuring return on investment as brands begin to invest meaningful spend in mobile and in turn, expect results. Following a string of product releases from competitors, JiWire, a San Francisco-based mobile-local ad startup, rolled out a new attribution tool called Location Conversion Index this morning, which draws on a similar technique used by competitors to measure in-store visits but allows marketers to normalize those numbers against a wider sample…
Mobile Dominates Local, but Are Wearables the Future?
Confirming a widely held belief, a new study from Yext found that the overwhelming majority of consumers – particularly those in younger generations – prefer accessing local information through a smartphone, even while a desktop computer is within reach. As the mobile market expands beyond smartphones into an array of internet connected devices, the next question for local technology firms is whether a new breed of mobile, and wearable, devices, might generate a similar opportunity…
Street Fight Daily: Google Introduces Offline Metric, McDonald’s Tests Loyalty Program
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Google Introduces Cross-Device and Offline Conversion Tracking (Screenwerk)… McDonald’s Stores Trying Loyalty Program (Bloomberg)… Facebook Says Its Mobile App Ads Work, So It’s Making More of Them (GigaOm)…
PlaceIQ CEO: Our Goal Isn’t to Improve Click-Through Rates — It’s to Understand Consumers
Fresh off of a $6.75 million round of funding earlier this year, targeting firm PlaceIQ is hard at work breaking down the physical world by location in order to analyze data and show the which ads will resonate best with consumers based on where they are at a given time. In a recent interview, the company’s CEO Duncan McCall spoke with Street Fight about where PlaceIQ fits in a crowded mobile advertising industry and how advertisers can use time, location and creative to understand consumer behavior…
8 Strategies for Selling to Local Merchants as an Early Stage Hyperlocal
Selling to local merchants is a challenge in a post-Groupon world, where many small business owners have grown skeptical of the long-term value that digital marketing solutions can provide. Early stage hyperlocals without established track records have additional hurdles to overcome, as they struggle to prove themselves in a crowded marketplace. All these obstacles are forcing hyperlocal vendors to get creative with the way they target local merchants…
Placeable Launches New Feature to Help Fix ‘Dirty’ Local Data
Two months after a major rebranding, the Denver-based Placeable has launched a new tool to help big brands clean up their location data. The feature, called Placeable Plot, allows marketers to update and manage location data for a brand’s brick-and-mortar stores across apps, search engines, maps, social networks and marketing campaigns…
Street Fight Daily: Leaf Raises $20 Million, AT&T Starts Selling Location Data
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Square Competitor Leaf Scores $20 Million Investment From Payments Giant Heartland (AllThingsD)… AT&T Turns Its Data Into An Adaptive Intelligence Business (ZDNet)… “Showrooming” Is More About Research Than Price Comparison (PandoDaily)…
Study: More Local Shoppers Using Mobile Devices for Retail Purchases
As mobile devices become smarter, consumers are turning to their devices for more than last-minute directions and simple searches. A new study from Local Corporation finds that the the smartphone, once thought of as a place where consumers went for quick bits of information, is moving deeper into the decision cycle, playing a larger role in more in depth research, once associated with with tablet behavior…
5 Local Data Aggregators for Hyperlocal Startups
For many founders of hyperlocal platforms, the ideas they’ve envisioned require access to local location data—and lots of it. Some of the most important background players in the hyperlocal ecosystem are the local data aggregators, which supply clients with the basic NAP (name, address, and phone number) identities of millions of businesses and points-of-interest worldwide. Here are five local data aggregators that hyperlocal vendors can use to power their local listings…
Street Fight Daily: Patch To Close Sites, GateHouse Files For Chapter 11
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Memo: ‘Regretfully, A Number of Patches Will Have To Be Closed (Romenesko)… GateHouse Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection (Wall Street Journal)… The NSA Refuses To Deny That It Collected The Location Data Of U.S. Phone Calls (TechCrunch)…
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