News and Analysis
Follow-Up Thoughts on the SMB Marketing/Operations Universe
“Regardless of the right package, the key for both agencies and small businesses is to choose best-of-breed components in each galaxy that integrate with each other so that you can add relevant and profitable services over time,” David Mihm says to Mike Blumenthal in their bi-weekly column.
Dr. Soon-Shiong and His New ‘Patient,’ the L.A. Times: Will His Rx Be ‘Local’?
My hunch is that Patrick Soon-Shiong will find that applying advanced technology to local news is not as challenging as conquering cancer, especially if he listens to what Angelinos say is their biggest concern by a wide margin – getting from their home to work or other day-to-day destinations.
Commentary
AOL: Time To Pack It In Or Patch Things Up?
Wow, everyone’s ganging up on Patch these days. No surprise, since it’s tied so closely to Aol., a company that has been declared dead so many times by frustrated naysayers that if it ever did expire nobody would believe the news. Yeah, Patch probably gets the dark shade of that negative halo…
Hello Privacy, Meet the New ‘Presence’ – Location
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Many years ago, when you were probably a tween, i was at AOL (sorry, Aol.) and a degree away from the following nugget. I think the folks involved included Ted , Barry Appelman and maybe Eric Bosco. I could have that a bit wrong but roll with me – I’m not the official techstorian and they’ll tell me if I’m wrong…
Civic Networking: The Next Next Thing?
This is the first in a series of guest posts by thought leaders in the local arena. We asked where local-social media might go in 2011.
By Tom Grubisich
Some Cassandras are forecasting the end of social networking. I will keep my ear next to my computer for the sound of some 600 million people migrating to the next big thing, but don’t think Facebook faces doomsday any time soon. Or Foursquare, Yelp or Gowalla, to name just a few of the proliferating social networks that have claimed a piece of Web space. But I do think social networking is on the threshold of an important evolution that will both affirm its basic value but also take it into new and ever more beneficial directions. Shaping this transformation are economic, technological and societal forces that are propelling people toward a path with many entry points but one destination: to act together and to do so smarter and locally…
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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