News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Investments in Search Will Diversify, Inside Uber’s Social Strategy
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Search Spend to Diversify, Spreading Among Platforms Beyond Google… Uber Relies on Automation to Keep Its Paid Social Strategy Humming… Getting Detailed Insights Is Top Challenge for Programmatic Marketers…
What January’s New York Retail Traffic Patterns Mean for Media Delivery
In an effort to learn more about shopper behaviors and patterns, the data science team at the mobile location firm Blis analyzed post-holiday foot traffic patterns at Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Saks, and Lord & Taylor in New York City.
Street Fight Daily: Mobile Commerce Grows, Publishers Seek Collective Bargaining with Platforms
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… As Retailers Leverage Robust Visuals and Efficient Interfaces, Mobile Commerce Grows… Legislation Could Give Publishers a New Weapon Against Facebook and Google… Snap Is Laying Off About 100 Engineers…
Commentary
The Hyperlocal Journalist and the Salesperson
“I worry about the future of my profession when I see large segments of the online news industry failing to rigorously test the kinds of revenue models journalism needs to survive,” writes CJR’s Michael Meyer, who runs the News Frontier Database. “Taking our content seriously is a basic requirement, but are we taking ourselves (or even readers) seriously if we’re not wholly committed to monetizing it?”
U-Deals Represent a ‘Profound’ Shift in Consumer Dynamic
Loopt’s new u-Deals services has been widely dismissed it as not much more than a “reverse Groupon.” But there are a couple of reasons that such comparisons are a mistake — and that the u-Deals model may be more profound than it first appears.
What Kinds of Businesses Do Daily Deals Benefit Most?
Business owners are always looking for a silver bullet — a killer feature that will bring in new customers. The recent daily deals craze has held out the promise of this kind of customer acquisition, but when is a deal feature a silver bullet, and when is it is shot in the foot?
Latest Posts
Street Fight Daily: eBay Acquires Shutl, Tracking Companies Set New Rules
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… eBay Acquires Shutl, Races Amazon To Your Front Door (ReadWrite)… Tracking Companies Agree to Notify Shoppers, But Retailers Demur (Wall Street Journal)… Why Longtime Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy Just Agreed to Work for Clinkle’s 22-Year-Old CEO (AllThingsD)…
What Legacy Local Media Can Learn From the Red Sox
In advance of 2013, the Red Sox again fired the team’s manager, changed the executive suite, and reinvented the workforce. The new goal: replace high-cost and complaining “superstars” with a talented new group who bought into the new model. The organization became more horizontal and the salary of the team dropped by 20%. Meanwhile, over the course of the year, productivity increased by 40%…
6 Tools Restaurants Can Use to Fill Tables at the Last Minute
With one in five dinner reservations resulting in a no-show, according to some estimates, restaurant owners are always searching for low-cost ways to fill empty tables at the last-minute. Increasingly, these frustrated restaurateurs are turning to hyperlocal vendors for a solution. Utilizing a combination of geotargeted messaging and real-time inventory control, restaurants are able to incentivize would-be diners to come in and fill tables that would otherwise have remained empty. Here are six tools that restaurants can use to fill tables at the last minute…
How Back-Office Innovation Is Transforming Local Marketing
Over the past few years, we’ve watched as a host of payment processing, point-of-sale and scheduling services have popped up, helping local businesses manage day-to-day operations in more efficient ways. Using the cloud, these ‘commerce’ software plays have begun to undercut a number of large legacy companies, shaking up industries which have remained static for decades. In a new report, Street Fight takes a look at the impact of supply-side technologies on the local marketing industry, detailing the opportunities and risks that these emergent services present to existing solutions providers…
How to Set a Pricing Structure for Your Hyperlocal Business
Most hyperlocal founders think the products they’ve developed are priceless. The small business owners they’re selling to, however, are likely to have a very different view. Deciding on a pricing structure is one of the most difficult challenges a hyperlocal business is likely to face in its earliest days. Here are six strategies for determining the right pricing structure as an early-stage startup from hyperlocal executives who’ve managed to crack the code…
Chart: The Local Marketing Landscape
The shift from print to digital is old news, but what’s shaking up the industry is the introduction of cloud-based business management systems — for everything from payments and point-of-sale to schedule — into the marketing mix. Marketers can write algorithms to connect supply and demand, automating the way businesses and consumers interact locally. Yelp meets Booker. Facebook meets OpenTable. These combinations will bring together consumer data from every stage of the purchase funnel, automate marketing plans and messaging, and reduce implementation and sales costs for both marketers and solutions providers…
How Audiences Must be Redefined for the Mobile Platform
Now, marketers are rushing to grapple with a new medium in the smartphone, struggling to understand what audience means in the mobile age. In considering audience on mobile, marketers need to understand the constantly changing context of a user and the implications it has on the needs and attitudes of the consumer. Marketers need to listen to all the signals a smartphone provides, the most important of which is undoubtedly location…
5 Leading Indicators of the Future of Local Search
The local search market is changing. On the buy-side, enterprise advertisers are starting to assert their control, demonstrating that they can leverage large footprints to compete in local with clean distributed data, and accurate claimed citations. Consumers, meanwhile, increasingly want to use their mobile devices for more activities than navigational search, expecting to be able to buy and not only find goods and services nearby. The advancements of local search are evolving so rapidly that a race to control consumer behavior may be brewing between the Davids and Goliaths…
Street Fight’s Big 3
Street Fight Columns
Street Fight Categories
Your Locations Show Up in AI – But Are They Recommended?