News and Analysis
Street Fight Daily: Reputation.com Acquires SIM Partners, Placed Open-Sources Its Platform
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Reputation.com Acquires SIM Partners… Placed Opens Up Location Analytics Platform for Free Public Use… BrandMuscle’s Paul Elliott Talks New Report on How Brands Can Go Local with Precision…
BrandMuscle’s Paul Elliott Talks New Report on How Brands Can Go Local with Precision
“Local business partners want to increasingly execute in digital, but there is a reluctance or slowness in the brands or enterprises in shifting their dollars from traditional coverage in marketing and media to digital tactics,” said Paul Elliott of BrandMuscle.
Street Fight Daily: Facebook Invests in Local News, Ford Plans to Enter Local Delivery
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology… Facebook Announces Support for Local News Subscriptions… Ford Lays Foundation for Autonomous Ride-Hail and Delivery Service… CPGs Focus on Marketing in Tough US Retail Landscape…
Commentary
WhosHere? Two Billion Free Text Messages, That’s Who
I’ve been wondering what happened to WhosHere, and all at once a friend pinged me about them and I’m sent a news bulletin trumpeting how myRete (developer of WhosHere) has delivered its 2 billionth free message on behalf us its 2.5 million members. Nice.
So what is it? As the company states:
WhosHere is the first mobile social networking app for the iPhone to let users meet new people and interact based on proximity. The application introduces a user to others with whom they have something in common. When a user finds someone interesting, they can send free text and image messages and make free VOIP calls. All this is done without disclosing any personal information unless the user chooses to provide it.
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GroupMe Launches ‘Joinable’ Groups (Pssst, groupflier Already Has Them!)
We’ve been over this before: while at AOL in the ’90s I failed to get approval for something I dubbed “Broadcast IM” — the ability to send instant messages via IM (AIM) to more than one person simultaneously, with each user’s response seen by everyone. Kinda like a listserv. Kinda like, yeah, Twitter.
Anyway, a few years later along came the wonderful (for its time) Upoc — group mobile texting and voice messaging. Then the tech bubble and subsequent mobile innovation collapse and general malaise among Americans regarding their use of cellphones beyond blabbing. I feared data on cellphones would become “soccer” – popular everywhere else in the world but too difficult with T9 for lazy Americans. Tick Tock… Hello iPhone. At last things began to really change, as we all now know…
Snapshot: Mobile-Social-Local by the Numbers
I came upon some interesting numbers on mobile social media worth sharing. Lisa Braziel at ignite social media pulled together data from a number of different studies of late to tell a bit of a story about the recent evolution in mobile-social. Unfortunately, like most research of breadth, it’s a piece of the past and not a realtime reflection. So keep that in mind while digesting.
SNL Kagan looked at location-based services activity between ’09 and ’10, finding that usership almost tripled. Braziel concluded this, in addition to other data points, indicate 2011 could be the year of mobile social — where it goes truly mainstream. Take a look at the graphic from eMarketer…
Latest Posts
Case Study: Blimpie Closes the Loop With New Mobile Gaming App
“For a restaurant company like ours, millenials are hugely important,” says Steve Evans, vice president of marketing at Blimpie, the quick-serve restaurant with nearly 1,000 franchise locations. “They tend to be a huge customer base for years to come, and all the research that we’ve seen shows consumers make their brand choices — and their brand loyalty — early on in life. If you get people in their earlier years, they’re still open to change.”
Street Fight Daily: Fake Yelp Reviews Rise, Yahoo Gives Maps A Facelift
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… A Whopping 20% Of Yelp Reviews Are Fake (MarketWatch)… Surprise: Yahoo Maps Gets A Facelift, New Features (SearchEngineLand)… Hyperlocal Power: Urban Compass Raises $20M At A $150M Valuation; Adds Advance Publications And Marc Benioff As Investors (TechCrunch)…
Digital First Partners With PaperG For Digital Ads
Digital First Media has teamed up with PaperG to build custom multi-device advertising campaigns for both desktop and mobile. The partnership allows PaperG, which automates display advertising campaigns for small businesses, to provide Digital First Media’s network of nearly 1,000 sales representatives with a full-service platform ad solution for mobile and desktop…
The Local Sharing Economy Is Here (But Scale Will Prove Difficult)
Every iteration of things that can be shared, from baby clothes to power boats, has been picked through by college students who have been steeped in the gospel of Zuck and turned into a local service set to scale. The problem, however, is that almost every startup gets stuck at city one. The reason? If the sharing requires some sort of physical exchange of goods or services, then it requires the commitment of two people who live close to each other to complete transaction. And they need to find each other even though the just-launched app won’t reach critical mass for a long time…
Mobile Is Huge — But Two Key Elements Could Slow Its Growth
We in the media think we’re in the information business, when the reality is that we’re very much in the advertising business, and advertising is in disruption right now. In their effort to influence and produce results, marketers are simply unable to demonstrate even a modicum of restraint when it comes to the line between useful and nuisance.
Street Fight Daily: Square and Intuit Play Nice, Confidence Crisis With Reviews
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… Square and Intuit Play Nice With New QuickBooks Integration (AllThingsD)… Confidence Crisis: 40 Percent Don’t Trust Online Reviews (MarketingLand)… Finding a Model for Sac Press by Looking at The Hawaii Independent (ScramentoPress)…
Study: Mobile Users More Willing to Share Location Than Browsing History
When it comes to mobile marketing, consumers are more willing to share the places they go in the real-world with brands than the websites they visit, according to a new study conducted by Millward Brown. The research, which surveyed 1,572 consumers who have downloaded a mobile app in the past year, found that 43% of respondents were willing to share their location with companies compared to one of every ten who said they would share their browser history…
5 Tools for Building a Community Marketplace
With their built-in audiences already in place, hyperlocal publications are able to easily overcome one of the biggest obstacles to getting a community marketplace off the ground. However, technical challenges still remain, and building a marketplace from scratch can be extraordinarily time consuming and expensive. Now, a handful of vendors are offering a solution, providing publishers with the tools they need to create custom marketplaces that can be up and running in a matter of days…
Street Fight Daily: PayPal Nears Deal For Braintree, Intuit Overhauls SMB Product
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology… PayPal Nears Deal for Braintree Payments (Wall Street Journal)… Intuit Overhauls QuickBooks Online as Competition for Small Businesses Ramps Up (AllThingsD)… < strong>eBay Unveils Click & Collect Service So Small Merchants Can Offer In-Store Collections (TheNextWeb)…
Is Content King in Local Too?
In the pantheon of buzzwords overtaking pitch decks and CMO-speak, “content marketing” is the new darling. The term has legitimate grounding to be fair, but like “long tail” and “web 2.0” in days past, its overuse precedes it. Content marketing also isn’t anything new — it’s been done for years, albeit under the ethically challenged “advertorial” rubric among other flavors. Now it’s new, improved, and hitched to en vogue terms like “native.”
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AI Won’t Fix Advertising – It May Scale Its Chaotic Nature